Earth 2.0 Is Out There. What Tech Will We Take?

Outer space seems a lot closer this month. Have you noticed?

December has seen a sudden flurry of starbound studies and new technology — from the NASA comet-wrangling harpoon to the space plane-rocket hybrid funded by a Microsoft co-founder, which cleverly marries designs from the world's top private space companies. Then there was the surprising news that Mars has more potential room for life than Earth does, albeit in caves below the surface. NASA's Curiosity Rover, currently en route to the Red Planet, would feel a childlike burst of excitement if it only could.

But for us humans, there was little to match the thrill of learning about Kepler 22-b, known to its discoverers as the Christmas Planet. Its unveiling last week marked the first time NASA has confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around another star. There was talk of Super-Earths earlier this year, but now astronomers are starting to announce what science-fiction writers have long suspected: There really are other worlds we could settle on now, rather than (in the case of Mars) going through centuries of terraforming.

Granted, it would take centuries to get to the Christmas planet, even at the speed of light. But it seems only a matter of time before NASA's powerful Kepler telescope finds an Earth 2.0 within closer reach. And then the dreaming can begin in earnest — not just the dreaming of how to get there, but the dreaming of what we should build when we do.

Otherworldly colonies have already caught the modern public imagination — witness last year's all-time record-setting movie Avatar, set on the lush world of Pandora, not to mention the Fox show Terra Nova — technically set in Earth's distant past, but also centered around colonists in a strange world, hampered by the need to send resources back home. Two 2011 movies have dealt with the notion of another planet like ours suddenly appearing in the heavens: Melancholia and Another Earth.

But what if we didn't go there to mine precious minerals and harass the locals? What if we just set out in the same spirit as the Pilgrims and pioneers, with the simple desire to start afresh someplace new?

What would starting afresh look like? What tools, technology and infrastructure would we take from old Earth, presuming we didn't want to live like Luddites?

Naturally, we'd want to make sure we didn't make the same planet-despoiling mistakes as on Earth 1.0. All technology should be clean technology, powered by the one resource every planet on which we can live is bound to posses: sunlight. It's handy that we've already got the whole solar-powered plane thing figured out; we'd need to extend that to all forms of transportation and energy.

What about manufacturing the tools, furniture and housing we'd need, once our colonists' tents and space hotels wore out? No need for large, expensive, polluted factories — this giant 3-D printer has you covered. As for the raw material, there's no need for plastic. Many of today's 3D printers create their objects using a kind of corn starch, which presumably would be easy to synthesize from the local vegetation.

But there's one more crucial piece of infrastructure, mere decades old but already indispensable: the Internet. Not just for wireless communication, although you'd probably be able to blanket the planet with a handful of WiMax towers, but also for the entire repository of human knowledge contained within. Need instructions for how to start a campfire, or build a city? Every colonist would be carrying them around constantly, on solar-powered tablets.

We'd cache the entire Internet before leaving Earth. Not too much of a struggle — it's a task Google is already fully engaged in. Then we'd unpack it at the other end, and simply start a new fork: Internet 2.0 on Earth 2.0. Which means we'd see a whole new virtual land grab as our colonists rushed to snag all the best domain names and Twitter handles. Depending on how rich the world, and how few the colonists, this may be the only resource war necessary.

What do you think? What technology would you take to a new Earth, and how would you structure its society? Let us know in the comments.

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