Garbage In, Garbage Out — or Garbage In, Fuel Out?
Space colonies, trash-fueled jet fuel, and AI shock therapy—Keith Henson, L5 co-founder and transhumanist pioneer, breaks down his vision for the future that might just save (or end) us.
Renewable Energy, Space Migration, the Road to the Singularity, and the Future of Waste: An Interview with Keith Henson
Keith Henson was one of the originators of the L5 Society, an organization dedicated to building O’Neill space colonies. The Wikipedia L5 entry explains: “The name comes from the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points in the Earth–Moon system proposed as locations for the huge rotating space habitats that Gerard K. O'Neill envisioned. L4 and L5 are points of stable gravitational equilibrium located along the path of the Moon's orbit, 60 degrees ahead or behind it.”
Henson also became controversial and influential when he was actually arrested for his protest prank against the Church of Scientology. A CNET article about his self-exile and then arrest in Arizona relates: “The misdemeanor conviction in California stems from a post that Henson made in the alt.religion.scientology Usenet newsgroup that joked about a ‘Tom Cruise’ missile, and Henson's picketing of the group's Golden Era Productions in Riverside, Calif.” During that period, Scientology was knocked down a few pegs by people following Henson’s lead in protesting against it. Anonymous—the first wave of political activism that emerged from 4chan—were leaders in the anti-scientology movement and they staged dramatic protests.
Henson is an electrical engineer. He has long been part of the transhumanist movement and has collaborated with K. Eric Drexler, known as the father of nanotechnology, on space colony papers.
RU Sirius: A few weeks ago there was a post—I seem to recall that it was on “X” that asked, and I’m paraphrasing: "Do you support humans living on Mars or should we live only on Earth?" And I naturally wondered: do people accept that those are the two choices? Your comments, please.
Keith Henson: Current humans would have an awful time on Mars. They would have to live underground to avoid too much cosmic ray damage. Eventually, with medical nanobots, the radiation would not be a problem.
O'Neill cylinders are better suited for unmodified humans. The shell plus a few meters of dirt keeps the radiation down. Rotation gives normal gravity.
RU: On a similar theme, after the enthusiasm for space colonization in the 1970s, there was the release of The Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler and the idea spread among the sorts of techno edge runners that you get nanotechnology first and then you can do the space colonies. Any thoughts on where we’ve landed as far as that one goes?
KH: By the time Engines came out, in 1986, the Space Colony meme (12 years old) had mostly burned out. It was clear by that point that mining the Moon and building power satellites was a long way off. The problem was cost: it was too expensive by a factor of about 300 for the would-be colonists to go into space on their savings. Freeman Dyson analyzed this in Disturbing the Universe (and that chapter was printed in the L5 News). L5 merged with von Braun's National Space Institute in 1987, forming the National Space Society. NSI had around 25,000 members, and L5 had about 10,000. I don't have exact numbers, but I understand that the combined membership fell for a long time. The meme of living in space was incompatible with reality.
There wasn't any choice: it would take nanotechnology to reduce the cost to where we could go into space. Of course, we may or may not survive the AI and nanotech singularity. I wrote about this in 2006.
RU: A less ambitious notion than space colonies is the idea of a space elevator as a means of harvesting solar energy from space. I interviewed Howard Bloom for Mindplex and he said he doesn’t think a space elevator will ever happen, but otherwise seemed optimistic about getting solar energy beamed down here. If I understand what he is saying, I think the idea doesn’t require sending anything out there, just better technologies for capturing solar energy using microwaves to get the energy down to Earth.
KH: Space elevators have two problems: even the strongest materials are not strong enough to get a decent taper ratio. The other problem is that they will get hit by everything in orbit around the Earth.
Power satellites have different problems. The big one for business is that they don't scale down; so you can't start small. Microwave optics force the size into a few GW. They still look good in comparison to nuclear; perhaps $2.4 B/GW as opposed to around $10 B/GW for nuclear, but a 5 GW power satellite would cost $12 B, not counting the R&D or startup for the construction. If you can lift parts to GEO for $200/kg, they produce power for less than any other baseload method.
Space junk makes it hard to build them in LEO and move out to GEO.
It takes 1000 of them to replace 1/3rd of the energy humans now use. At 50 a year, it would take 20 years. 50 a year takes 25,000 StarShip launches, which may be at the ozone damage limit. Not likely to happen for 20 years, which puts it beyond the singularity.
RU: Making synthetic fuel from trash and intermittent renewable energy is a dense on-paper proposal you’ve put together. Could you make the “elevator pitch” here for the Mindplex folks? Get it down to a sharp paragraph?
KH: In the mid 1800s, municipal gas was made from carbon (coke), steam, and heat. This proposal proposes using the carbon in trash, steam, and heat from intermittent renewable energy to make syngas. The syngas can be stored or used to make diesel or jet fuel.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
RU: There’s been a lot of talk about—and attempts to—usefully recycle some of our waste. It does not seem to have made a dent in the overflow or even to have developed a trustworthy reputation as something that is consistently legitimate. Have you investigated the current state of things in terms of using waste or garbage, and the attitudes toward that amongst government people and others?
KH: Los Angeles did reduce the waste flow by recycling. But there is still an awful lot of trash going into the landfills. This proposal turns the trash into valuable sustainable fuel. It has the advantage of no need to sort the trash; and, unlike incineration, generates no pollution.
RU: Not generating any pollution sounds elegant and noteworthy. From your paper, "Heating carbon in steam to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide” brushes up against several prejudices. How does your idea fit—or not fit—into the need to put less carbon dioxide into the environment?
KH: As part of the gas processing, the CO2 can be sorted out and sequestered. If you feed the vaporizer on biomass, you can make energy in the same process that takes CO2 out of the air. If you are making fuel, half the carbon winds up in the fuel.
I don't think this is a big deal. I have been talking for many years about the problem when we take too much CO2 out of the air. Carbon—that is, diamond—is the best engineering material. We are likely to strip it out of the air for all sorts of projects.
RU: What will it take to move this project from theory to reality?
KH: A lot of money, maybe a billion dollars—a very tentative number. On the other hand, the profit on sales of jet fuel pays off the investment in 5 years.
RU: In an earlier question you wondered about our ability to survive a technological singularity and pointed us to an article from 2006; A lot has happened since then—or has it? What's your analysis regarding the recent excitement over LLMs and all the chatter about AI? A lot of hubbub or are we closing in on smarter-than-human AI?
KH: Closing in. Despite being familiar with AIs from editing Drexler’s book, it was a shock when the recent crop of AIs was released. I spent a few pages interacting with an early one. It went out and read "The Clinic Seed" on the web. It was surreal talking to a real AI about a fictional one. I posted the exchange on the extropian mailing list.
