Amish in space

Space colonization would allow humans to live more in accordance with their nature and traditions

Imagined inside of an O'Neil cylinder

For 17 years, I have lived together with a space station enthusiast. I never got the thing. Sure, I didn't actively dislike the thought of space stations. I just saw the whole thought as laughably unrealistic. Something to make jokes about rather than thinking about seriously. I loved planet Earth too much to care about anything beyond it.

That is, until a few weeks ago. When I was resting after a hard day's work of casting a concrete slab, it just struck me out of nowhere: Building space stations is the best way to follow human nature. Previously I had been skeptical of space colonization because I believe a lot in human nature. I don't think humans are just flexible rational intellects that can be placed anywhere. Now it struck me that just because we are humans, with all the faults and flaws that follows, we should venture into space. We shouldn't expand into space in order to create a new superhuman, but in order to follow one of our natural impulses: The instinct to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.

The meaning of work

I work a lot. I mean work in the sense of building things and growing things. So I have had a lot of time to think about one basic question: Why do humans work? The answer I reached is that we work in order to adapt the world to human nature. We remake the world from how it is when it just is to how it is when humans thrive (with better and worse results, I don't claim that humans thrive in modern cities).

Building space stations is a way to reshape the world to human instincts. Humans are an expansive species. That is one of our core features. I believe we won’t be happy if we ever finish our expansion. As reverend Thomas Malthus taught us, humans can't expand indefinitely on earth. If we stay on earth, sooner or later we will need to adopt a sluggish existence of just subsisting, with replacement or sub-replacement fertility. This has already happened in the whole world except Africa and the Middle East. Does it seem to make people particularly happy? Not what I can see. 

Imagine that existence going on and on for millions and billions of years. Technology development will save us labor. Task after task will be eliminated. To what use? Leisure is like food and sleep: Above a certain point, more of it doesn't make people happier or healthier. Without population expansion, more leisure and entertainment is all that technology has to offer us. Generation after generation, the main thing people can look forward to is even less work to keep the constant sized Project Humanity floating. 

Justice to the human race

An existence of idle subsistence is not worthy of our species. We didn't get to where we are only to step on the brakes and start doing nothing. Doing nothing is against our nature. Many of our ancestors became our ancestors because they always wanted to do something. 

So I think we should expand relentlessly. Like an Amish congregation, or a Hutterite colony: Both Amish and Hutterites live in communities of about 150 people. They have about five children per family, leading to rampant expansion. For every generation they need to create new colonies and congregations. The surplus they create with their hard work is necessary to buy new land where they can house their offspring. 

If the whole world acted like that we would quickly run out of arable land. But I also think this behavior is the closest thing to human nature and therefore we should be doing it. The way to square the circle is to create new arable land and new space for the next generation of human beings. This can be done on earth, for a while. And it can be done in space, more or less forever. 

War no more

I think we should do what humans have always done, minus one detail: War. The human instinct to expand has led to a relentless history of war.

With space stations, that will no longer be the case. Space stations can be moved away from unpleasant neighbors. They can not be attacked with heavy weapons: If they are, the station is destroyed and everyone in it dies, rendering it rather useless. It is not like on earth, where you can bomb a country for years, lose a certain part of the population and then build it up again.

On the other hand it is not very difficult to create new space stations once you have the infrastructure for it. Resources are more or less unlimited in the asteroid belt. And the zero gravity of space is well suited for fabricating large constructions. If it is easier to build something yourself than stealing it from your neighbors one of the most fundamental reasons for war disappears. 

Space makes it easy to build things and hard to wage war. It is thus eminently suited to humans who are peaceful but expansionist, the kind of people who like to work hard but wouldn’t think of coveting their neighbors' property. A certain subgroup of the human species inevitably comes to mind: the Amish.

