The “Open Window” Space Myth vs. Space Fact

Probably the most common response [to the idea we must go to Mars as a means of guaranteeing our survival] is one of "all in due time, my lad, all in due time." It is essentially taken for granted that, one day, humans will be a space-faring species, colonizing distant planets, exploring faraway worlds, and going "where no man has gone before"
. . .
The reality is much more complicated . . .

There is a wonderful novel by George Stewart, Earth Abides,¹ which inadvertently addresses the first, and most glaring, misunderstanding that most people, including many actual rocket scientists, have about man's future in space. The novel follows the life of a man, Ish, who survives a terrible plague which sweeps the Earth, killing something like 599,999 out of every 600,000 people.

The story dramatizes the dependence of technology on a dense population. At first the dominant repercussion for Ish's life is his utter isolation, for water and power systems continue automatically, regulated by machinery which requires little maintenance; canned and frozen goods, gas, and weapons for hunting feral livestock, etc., are freely available in the empty shops; surviving immediately beyond the plague is not the problem. As the plot unfolds over Ish's lifetime, however, the systems fail, the supplies deteriorate with age, and technology drops away until the remaining human population regresses completely to the stone age.

The novel convincingly shows that technology is a function of population. This reversion to a primitive lifestyle is both predictable and inevitable. When there are only 100 people in a closed society, totally dependent upon themselves for their survival, they do not have toilets. It would not only be absurd because of the lack of necessity for it, it is simply impossible. The technology of toilets requires too many people. For one thing, it presupposes a water system. Water systems do not work without plumbing. And plumbing requires pipes, which don't just spring from the ground. Somebody, almost always at a great distance from the application point, manufactures them, usually using metal mined in a separate, even more remote location. Somebody has to deliver them over that great distance. Someone had to build the truck, or wagon, or whatever, and others the road, etc., etc. Knowing how a toilet works is not the issue. The job is just too large unless the population is also large. It requires an infrastructure impossible to support without a minimum population base. One hundred is not enough. Nor is 1000 or 10,000, or, if the society is truly closed, even 100,000.

As with toilets, so also with spaceships. Far more so.

All our favorite heroes from our fictionalized future in space, have one thing in common: they have a home planet where industry and advanced technology thrives. The importance of that cannot be overstated. Spaceships, with their populations of (only) thousands, cannot function for long without periodic visits to a home base for resupply and, even more importantly,

¹ Stewart, George R., Earth Abides, Random House, New York, NY, 1949