Dyson and the archipelago of the asteroids

Freeman Dyson died in 2020. I was lucky to have a long talk with him in 1976. This is a short version of the description I wrote at the time; I could send the full 2,600 words to anyone who asks.

Dyson, British-born but “in America off and on since 1947,” was one of the thinkers who had a berth in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was on a lecture tour sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, and had arrived at Furman University.

I was not part of the university, but I had the use of a room, because of the arrangement made by Bill Brantley, head of the physics department, for me to put together the Astronomical Calendar that I had suggested. I was working on the next year’s book, and drafting a section called “Overview of Astronomy” – rash attempt by an amateur to describe the universe in half a page. It later became the opening of the Astronomical Companion.

I went along the hallway to ask the scientists a question. Bill told me: “There’s a seminar starting in a few minutes: Freeman Dyson from Princeton. He can probably answer all your questions about the universe.”

I went down to the event, in a large auditorium. Dyson  later told me that he was ill at ease when speaking to large audiences, greatly preferred talking with small groups.

 

Dyson spheres

He posited civilizations of Types One, Two, Three, utilizing the resources of a planet, a star, a galaxy. As yet we know only our own Type One.

Type Two would use the materials of a whole planetary system to build a sort of cocoon around it, trapping all radiation, which ultimately would have to escape in the form of heat. Such a civilization might be detectable as an infrared star. This idea had long been famous under the name of “Dyson spheres.”

Later in the day, Bill appeared at my door with Dyson, who had asked to talk with me. I hastily found a steel stool, on which Dyson perched in his idiosyncratic manner. If I did a furtive sketch of him, I can’t find it. He had a remarkable likeness to a dear friend of mine from New Zealand.

He told me about his visit to Armenia, he had seen Mount Ararat from the north, so I showed him my painting of it from the south. From time to time I remembered that I ought to be doing more of the questioning, but he was someone who showed a more than perfunctory interest in the answers to his own questions.

We talked about Varietism; and his “little theory” on language, which he introduced diffidently because, he said, he didn’t know much about linguistics: it was that a new language must arise for a new civilization to arise.

And especially about the archipelagoes of northwestern America, and of the asteroids.

 

Miles-high trees

“People should live the way the Haida Indians do, on the northwest coast. I got interested in them because my son George is living among them… No, he doesn’t have a job there, he’s just living among the Haida and observing them. I visited him last year, but I wasn’t even sure which island I would find him on. He’s been at the south on Vancouver Island, and on the north in the Queen Charlotte islands and up into Alaska. The Haida live in small groups, they can move about easily by water, they’ll move on again somewhere else if the tourists or loggers start catching up with them. Remote and independent ways of life like that are the best hope for preserving human variety.”

And this was the connection to space-travel and the asteroids. “Colonizing the asteroids is the answer” – the answer to the modern world’s repressive effect on diversity of lifeways. Asteroids with composition like the carbonaceous-chondrite meteors may have soft surfaces, may contain water and minerals; we could build greenhouses on them, dig caves into them, enclose them with cocoons containing atmospheres, grow trees which, unrestricted by gravity, would ramble out miles into space.

I was picturing the geographical excitement of scrambling lightly over the heights and abysses and overhangs of a non-spherical planet; discovering its springs and ponds and gardens and villages, flitting as easily as a monkey up its miles-high trees.

 

Varietism

Groups of fifty people could lead their independent ways of life on asteroids. “You need an archipelago. The Queen Charlotte Islands are an archipelago, so are the asteroids.” Though the asteroids are an archipelago whose islands keep hugely changing their vast distances from the Earth and from each other, they have the great advantage over Earth and Moon of their small gravity, making it easy to push off from them – to set sail with goods or people from one to another.

Dyson stayed talking with me all afternoon, so that one of the professors, waiting in his office for a talk on astrophysics, at last came along to see what was happening. In the evening Dyson was to give his third and “big” lecture, at a banquet for the Phi Beta Kappa members – “That’s why I’m wearing these absurd clothes” (a dark suit).

I was contemplating starting my magazine In Defense of Variety, so I wished I could get Dyson to write an account of his ideas about offshoots of humanity preserving variety in the archipelago of the northwest coast and in the archipelago of the asteroids.

 

Edit not

I wrote to him: “I hope you remember our conversation, though I doubt you remember it as well as I do – I made six pages of notes about it,” and asked him to consider writing an article with a title such as “Escape to the Archipelago” or “Flight to the Archipelago.” I suggested that, to lighten the labor for him, he could “dash down some notes” and I would connect them into prose and send this to him for editing.

He sent a friendly handwritten reply, from California. He wanted to subscribe to the magazine, but had “little liking” for my suggestion of sending notes for me to edit into prose.

“Writing is for me too personal a thing to be done in committee. I cannot separate my thoughts from the words I use to express them. So when I do write something, I write it myself, and the less editing the better.”

There was more correspondence, I tried to re-explain that I would do no “editing”; anyone who contributed anything to my magazine would be the “absolute dictator of the words as they will appear.”

Dyson saromised to “keep your invitation in mind, and perhaps one day… At the moment I am much too busy with science.”

He published his book Disturbing the Universe in 1979, three years after our conversation, and I read it in 1984. He had been telling me fragments of the set of interrelated ideas that were in his mind. Here were most of the topics he had talked about, now more fully expressed in that personal style which certainly I would not have dared to meddle with.

“A telephone pole is an edited tree” –Barrett Watten :

 

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