When it comes to living together in space, I think the Amish could have a lot to teach us. Different human populations have reacted differently to the state of peace we live in. Most populations sanely and wisely, but also depressingly, stopped expanding. The Amish, on the other hand, just pig-headedly forbade war and everything that reminds of war (even mustaches!), but otherwise continued as usual. Personally I think the Amish have chosen the right road. Their one big problem is that sooner or later they will bump against the ecological limitations of planet earth. That problem could be solved if we can do as the Amish but with enough technology to allow us to expand into space. 

The Amish are not hostile to technology per se. They use fertilizers and pesticides in their agriculture, for example. This study from 1979 says that progressive Amish dairy farms used less land than conventional farms per unit of milk produced. In the future, when Earth is running out of space, will the Amish then accept expansion into space? I don't find it that impossible. In general, the Amish try to fine-tune their technology rules in order to allow people to keep providing for their expanding families but without causing wide-spread idleness. 

The Amish know that expansion feels good and idleness is depressing. If the Amish, and the rest of us, started expanding into space, we would forever solve both the expansion problem and the idleness problem. In space people are always free to expand, as long as they work hard. The old virtue of diligence could get a renaissance. A venture into space would not just be an opportunity to become more modern. It would also be an opportunity to become more traditional. 

Peaceful evolution

The Russian war against Ukraine shows that the instinct to wage war rests hard in human nature. There naturally will be war when neighboring populations expand exponentially. But Russia and Ukraine are two declining, aging populations. Demographically, Russia and Ukraine have every reason not to be at war. And still they are. That says something rather sad about human nature. Not making war doesn't come naturally. We need to make a concentrated effort to avoid it.

Space colonization should open the door to a new era of human evolution. Evolution that favor the hard-working and intelligent and discriminate against the war-mongering. 

Yes, I know, talking about human evolution in the future tense is a heavy taboo. Evolution is supposed to be something that happened a very long time ago, preferably such a long time ago that no one living now is responsible for it. Especially with the development of gene analysis technology, we know this is not true. Evolution is alive and well, in this now. 

With space colonies acting as independent republics, there will be immense opportunities for peaceful group evolution. Those space colonies that can cultivate values like community, industriousness and family will grow physically, or spin off daughter colonies. The surplus from evolutionarily successful colonies will be used to expand. There are no physical limits to such expansion. Evolutionary logic means that in such circumstances humanity will evolve away from a species of soldiers and towards a species of engineers.  

What we owe the future

There is some kind of urban (internet?) legend about an astronomer saying to his audience that the sun will explode in 5 billion years. Here I found it in the shape of a comment:

Speaking about worries on impending catastrophes, I remember that back in 1960 a little old lady heard the speaker in the New York Planetarium say that the Earth will disappear in smoke about 5 billion years when the sun converted into a brown dwarf. She rose and asked the speaker:

“How many years did you say, sir?”

-“Five billion years, madam.”

-Oh! I am relieved now. I thought you said five MILLION years!”

More often, it is a young student that asks the question, but the point is always the same. I never got this joke, because I am that student/old lady. I also strongly prefer the sun to explode in 5 billion years rather than 5 million years. 5 million years ago, our ancestors were just diverging from the chimpanzees. It took us 5 million years to get from being apes to being what we are now. 5 million years is a long, but still limited time. Five billion years, on the other hand, is more time than life itself has existed. During that time we should have found a way to regulate our distance to those life-giving, but dangerous stars.

In any case, I think we should better start working on it now. I still love planet earth. But there is one thing I love more: The human race. Expanding humanity is an obvious way to avoid that scheduled stop-date for human existence, however distant it might sound. What could be more valuable than that? 

If the peaceful and expansionist Amish do not want to embrace enough technology to migrate into space, we technology-lovers will have to embrace some of the Amish virtues instead. The human race is both a peacefully expansionist and a highly competitive, self-destructive species. Our only way to follow the better side of our nature is to keep expanding, sooner or later beyond the borders of our planet. That is what we owe the future.