Freeman Dyson on Human Space Settlement – Interview October 3, 2019

Freeman Dyson. Credit: Monroem, Wikicommons.

Having titled my forthcoming book Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries out to Conquer the Universe, and certain that I had covered my quotient of crazed visionaries, I needed to interview at least one bonafide genius.The 97-year-old Dyson fit the bill . . . Early in his career he devised, as one biographer put it, “The Rosetta Stone for quantum electrodynamics,” the mathematical equations that reconciled  Richard Feynmann’s  diagrams of quantum interactions with Julian Schwinger’s apparently contradictory mathematical descriptions.

Dyson also had long been a spacefaring advocate, concocting concepts beloved among science fiction writers such as the Dyson Tree, a bio-engineered plant designed to provide comets with an atmosphere. He died four months after we spoke, making this one of his last interviews. No doubt a few more television crews and journalists showed up at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton after our talk. Everyone wants to meet genius.

                – Fred Nadis

When did you first get interested in spacefaring?

In answer to that, in 1932,  I think it was [actually 1930-31 when Dyson was age seven], when the asteroid Eros came close to the Earth—quite close—it was in all the newspapers—big excitement—I was interested in astronomy altogether. I also began reading Jules Verne, with his novel Hector Servadac [Off on a Comet]. I took it out of the school library and I thought it was all true. The hero went off and found new planet, with weird beasts. After I read it I was terribly disappointed to learn it was all a story.

Is it true that at age four you tried to calculate how many atoms made up the Sun? Your conclusion?

I still have the piece of paper with a big number on it. It’s preserved. It wasn’t a real calculation. Just numbers scribbled out. Like when a child is learning how to write but doesn’t yet know the alphabet. “Accurate?” It was not accurate – not correct – I checked it.

Did John Desmond Bernal’s The World, The Flesh and the Devil have a strong impact on you?

Yes. I read it quite a while later. Not as a child.

Is it your view that human settlement of the solar system and beyond is inevitable? Is this a matter of “destiny” or an “evolutionary step?”

I do see it as evolutionary. We are as a species, explorers. People have always moved around more than needed, driven by curiosity. It’s part of our nature. When tools are available, we go off on long trips. That will happen. It’s always a choice. Maybe only a small minority will go. But it will be an evolutionary step. To live on Mars permanently, you’d better have fur rather than naked skin. People will have to adapt to the environment. They will need a different body. Genetic engineering will be part of it.

Do you believe that “Goldilocks” exoplanets will be found that humans can one day reach and possibly settle?

Oh yes. But I think that’s over-emphasized actually. You could probably settle very well on small objects that are not at the moment suitable. Most of the real estate in the universe is small, cold. The media always talks about planets, but it is likely that smaller objects which you can easily land on and take off from are much more convenient. They are not Goldilocks at all. Very cold and dismal at the moment. You have to change the environment by building comfortable habitats for people and life in general. Change them considerably to make them suitable for life. It can be done—if  there is starlight, minerals, water, you can engineer it so life can settle.

Was your idea of the Dyson sphere—surrounding a star—a description or prescription? If a tool for detecting advanced civilizations, was it a mistake to treat it as a way to measure our own progress?  

The whole thing was a misunderstanding because I used the word ‘biosphere’ to mean a habitat. I should have said habitat. People took that to mean a big round ball, a sphere, this was a misconception. Aliens could be in all kinds of habitats. More likely it would be a group of small objects.

Should we be working to create what Kardashev called a Type II civilization? One in which all of a star’s energy is harnessed?

You always have a choice. I prefer the diversity of lots of little expeditions. I take the Polynesians of the South Pacific as my model. These were fairly small groups of people with chickens, pigs, babies, sailing across the ocean. I think its nicer small than a huge construction.

Is there any sense to the notion some space enthusiasts offer that we must “redeem” matter by transforming it to life/mind as our civilization expands? Does this relate to religious thought?

I would describe transforming nature differently. There’s a difference between England where I grew up and the United States in people’s thoughts about nature. Here wilderness is looked at as more desirable. In England, the opposite is generally true. Mind has a lot to do with it. To a great extent, my thinking comes from having grown up in England, which happened quite recently. Not long ago there was nothing on the islands but a forest. After the Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, it became habitable and humans moved in on the islands. Humans made a big change from a uniform forest to now. Now there are mixed ecologies, farms, grasslands, cities, beaches, all kinds of ecologies in a small area—a more diverse set of living creatures. To my mind it is much more beautiful, despite the high density of humans, more beautiful than if left to nature. It is the same way with life moving out to the asteroid belt. Life would make them much more beautiful. It’s not so much a religious impulse as a feeling that we are a species that creates diversity. By all means, why don’t we go on doing that?

