Outside Earth will stun you: on almost every page, your jaw will drop in response to overwhelming revelations and your head will nod violently as you suddenly recognize some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you’re thinking about things like colonizing space). It will also make your head sadly resigned to the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes.
But amazement will win. Off-Earth: Ethical issues and dilemmas for life in space is really very good.
The shortcomings of a STEM education
Nesvold is an astrophysicist. She worked at NASA; She can easily run the equations to calculate how much fuel it will take to get people, life support systems, and mining equipment to Mars.
But eventually she realized that that was the easy part. Her extensive training had not trained her to do what really interested her: building a just, just, sustainable, and enduring human society in space. So she began interviewing ethicists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, lawyers, economists, and policy experts and collected her insights in the podcast Create new worlds. This book is an extension of many of the ideas originally explored there.
The chapter headings, all questions, give a good indication of the themes she is highlighting in the book. Should we colonize space at all? Why? Who is allowed to go? How are property rights distributed and finite resources allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? How will we do that? What happens if someone breaks the rules or needs medical attention? What if that person is the only one who can fix the water purifier? Underlying all these questions, which are not yet addressed by any public or private institution currently launching rockets into the air, is who gets to decide?
Many of these themes have been covered extensively in fiction. But Nesvolt doesn’t actually mention these works, except to warn against the risk of taking them as prophecy.
Lessons from history do not bode well
Each chapter begins with three fictional vignettes set in the past, relative present and future – in the year 2100, in a recently formed but operational space settlement. All three are about different people leaving their homes; what types of people leave, their motivations, and the circumstances of their decisions. Their goal is to remind us that colonizing space is not just an endeavor that affects the human species as a whole. Rather, it will involve and influence the many individuals who make up this whole. It’s a more effective conceit than it sounds like it should be, and her narrative ability to narrate it belies her lack of liberal arts education, which she laments.
The most common metaphors used when thinking and talking about settling in space revolve around Europeans colonizing the New World and the Manifest Destiny-driven expansion of those colonists into the borders of the Wild West. This view depicts space as a blank blank canvas just waiting for civilized people to build a utopia within. A problem with this framework is that the analogy might be most compelling for Americans, who are currently advocating settling in space. For those who didn’t grow up with this mythology, it probably is a lot less. Another problem is that the outcome of these precedents is not all that encouraging.
Nesvold discusses numerous ways in which the colonization of space can repeat the mistakes of colonialism, chief among which is labor exploitation. The financiers who financed and often profited from colonial enterprises were not usually the laborers who went to the new areas to build the colony and its infrastructure (unless they were; this happened in Jamestown). In the 18th and early 19th centuries, indentured servants who landed on the shores of America had already traded their unpaid labor for the cost of their passage upon arrival. Far from home in a challenging new environment, these vulnerable workers were at the mercy of their employers.
In 2020, Elon Musk suggested that people who wanted to fly SpaceX to Mars but couldn’t afford it could take out loans to cover the $200,000 fare and work them off upon arrival. What happens, Nesvolt wonders, when their working conditions are terrible? What’s to stop their employer – who controls their oxygen supply, remember – from holding them hostage even after they’ve worked off their debts? You can’t just go and try to fend for yourself; There will be no land life or web life in space.
But Nesvolt is not pessimistic. She states that if we don’t want to bring with us war, inequality, exploitation, resource depletion, and injustice when we eventually settle in space, all we have to do is eliminate those things on Earth first. And we need to do it now, not when all the technical challenges are resolved and we’re ready to go off-planet. If we want a civilization worth exporting to space, we must create it here.
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