
We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-we-should-think-twice-about-colonizing-space
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ufmace
This seems kind of silly. Yes, there's good chances that there will be
balkanization and space wars when we colonize widely. That's no reason not to
do it. Should we stay confined to a tiny island on Earth just so that we don't
get big enough to form nations that sometimes fight each other? Maybe there
would be less war overall, but we'd never progress from being hunter-gatherers
and subsistence farmers, and would always be vulnerable to a whole bunch of
things that are inconsequential to our current global society.

~~~
lou1306
Moreover, staying confined here has not prevented us from forming nations and
waging wars... With the added drawback that all our eggs are currently in the
same planetary basket.

I'm not even sure that "space wars" will be that common. War is expensive,
even more so when you have to do it on top of space travel. I think that,
without either some extreme commodification of space travel, or some insanely
huge reward, space wars won't be a reasonable option in most cases.

~~~
JetSpiegel
> I'm not even sure that "space wars" will be that common. War is expensive,
> even more so when you have to do it on top of space travel.

Using the example from the article, if Earth considered "Gliese 581 d" Space
Commies or something and sent an army NOW at c/4, we would get a message
saying "We're here, will engage" in 2118. That's beyond the life expectancy of
anything but a small percentage of people being born now.

Using xkcd logic, it was like WW1 Germans deciding "We will invade Russia",
send his Pickelhaube corps and when they get to Moscow its 1998 and the Soviet
Union has collapse already. They would be using Gewehr 98, they would be
slaughtered by a single T-34 out of a museum. News of 1998 Moscow (and
pictures of McDonald's on Red Square) would arrive to Angela Merkel.

100 years is a damn long time.

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lm28469
> How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems
> with us?

What ? Our "problems" are inherently human, they won't go away, they've been
there from the beginning, they evolve like everything else. This question
doesn't make sense. There is no "us" vs "our problems", our problems are us.

> And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain
> peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry
> could destroy entire civilizations?

Spreading, fighting and destroying civilisations is what makes us human (and
what makes up life, for that matter). No matter at what scale you look the
universe is creation and destruction.

> Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers
> had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong

Everything is easy to comprehend in hindsight. Chances are people will look at
our generation and find everything we fought for as useless and non sensical.

It's nice to think that humanity will one day attain an utopia in which
violence, hate and wars don't exists but that's highly unlikely. Life/death,
love/hate, peace/violence, are not separate entities, they can only exists
with their opposite. Just like you can't have valleys without mountains.

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keiferski
At some point, all of the ‘non-expansionary’ attitudes will be evolutionary
dead ends.

See: Luddites, those against exploring the New World, etc.

~~~
mikestew
Those opposed to exploring the new world were basing it on ignorance and
rumors. Dragons! Sea monsters! The edge of the earth! None of which was true,
you just need to have enough supplies, keep the crew from mutiny, and hope
there's decent weather.

In contrast, what we know from facts about space travel: even real sea
monsters might leave you alone once in a while, but space is actively trying
to kill you at every moment. There are real problems to be solved, like rocket
equation, radiation, having enough bandwidth once you get there to stream
Netflix. The monsters out there are quite real and quite deadly.

Luddites were just worried about job security.

~~~
proaralyst
In contrast, what we know from facts about sea travel: even real land monsters
might leave you alone once in a while but the sea is actively trying to kill
you at every moment. There are real problems to be solved, like fresh water
generation, bad weather and having enough food supplies to last until
landfall. The monsters out there are quite real and quite deadly.

Did you know that the sea is still deadly? Not all of these are fatalities,
but some are:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_2018](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_2018)

~~~
stickfigure
It's worth pointing out that nobody has 'colonized' the sea yet. Not once in
the history of the world. Sure there are ships and large platforms but nothing
as self-supporting as a _colony_.

As has been said before by others: I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars
or space after we've colonized the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and the bottom
of the ocean - all of which are _vastly_ easier.

~~~
tendersej
I don't think the difficulty of the entreprise is what matters, but rather the
ROI. Not to mention that no one has a claim on space (yes, there are treaties,
but should one nation / group of nation leave others in the dust, I doubt they
would pay much attention to those treaties).

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xiphias2
,,In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads
throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same
time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification''

I see the opposite happening already. There was a comparison on instagram
made, that concluded that the cafe places all around the world are converging
to the same look. There are still tensions between countries, but the number
of people killed in wars is exponentially decreasing compared to the number of
people living.

~~~
deytempo
All of which is happening on the planet earth. Not sure how your argument
relates to colonizing space

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Fedoranimus
Where do you draw the line though? Planet Earth used to be a lot bigger than
it is now (metaphorically speaking).

"All of which is happening in the Solar System..."

"All of which is happening in the Milky Way..."

"All of which is happening in the Observable Universe..."

It's probably a cycle that will occur as we make advances in communication
technology.

~~~
adrianN
The speed of light puts a hard limit on places that can easily exchange ideas
and customs. At the very latest when we leave the solar system there will be
significant diversification.

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KentGeek
Silly idea. We could not possibly come up with all the possible outcomes
(positive and negative) of space colonization in order to make an "informed"
decision. If Phil Torres and his friends decide for us that space colonization
should not proceed, how do they enforce that decision?