I think you agree with Louis Friedman [co-founder of the Planetary Society] on interstellar propulsion: “you can’t take it with you.” How would your photonic intergalactic railway system work? What would need to happen first?

I call this the public highway. I’m sure it will be feasible someday. The reason public highways are effective is because they are cheap. The cost is shared between huge numbers of travelers. Same in space. If everyone builds their own ship this is very costly. Only big organizations can go. It is not available to everybody. For the public highway a laser beam or microwave beam could provide propulsion. These would be fixed beams for propelling simple vehicles or information. The energy would be from starlight or solar sources. This could work within the solar system or beyond.

Have any biologists evaluated or collaborated with you on your idea to create “Dyson trees” or an “astrochicken” [a self-sustaining interstellar probe], or “‘biome eggs” that contain entire biomes? Are there any biologists or astrobiologists who see these approaches as feasible? Or would you call these thought experiments?

The main point is that technology is unpredictable. You never know until you try. Whether it works or not depends on all sorts of accidents. When I was twenty years old there were four revolutions in science: space rockets; nuclear energy; the computer revolution; and DNA.  I guessed at the time that the most interesting of these was nuclear energy. Of course I was wrong. It never brought about a technological revolution, or was only moderately successful. It turns out nuclear power is only good for making bombs. It was a bad guess. Of the four, computers really changed the world, though I never put it at number one. Today they are so small, so powerful, that they lend themselves to all kinds of new inventions which nuclear couldn’t do. As for space, the record is half and half: the unmanned program has been wonderfully successful; the manned program a dead end. You can’t tell until you try. I was thinking that manned expeditions were the way to go, when really miniaturized instruments made a difference. The applications of biotechnology remain ahead—much will happen. We don’t know which will be winners or allow these approaches to making space livable.

I believe you are a skeptic on the mind-upload or AI consciousness notion fundamental to posthumanism. A lot of people who fear humans are unsuited to interstellar travel argue that AI/posthuman is the way. Disagree?

I was asking what is a human brain? Is it a digital or analog machine? I think the brain is mostly an analog machine. AI hasn’t worked because it is purely digital. There is not a good match between brain and machine. That all this remains to be seen is also true. There is recent progress in AI that is quite real. But I don’t think it is comparable to human thought. It is probable that they remain different. Once we understand the brain we can build machines that are better. I will say it is an open question.

Do you favor the “strong anthropic” principle (the idea that our universe is one that happens to have a built-in bias to nurture life and consciousness), as did Stephen Hawking, and see it as proof of the multiverse?

No. I have enormous respect for Hawking—he was a friend of mine--but he also talks a lot of rubbish. I think the multiverse idea doesn’t make much sense. There is only one universe we can deal with. The rest is fantasy.

SETI backers long to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligences, whereas many space settlement backers usually assume the galaxy is a blank slate—i.e. humans are alone. Where do you fit in these camps?

This is one of the big mysteries of course. It makes exploring worthwhile. We’re still exploring the universe and doing remarkably well. We see more now than we did ten years ago. We’re learning much more. The question of whether there is anything alive off the Earth. Well, we have no idea what the answer will be. Either way, extraterrestrials or not, we are confronting big problems and big opportunities. It is a wonderful field to get into. I think both approaches are important. Both exploring and thinking about settlement. I’m in favor of both.

What would you say the legacy of Orion (the nuclear-bomb powered spaceship you helped design in the early 1960s) was?

Overall it is not important. It made sense fifty years ago. We had no idea how you could communicate in space. We thought of going out on Orion like Darwin on the Beagle to Mars. We’d step out with pads of paper and take notes. Five years later we would tell the world what we found. Now we have wide band width communication. Instruments on Mars supplying information. The whole big expedition approach became irrelevant. Orion was fun but history passed us by. I don’t see it becoming useful. It has shrunk in importance.

What would you like to be your scientific/intellectual legacy?

I don’t know. Science is mostly teamwork. I was part of a team that developed an area of particle physics. Not sure that I did anything particularly outstanding. I may be remembered as a writer rather than a scientist. That remains to be seen.

Would you have liked to have lived on an O’Neill cylinder [the giant space colonies  Gerard O’Neill planned in the 1970s in cislunar orbit]?

Not really. I didn’t like O’Neill’s style of colonies. Too bureaucratic. Big organizations are not my style. I prefer the Polynesian approach to colonizing. A small group taking its own risks. They would be independent. That was not the O’Neill style. He was a good friend. I liked his ideas but wouldn’t want to live on one of his colonies.

How about a short visit?

That’s something else. Sure. That could be fun.