A Capability Is Not a Possession

Have you ever just woken up in the morning and taken stock of the miracles life has given us?

Not the big things. The ordinary ones. The ones sitting all around you that you have stopped seeing, because they hardly ever fail. A storm knocks the power out and suddenly you notice — and then it comes back on, and you stop noticing again.

The light that comes on when you flip a switch.

Hot water out of a spigot. As much as you want. At whatever temperature you ask for.

A refrigerator humming in the corner, with food in it that is still good.

Water you can drink straight from the tap without wondering what is in it.

A car in the driveway that will carry you three hundred miles today if you decide to go.

Roads under it, built by somebody you will never meet.

An airplane overhead, full of people having an ordinary afternoon, six miles up.

Have you ever stopped, planted your feet on the ground, and reflected for a moment on how lucky we are to be alive in this day and age? To have any of it at all? And then gone one step further and asked the real question — how is it that we have all of this? Where did it come from? Who did it?

We have all of these things because they were created by great men. Men who were revered in their time. Their names were in the newspapers and their work changed what was possible for everybody who came after them. Most of us could not name three of them now.

Here on Mother Earth, in the cradle of humanity, we take everything for granted.

None of those things are things. Every one of them is a chain. The refrigerator is a hundred and fifty years of thermodynamics, a copper mine somewhere, a power plant, and somebody on shift at three in the morning making sure the grid holds. The can in your cupboard is a mine, a rolling mill, and a tin lining somebody had to invent. The bacon and eggs are a farm, a slaughterhouse, a refrigerated truck, a road, and the mechanic who keeps that truck running.

Bring a man forward from 1850 and set him in your kitchen. Light without fire. Cold water and hot water out of the same wall. A box in the corner keeping meat fresh in July. He would be undone by it. You walk past all of it before you are fully awake.

We don’t think twice about any of it. Until it isn’t there.

We have all become operators of systems nobody in the house understands. We can use everything and repair nothing. We drive the truck and cannot time the engine. We flip the breaker and do not know what is on the other side of it. That is not a character flaw — it is what specialization bought us, and in aggregate the trade has been extraordinary. But the knowledge that keeps you alive is now distributed across ten thousand strangers.

Somewhere tonight the power goes off. The hot water goes cold. The food starts to turn. There are places in the world where that happens so often that people have become conditioned to believe it is normal, and to accept it. Venezuela is the one I know about — the power goes out almost daily, and then the water gets shut off too. I am sure it happens in plenty of other places. If you are reading this from the United States, that is hard to picture. Most people here would not know how to get a generator running and hooked up to the house. And a generator is the toy version of the problem.

Now take that house and set it on the Moon. There are no ten thousand strangers. There is no other side of the breaker.

Going to the Moon is going to be like going back in time on Earth. Everything starts over. Not the polished end of the chain — the front of it. You are the man in 1850 again, except the air is outside the wall and nobody is coming.

So let us take one thing and follow it down. Glass. And understand that glass is only one of many — it is the first item on a very long list, and every other thing on that list has the same story underneath it.

Glass is a good place to start, because nobody thinks of glass as an invention. It is just there. It is the window, the jar, the screen you are reading this on.

It took us about five thousand years. Around thirty-five hundred BC in Mesopotamia, glass shows up as a glaze on pottery — not an object, a coating.¹ It takes until the sixteenth century BC before anybody makes a vessel out of it, and the way they did it was to wind molten glass around a core of dung and clay, let it set, and scrape the core out.² Around fifty BC, somewhere near Syria, somebody put a pipe in the molten glass and blew. That is the revolution. That is what turned glass from a rich man’s ornament into something Rome could put in windows.³

Five thousand years, and every step of it was somebody standing at a furnace figuring out the next thing.

Then the blacksmith. A trade like that was not learned from a book. It was learned in the body, over years, standing next to somebody who already knew — and he passed it to his children the same way. When that chain breaks, the knowledge does not go into storage. It goes away.

That is how knowledge moved for most of human history — hand to hand, one man to his son, and it died when the chain broke. Then somebody built a printing press, and for the first time a thing one man figured out could be written down and carried to ten thousand men who would never meet him.⁴ That is what set the Industrial Revolution loose. Not one invention — the ability to distribute all of them. The country grew on it, and so did the world.

And we are further along than that now. The internet put it all within reach, and artificial intelligence can go and find it and put it together for you. There is probably nothing left we could not figure out, if we decided to.

But read that back against the blacksmith, and you will see the catch. Every bit of it only carries what somebody thought to write down.

