Dwarfs in Space: Colonization, 'Phantasm' and Transhumanism

So I was telling my podcasting partner Allison Loudermilk about the 1979 horror film "Phantasm" the other day, and it really got me thinking about the transhumanist possibilities for space colonization. What does a film about flying silver death balls and creepy old dudes have to say about humanity's future amid the stars? Let's discuss.

If, like Allison, you've never seen "Phantasm," allow me to summarize. The film centers around a young boy's encounters with a mysterious "Tall Man" who runs the local funeral home. We later find out that Tall Man is a being from another world, presumably one with harsher gravity. Whilst being chased by flying silver balls through cemeteries and mortuaries, our hero discovers Tall Man's fiendish business model: to compress cadavers down into denser, squat little zombie dwarfs, whom he then transports to the high-gravity hell world to serve as slave labor. In the still below, you can see one spilling out of its canister onto the alien surface.

There is nothing I don't love about that concept. Yet I think the whole corpse-squishing business underlines some important realities about the future of space travel and the possible colonization of other worlds.

Tall Man can't just send live humans to this hell world now, can he? That doesn't seem to even be in the cards. We've evolved to thrive under a very precise set of environmental circumstances here on Earth, and there are still plenty of areas on our own planet where we can't function.

Being a practical guy, Tall Man turns to zombie labor. Hey, they don't need air, radiation shielding or habitable atmospheric pressure at all. Yet he STILL needs to alter their physiology so they can function on a high-gravity world. To put this (and by this, yes, I'm still talking about zombie dwarfs) in some perspective, consider Jupiter. While the largest planet in our solar system lacks a solid surface to stand on, its mass is such that you'd weigh 2.5 times as much as you do on Earth. If you weigh 170 pounds, you'd weigh 402 pounds on Jupiter. While this would be torment to our fragile bodies, just imagine standing on the surface of something with the mass of the sun. You'd weigh 4,602 pounds! You can calculate your exact weight on a variety of cosmic bodies on this Web site.

For decades, our vision of life in space and on other worlds has largely revolved around either living in closed structures that replicate our own environment or terraforming other worlds to turn them into replica Earths (see the image below of what a terraformed Mars might look like). But just consider the technological requirements with either of these plans. Can any of our gravity-replicating schemes actually work effectively enough to prevent low-gravity muscle atrophy and bone loss on lengthy space flights? And what about on so-called generation ships, where only the ancestors of the original crew would ever see the destination? What about all that radiation and the effects even a relatively short space flight can have on our sanity?

Instead of sustaining artificial environments in space and tackling the gargantuan challenge of altering alien worlds to resemble our own, should we focus more on changing humans? Given our ever-increasing understanding of our genes and evolution, might we one day be able to develop a strain of humanity better-equipped to handle increased radiation and low gravity? Instead of sending humans to another world with a tank of oxygen, could we instead create variations of our species who can process an exoplanet's atmosphere?

Better yet, might we take a little from column A and a little from column B by altering both an alien environment and its would-be colonists, or creating humans better suited to, say, life inside an enclosed Martian base?

This is where the transhumanist dilemma comes into play. If we send altered humans to another world, what are we actually sending? Are they no more human than Tall Man's dwarfs? Would such a feat satisfy our need to one day expand beyond the confines of our planet? Would we smile to see something alive but inhuman planting an Earth banner on a distant world?

On that note, if altering the human form for space travel is wrong, what about attempts to alter it here on Earth for longer life? Isaac Asimov argued that immortality is bad for humanity as it halts human evolution, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said “When one tries to rise above Nature, one is liable to fall below it.”

The arguments for and against spiral out from there, but I think I've said enough to make my point about space colonization and evil, hooded dwarfs.

What do you think? Will we one day take the reins of evolution and populate the universe with altered quasi-human forms? Or should we seek to turn distant worlds into impostor Earths and send steel-wrapped slices of our current existence into the cosmos?

And is either choice any more preposterous and egocentric than the other?

P.S. Warhammer 40K fans, I apologize for not dragging your beloved squats into this.

Bone up at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Terraforming Mars Will Work
How Zombies Work
Is the human brain still evolving?
Will humans be living in space in the next 50 years?
What makes graveyards scary?

Images: Courtesy Phantasm.com, NASA and Amazon.com