Science: Outward Bound

By day Dandridge MacFarlan Cole, 39, is a respected high-level engineer in the Missiles and Space Vehicle Department of the General Electric Co. On his own time, Engineer Cole worries about the future of the human species—which he regards as very chancy, indeed. Last week at a meeting of the American Astronautical Society in Dallas, Cole argued that the best hope for humanity is to desert the earth entirely, and offered his own way-out plan for making the escape.

One reason for Cole's bearishness about earth is what he calls the "biodetonation": the explosive population increase which, he believes, will turn the earth's entire surface into a single city within a few generations and require the cultivation of high-yielding algae on every rooftop to feed the elbow-to-elbow masses. But even more dangerous than biodeto-nation is "sophidetonation": the ever-quickening accumulation of scientific knowledge. One likely effect of sophidetonation, says Cole, is a war fought with megaton or perhaps gigaton* nuclear weapons, and although this might serve as a drastic check on biodetonation, it would not leave the earth a pleasant place to live.

To enable at least part of humanity to beat this rap, Cole proposes the development of giant spaceships, each of which would contain at least 10,000 individual humans who would function rather like the cells of a multicelled animal; collectively, they would constitute what Cole calls a unit of "macrolife." Stowed along with the humans in the vast body of the macroorganism would be domestic animals, plants, raw materials, machines and computers, as well as microfilms of all the books in the Library of Congress. A fully developed unit of macrolife would have rocket propulsion to enable it to move at will around the solar system. It would be able to live independently almost anywhere in space, but its normal habitat would be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where it could feed upon the mineral riches of the asteroids.

Feeding on Asteroids. As Cole envisions things, the human cells inside the unit would be both male and female, and they would multiply in the normal human way. But the unit itself would multiply asexually, like an amoeba. As its human population increased, its internal machine shops would turn out parts for a new unit, using ingested asteroid material. After 40 or 50 years a fresh unit of macrolife would separate from its parent and look for a place in the sunlight and an asteroid to feed on.

Cole does not think that space-voyaging models of macrolife could be built at present with any hope of success. Humbler models should come first—to give practice. One useful transitional form, he believes, might be an underground missile base that could be sealed off for years. Self-contained underwater bases would provide useful experience, too, especially if they could cruise around like giant nuclear submarines. Perhaps the most practical training unit would be an underground city stocked with enough people, supplies and equipment to survive a nuclear war and recolonize the earth's devastated surface after postwar radioactivity had fallen to a tolerable level.