What's Next, Ice Pirates?

      Now that the word on comet ice has come in from the Rosetta space probe, do we need to change our ideas about water in space?  Rosetta’s powerful chemical “sniffers” have found that the gasses emitted by its target comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, show its ice contains less deuterium than earthly water.  Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that contains a neutron, as well as the usual proton and electron.  This detail confirms some earlier comet observations and threatens to topple the widely-held theory that our planet’s water come to us mainly from comets.  It would seem that all the water in comets from the Oort Cloud in our outer solar system may be deuterium-poor.  So now the search for terrestrial H2O among the planets switches to the asteroids, which are already high on the NASA to-do list for a variety of other reasons.  However, just because the outer solar system’s water may be deuterium-poor, this doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to chuck out all our existing concepts of space travel and exploration.

     In the campy sci-fi film Ice Pirates, conceived by Stewart Rafill and Stanford Sherman, the scarcity of water in a futuristic universe leads to a string of adventures and escapes for the heroes, who make their living by appropriating the liquid from a monopolistic superpower.  Ice cubes are an interplanetary unit of exchange.  In the film, the dearth of water is partly due to the monopoly, which goes so far as to destroy planets endowed with a rich supply.  While there is also a panoply of sci-fi material that posits the opposite scenario of worlds awash in endless seas (one thinks of Atreides' planet Caladon in Dune, for one), the perspective of a relatively waterless cosmos is well represented in other writings.  Yet, we have to remember that Rosetta's discoveries did not say that comets have no water, only that they have a different kind.

     It would seem unlikely, on face value, that deuterium-poor water would prove useless for humans.  The small quantity of extra neutrons in our planet's "deuterium-rich" water may simply be an insignificant difference to our physiology, though one supposes that some research may soon begin to examine this question.  Furthermore, even if comet water proves to be unsuitable for consumption by the human body, that is hardly the end of its applications.  More importantly, water may eventually be an essential element of fuels for future space vehicles, regardless of the percentage of deuterium involved. 

     As for water becoming a target of pirates as well as astronauts, the case seems even slimmer.  After all, water is a simple combination of two of the more abundant elements in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen.  An adequate supply of the two can easily produce their combined result.  For a technology capable of interstellar travel, this would not seem to be a “three-pipe problem.”  By its very nature, piracy involves multiple factors, for besides requiring a substance worth stealing, piracy on Earth has always required the geographic factor of “choke points,” straits or channels which concentrate commerce and make ships vulnerable to pirate raids.  This has been true from the earliest mentions of pirates in Greco-Roman seas and on the rivers of ancient China right up to our current pirate hot spots, namely the Gulf of Aden, the Malacca Strait, and the Niger Delta.  The universe may well eventually provide shipping lanes among the stars, but its vastness argues against the concentration of targets within a narrow area.  Space, unlike the Earth’s oceans, offers three or more dimensions for its ships.  If interstellar civilizations guarantee the security of difficult passage points by some form of forceful patrol, space piracy would probably prove unlikely.  Earth’s pirates almost invariably fled from even the most token military force and only fought naval ships when they were cornered.  In addition, manpower would prove far more difficult to come by in an interstellar setting.  All that is needed for piracy in Somalia, Sumatra, or Indonesia is a hopped-up fishing launch and a few miserable men armed with weapons less formidable than one could find in most suburban neighborhoods of America.  African peasants armed with Kalashnikovs are not going to cruise in outer space.  While pirates have always proved resourceful when conditions favored their development, those conditions on a spatial scale would be far more daunting than any faced by pirates in our history. 

     Ice and water will continue to be attractive, and perhaps crucial, commodities in our exploratory future.  Nonetheless, these materials may play a less important role in the eventual concepts of wealth than organic substances, such as chlorophyll or complex proteins.  As we prepare for our next “giant step,” a manned mission to Mars, we will face increasing reminders that much, much research is necessary here on solid ground before we can come to grips with even the most fundamental molecular and organic conundrums that space travel will present.