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In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @[email protected] 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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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead
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The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is *vastly* beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back *real* space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).
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Every place we might settle in space - giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars - is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today - the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on.
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The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There's virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You're completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, *air*.
There's Helium 3 on the Moon, but not much of it, and there is no universe in which is it cheaper to mine for Helium 3 on the Moon than it is to mine for it on Earth.
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That's generally true of anything we might bring back from space, up to and including continent-sized chunks of asteroid platinum.
Going to space doesn't end war. The countries that have gone to space are among the most militarily belligerent in human history. The people who've been to space have come back perfectly prepared to wage war.
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Going to space won't save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.
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We aren't anywhere near being a "multiplanetary species." The number of humans you need in a colony to establish a new population is hard to estimate, but it's *very* large. Larger than we can foreseeably establish on the Moon, on Mars, or on a space-station.
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But even if we *could* establish such a colony, there's little evidence that it could sustain itself - not only are we a very, very long way off from such a population being able to satisfy its material needs off-planet, but we have little reason to believe that children could gestate, be born, and grow to adulthood off-planet.
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To top it all off, there's space law - the inciting subject matter for this excellent book. There's a lot of space law, and while there are some areas of ambiguity, the claims of would-be space entrepreneurs about how their plans are permissible under the settled parts of space law don't hold up.
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But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.
Space law doesn't exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to - and shares history with - laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean's surface, and the ocean's floor.
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These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than "money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid."
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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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So disappointed to check and learn that "sensawunda" is not a Belter Creole word...