In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren’t going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:
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The Weinersmiths have such an account in defense of space law: namely, that space law, and its terrestrial analogs, constitute a durable means of resolving conflicts that would otherwise give to outcomes that are far worse for science, entrepreneurship, human thriving or nation-building than the impediments these laws represent.
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What’s more, space law is enforceable. Not only would any space settlement be terribly, urgently dependent on support from Earth for the long-foreseeable future, but every asteroid miner, Lunar He3 exporter and Martian potato-farmer hoping to monetize their products would have an enforcement nexus with a terrestrial nation and thus the courts of that nation.
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But the Weinersmiths aren’t anti-space. They aren’t even anti-space-settlement. Rather, they argue that the path to space-based scientific breakthroughs, exploration of our solar system, and a deeper understanding of our moral standing in a vast universe cannot start with space settlements.
Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt - a very, very expensive stunt.
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These boondoggles aren’t just terribly risky (though they are - people who attempt space settlement are *very* likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put *multiple* robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.
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For the cost of a tiny, fraught, lethal Moon-base, we could create *hundreds* of experiments in creating efficient, long-term, closed biospheres for human life.
That’s the crux of the Weinersmiths’ argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics.
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If you want to create stable space-settlements, you’ll need to create robust governance systems - space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space - a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan - then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.
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Space is amazing. Space science is amazing. Crewed scientific space missions are amazing. But space isn’t amazing because it offers a “Plan B” for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity’s recklessness. Space isn’t amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It’s not amazing because it will end war by mixing the #sensawunda of the “Pale Blue Dot” with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
So disappointed to check and learn that “sensawunda” is not a Belter Creole word…
A science-driven approach to space offers many dividends for our species and planet. If we can figure out how to extract resources as dispersed as Lunar He3 or asteroid ice, we’ll have solved problems like extracting tons of gold from the ocean or conflict minerals from landfill sites, these being several orders of magnitude more resource-dense than space.
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If we can figure out how to create self-sustaining terraria for large human populations in the radiation-, heat- and cold-blasted environs of space, we will have learned vital things about our own planet’s ecosystems. If we can build the robots that are necessary for supporting a space society, we will have learned how to build robots that take up the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks that human workers perform on Earth today.
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