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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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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In other words, it’s not just that we *should* solve Earth’s problems before attempting space settlement - it’s that we can’t settle space until we figure out the solutions to Earth’s problems. Earth’s problems are *far* simpler than the problems of space settlement.
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As I read the Weinersmiths’ critique of space settlement, I kept thinking of the pointless #AI debates I keep getting dragged into. Arguments for space settlement that turn on #ExistentialRisks (like humanity being wiped out by comets, sunspots, nuclear armageddon or climate collapse) sound an awful lot like the arguments about #AISafety - the “risk” that the plausible sentence generator is on the verge of becoming conscious and turning us all into paperclips.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr There is literally nothing that can happen to the Earth to make it less habitable than any other place in the Solar System. Short of the planet breaking up into pieces, any place else would require vastly more resources and effort to make liveable.
I am in favour of space settlement, but any practical arguments for it beyond scientific value are specious.