Should we go to space and stay there?

Writing boring things about important subjects.

                                     

During the spring, Anders and I had a disagreement: He spent months and months writing a very ambitious four part series on space colonization. I said it made me fall asleep. 

First I came up with a number of suggestions for how to modify it. Just turn that article around and swap the end and the beginning. Make the message clearer. Blah blah blah. 

He wasn't interested. Instead, he had another plan. “In the summer, you won't be able to keep it up”, he said. “Then you will become desperate and you will concede to publish this, just as it is.”

He was right, of course. The summer holiday, when the kids are at home all day, is a difficult time for our blogging operations. Rob Henderson recently wrote that he spends about 8 hours a week actively writing and editing his blog. I’m not even close to that level of efficiency. I struggle to keep it up when I have 16 hours a week dedicated to writing - the time when most of the kids are at school, child 5 goes to daycare and Anders takes care of the baby in order to give away all the writing time to me. Without those 16 hours, I just don't make it. 

So, Anders was right, summer forces me to capitulate. But I have demanded, and received, an important concession. Before we publish any of Anders’ articles I will publish an introduction, raising the question of the importance of space colonization to the future of humanity. Here it is:

Looking up

Humans are an expansionist species. Expansion is literally inscribed in our genes. Even a hunter-gatherer woman who breastfeeds each child for three years will have around six children during her lifetime, much more than is needed for mere survival even with a high disease pressure. These excess children are used for expansion. And expansion will go on until it is stopped by famine or war. This is humanity’s natural state. 

A hundred years ago most Western civilizations stopped expanding. Then all advanced civilizations followed suit. And now even the not so advanced peoples of the world are in the process of the same de-expansion. The result: The Western world, and soon all of the world, has been drained of vitality and momentum. We are like pandas in a zoo, vegetating over our bamboo shoots. We don't even know how to make and raise our young any longer.

Down on Earth humanity only has two options. Either we continue killing and massacring  each other like humans have done since we came down from the trees (a terrible option). Or we get serious with the panda parable and stop expanding completely (also a bad option, although for different reasons). 

The only way to avoid these two unappealing options is to look for expansion somewhere else, and that somewhere is up. Humanity’s expansion on Earth is limited by a lack of resources. In space the resources are practically infinite. 

Cutting the Gordian knot

Going to space solves a number of problems. Like what to do with all that excess labor. In my post Everybody wants a piece of Marc Andreessen, I complained that the easier it becomes to produce the necessities of life, the more people there will be who are just mooching from the producers, until almost everybody is.

Something like this has happened every time in history when subsistence technologies became more efficient, although to a lower degree. Throughout history, every time subsistence technology has developed, there have been two outcomes. 

1. A bigger exploitative class with members that work even less 

2. Population increase and expansion into marginal soils.

The human race is a restless bunch. However much people claim to love leisure, game theory ensures that we will not become a leisurely species: The energetic individuals who work or fight will always set the agenda. For that reason, higher productivity doesn't lead to much leisure. It can only lead to more fighting or to population expansion that forces people to work more for their survival. 

I think horticulturalism is the most obvious example of outcome 1. In horticultural societies, it seems common that adult men work rather little. Instead, they spend a lot of time forging bonds with other men, creating alliances for fighting. Admittedly, also the males of pre-colonial Australia did so, although they were hunter-gatherers.¹ Still, I find it plausible that in many places, the invention of agricultural technology initially allowed men to focus less on subsistence and more on warfare. 

That order ended when the population increased too much for horticulture to be a feasible mode of subsistence. When population increased, marginal soils that required more labor had to be cultivated. That forced more people to put in more working hours in order to stay alive. Until new developments in subsistence technology were made. Then people had more time left to fight over relative status. Until population increased again, making subsistence more difficult.

This time is no different. Right now we are in a phase when subsistence technology is improving very rapidly, while population is stagnant or shrinking. As always, this leads to a bigger exploitative class. And as always, the only thing that can break the curse is to expand human civilization. 

Breaking new soil takes an enormous amount of work. It takes so much work that everybody's work is needed. Having filled up every corner of Earth, today our marginal soil is above us, in space. Only space has the potential to swallow all of humanity’s productive capacity. In a constantly expanding civilization, there will always be a corner to work on for everyone. 

If we choose a strategy of expansion, we can have a society where people emphasize their useful sides. If we have an infinite space to expand across, this strategy can go on infinitely. 

That way, going to space, or even working towards going to space, can forever transform us from a species of restless warriors-on-standby to a species of industrious engineers. 

Also, space colonies would boost cultural evolution. A permanently inhabited, financially self-sufficient space colony would be a true charter city. Sheer distance between groups of humans would make real liberty possible. Evolutions of different ways of being human would be turbo-charged. 

Is it technically possible? 

For that reason I'm eager to know more about one question: Is space colonization technically possible? Anders has spent quite a bit of time investigating this question. 

It is a difficult subject, to say the least. Basically, it is about physicists guessing. As everybody knows, science builds on experimentation. But since no one can afford to build a larger-scale space station, nobody has tested the ideas. So we have to put up with a lot of guessing.

Right now few people with resources are eager to find out. Apart from the loose talk about moving to Mars, space colonization is considered a non-issue. I find one of Anders’ anecdotes especially symptomatic: On moonlander Odysseus, which touched down on the moon earlier this year, some cargo space was being rented out. And guess who rented it: Jeff Koons, number one play-leader of the upper class. Jeff is the world's foremost expert in how to have a little fun through spending huge amounts of (other people’s) money. And the little fun this time was littering the moon with balls of stainless steel. Mr Koons persuaded enough rich people to contribute to the littering through buying their own steel ball. 

I don't know Jeff Koons enough to understand what he is doing. Does he genuinely believe he is doing great art, or is he just exposing the decadence of the monied upper class? Whatever his intentions, the latter is the result. The human race has the technical capacity to send tonnes of stuff to the moon. And the humans with the power to decide what to send have no better ideas than to send balls of scrap metal and do some littering.

Most exciting social engineering project ever

Anders and I are the stereotypical male-female couple. While he is dealing with hard, technical questions like how can a space colony be built, I'm more interested in soft anthropological questions. 

For example, a space colony is like an island deluxe. Does that mean that there will be an island effect on its human inhabitants, so they become smaller? Neanderthal people were not obviously less intelligent than homo sapiens sapiens.² But they were indisputably bigger. Did homo sapiens sapiens once win because new technology like projectile weapons made numbers more important than individual strength? 

Could something like that happen again if technology changes again? Getting people to space might become a bottleneck. Sending a person who weighs 50 kilos might be about half as expensive as sending a person who weighs 100 kilos. And provided that most work in the space colonies is of intellectual nature, light-weight people will contribute as much as heavier people of the same intelligence level, while using less resources. Could a series of such circumstances start a process of evolution toward a new breed of future humans? A big-brained breed the size of homo floresiensis, maybe?

I'm thinking of things like that, while Anders is dealing with the technical details. And those details mean everything. Whether it is technically possible to settle space is likely to determine the future of the human race.

Being a dreamer, I imagine myself working in the orchard of a space colony. An intensely managed, very dense orchard with low trees or vines, like this kiwi orchard. That will not be me, of course. But maybe a future human being with my inclinations. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. 

1. For example, this is what Carl Lumholz reported in Among Cannibals, 1889, chapter 12, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66299

2. Says for example Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2020