Now fast forward to the 1960s, when we started the space program. We did it in less than ten years — and then it felt like it just stopped. We set the capability down.

And that is not only a loss. It is an injustice. The astronauts, the engineers, the people who orchestrated that program are mostly gone now, and a great deal of what they knew went with them. They gave a piece of their lives to that work. To let their wisdom die with them is an injustice to what they contributed, and an injustice to humanity itself. They did not do that work so it could be admired in a museum.

That is the whole point of the title. A capability is not a possession. You do not have it because you once had it. You either keep using it, or you put it down — and picking it back up costs you decades.

And do not tell yourself the book will save you. Take the water filtration system Mark Nelson built for Biosphere 2. Say he writes it all down, every line of it. You follow it precisely and it still fails, because he never wrote down what he never thought to write — the thing his hands knew. And there is nobody left to ask. So you get frustrated, and you quit.

The same will be true of glass. Somebody will write down how the furnace runs, and leave out what his hands knew.

Biosphere 2 is the proof. Over sixteen months the oxygen fell from twenty point nine percent to fourteen and a half.⁵ The crew was exhausted and could not sleep. The answer turned out to be the concrete, quietly eating the carbon dioxide.⁶ That did not come out of a manual. It came out of somebody staying with the problem.

Which is why this is urgent. The people who hold this knowledge are alive right now. John Allen, who conceived and built Biosphere 2, is ninety-seven.⁷ Mark Nelson, who sealed himself inside it for two years and built its wetlands, is still working.⁸ That window does not stay open.

So here is the first problem on the table, and I am putting it on the Punch List today. Who is going to help us make glass on the Moon?

Not how. Who. Because this magazine is not the place where the problem gets solved — it is the place where the problem gets posted. We are asking who is coming to work on it. Who helps us design the machine. Who works out the process. Who figures out the plant, and the power to run it, and how it gets there in the first place. Who reads this and thinks, I could solve that.

The ingredients are already up there — the ground is roughly forty percent oxygen, locked into silicates.⁹ Then steel. Then concrete, and wire, and glue, one material at a time. Each one goes on the Punch List. Each one is a who.

If that is you, write to us. Tell us what you would try. Tell us where we are wrong.

This is not nostalgia and it is not a history lesson. We are on a mission. We intend to gather the knowledge from our forefathers and from the people still standing among us, and put it to use — because knowledge you do not use is knowledge you lose. That is the whole lesson of this piece. To take stock of the value of what we have. And to get people to aspire to something greater than living for the weekend.

Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.

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A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.

Sources

1. Glass-like vitreous glazes and faience come before true glass; the earliest true glass objects, mostly beads, are generally dated to the mid-third millennium BC in Mesopotamia, Syria or Egypt. Wikipedia, History of glass. ↩
2. Core-formed vessels appear in Egypt and Mesopotamia around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries BC, made by trailing molten glass over a core of sand, mud or clay on a metal rod. Wikipedia, History of glass; Ancient Art, How It Was Made: Roman Glass. ↩
3. Glassblowing developed by Syro-Palestinian craftsmen between the first century BC and the first century AD, and reached Rome after the region was annexed. Ancient Art, How It Was Made: Roman Glass. ↩
4. Wikipedia, Printing press. ↩
5. Oxygen from 20.9 percent to about 14.5 percent over roughly sixteen months of the first mission. Severinghaus, J.P., et al., “Oxygen loss in Biosphere 2,” Eos, 1994; Wikipedia, Biosphere 2. ↩
6. Carbon dioxide absorbed by the exposed concrete as it carbonated, hiding the oxygen loss. Wikipedia, Biosphere 2; see also our own account in The Box Nobody Tested. ↩
7. John Polk Allen, born May 6, 1929, inventor and director of research of Biosphere 2. Wikipedia, John P. Allen; Institute of Ecotechnics, John Polk Allen, FLS. ↩
8. Mark Nelson was one of the eight crew members of the first mission, September 1991 to September 1993. Wikipedia, Biosphere 2; Silverstone and Nelson, “Food production and nutrition in Biosphere 2,” Advances in Space Research. ↩
9. Lunar regolith is more than 40 percent oxygen by mass, bound up in oxide and silicate minerals; ESA gives 40–45 percent. NASA, Oxygen and Water Production Architectures for Early Reusable Lander, Lunar ISRU Workshop, 2019; The Engineer, Study set to extract oxygen from Moon rock regolith. ↩