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Settlement of space would reduce the impact of most (but not all) existential risks because it would provide a backup for Earth. For this to work, space settlement needs to be able to sustain itself without supplies from Earth. At the present slow rate of progress towards settlement, this seems like a prospect for the far future. That may be too late. Dr. Willard Wells (who gave a talk at the 2012 Mensa Annual Gathering at the invitation of our SIG) estimates a 50% probability that civilization won't last 100 years. [Willard Wells, Apocalypse When?: Calculating How Long the Human Race Will Survive, Springer, 2010.] However, a recent paper suggests a method for industrializing the solar system that could reach self-sufficiency within a short time. [Philip Metzger et al, "Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry and Solar System Civilization," Journal of Aerospace Engineering, April 2012.]

Dr. Metzger's method starts by sending a few tons of material to the moon. We have already demonstrated the capacity to do this. That material would includes power supplies and mining equipment and also miniaturized, automated or remote-controlled machines that can make things via chemical processing, machining, 3D printing, and robotics. These would make subsequent generations of machines. The first new generation would be crude and require components from Earth because initial lunar manufacturing would not have the extensive facilities of Earth, but subsequent generations of machines would be more capable and require fewer components from Earth. Our cavemen ancestors made tools with rocks, sticks, and animal skins. Subsequent generations of their tools became the sophisticated machines of today. Metzger proposes to replicate this process in space. Exponential growth is typical of such processes, exponential growth that could industrialize the solar system in fairly short order. There is enough material in the asteroid belt to build O'Neill habitats with 3,000 times the land area of Earth. [Gerard O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, William Morrow & Company, 1977.] This sounds like a job for government, but governments are not moving fast enough. Unlike other proposals for settling space, Metzger's ideas do not require new physics or unprecedented launch capacity, but they do require redesigning many industrial processes to work in the space environment with modified machines. Much of the redesign could be done by advanced amateurs like the Wright Brothers. There are thousands of advanced amateurs today. Many have developed and joined "makerspaces," places that acquire advanced machine tools that members can use. Targeted prizes for development of the necessary space technology would encourage some makerspace members, university departments, and garage-based inventors to work in this area. The attendant publicity and public interest might encourage governments and foundations to provide the necessary launch capacity and support.

Our SIG can do something special to help. I have written an article about this that is scheduled for publication in a Lifeboat Foundation anthology. We hope that we can recruit some of the readers of that book to help with the prize project. We can improve the prospects for that project even more if we implement pilot test versions soon so we will know the ropes when more recruits become available, and thus make better use of their availability. If you would like to volunteer for a committee to work on this, or donate money for prizes, write me at blodgett@global-risk-sig.org .

What this publication is about
By James Blodgett