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keymone
No, we really shouldn't. Our civilization will be dead if it doesn't
distribute across planets and other stars, it's just a matter of time. A
concern about political issues between colonies is just putting the cart
before the horse.

~~~
yellowapple
I mean, we're welcome to give it a second thought, but doing so is unlikely to
result in a different conclusion that "the only way to go from here is
out"[1].

[1]: [https://youtu.be/ab_mH8R0KTM](https://youtu.be/ab_mH8R0KTM)

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buboard
Apart from the silliness of pretending there won't be future wars, there is an
assumption here that space colonists will be even able to communicate with
each other. The ones who travel fastest can be constantly outside the
spacetime cone of the others, and if they re advanced enough even their
lightcones. the universe is vast for everyone to live long and prosper, and
sometimes kill each other.

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DanielBMarkham
Lots of click-baity material here, and plenty to tear apart.

I think the best way to understand this essay is like this: it's all received
wisdom based on what we've experienced so far. That doesn't make it right or
wrong. It just makes it highly speculative.

Like to see why? Dial back the calendar a few hundred years. Some bozo named
Columbus just got back from a trip. He says there's tons of wealth awaiting us
in some far-off, plentiful, perhaps-utopian paradise.

Now that we've rewound the clock, you can read through this essay in the same
way, substituting the new world for space. It's all the same.

My fear for our species is that 1) we get exactly what we want, ie, we create
AGI that caters to our every whim, thereby making our entire species
superfluous, and 2) if we don't do that, we argue our way out of exploration
and adventure and into introspection and conflict. Who knows, maybe we do
both.

I wish this had been a better essay.

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abledon
Getting to mars and colonizing there seems like an awful life:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w)

~~~
rjf72
Depends on what you see the point of life as.

I'd agree it would not be a luxurious life. Luxuries and comforts will be
scarce, work will be extensive, and there will almost certainly be extremely
high mortality rates relative to Earth. And I am willing to pay an extremely
large price to be one of the first to go!

Because in exchange for all of this you get to experience things nobody else
has ever experienced, or ever will be able to experience in the same way. You
get to play a part in creating a society that will likely exist for so long as
humanity itself continues to exist. You will also get to challenge yourself in
ways - physically, mentally, and psychologically - that you'd never imagined
possible. Perhaps the biggest benefit of all is that the selection bias is
going to lead to one hell of an interesting group of people in this society.
My wife is afflicted of the same apparent insanity as myself, so this sounds
like a pretty great life from a different perspective.

~~~
buboard
it is a question whether it is attractive enough after the novelty. People
went to the moon once, twice, a few times and then meh, they 've lost interest
to even build a habitat there. A colony will have to be actually attractive
for people to go there. The bulk of settlers in america for example did not
end up there for the thrill of exploration.

I think mars will be similar to Luna: a few exploratory human missions and
then silence for many decades, until terraforming technology has become
commodity.

~~~
rjf72
"People" didn't go to the moon, the US government went to the moon. And they
were primarily driven by the motivation of military development and the growth
of soft power. After the landing on the moon there was unprecedented public
support for further expansion. Aside from the general public the astronauts
themselves, practically all of academia, and even people such as Wernher von
Braun, the chief architect of the Apollo program had expressed not only desire
by technical capability and ideas of how we could get to Mars.

But the wills of the people and the wills of government often conflict. And
government generally wins. As the military and soft power tasks had been
effectively achieved, government interest in space rapidly waned. There were
also extremely petty reasons. Nixon, in part, also did not want to drive what
he felt was JFK's legacy, and instead aimed to create his own; something he
certainly achieved. There's a great writeup on his views and decisions
regarding space and NASA here [1]. He is one of the biggest reasons that space
died, though it must be said that any president following him (with a
compatible congress) could have just as easily resuscitated it as he killed
it. Trump reportedly was willing to offer NASA an 'unlimited' budget if they
could get a human on Mars before the end of his first term. Something that's
unfortunately almost certainly technically impossible given the state of our
dilapidated space program (relative to where it could be today).

The point of this all is that the 21st century will be the first time the
_people_ go to space, let alone to another celestial body. And there's no
reason to expect we'll turn back. The nice thing about a capitalist system is
that so long as the money is there, things will happen. You can look at
society as a venn diagram between money and desires for space. There's far
more than enough of an overlap there to sustain space indefinitely even
without the incredible wealth of certain players such as Bezos.

[1] - [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-
callahan/20...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-
callahan/20141003-how-richard-nixon-changed-nasa.html)

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roryisok
> To put it differently: If conflict were to break out in some region of the
> universe, could the relevant governing authorities respond soon enough for
> it to matter, for it to make a difference?

Surely the relevant governing authorities in this case would be local - each
planet or station analogous to a country rather than a region? It wouldn't
make sense to try to "govern" from light years away.

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Causality1
This is idiotic. It's a rehash of a very old argument that one shouldn't have
children because eventually your descendants will fight on opposite sides of a
war. He's just replaced "country" with "species".

~~~
rising-sky
I don't see how this is idiotic or even a rehash of that argument. The author
is simply saying proceed with caution, not that one should not proceed.

The last paragraph summarizes the intention of the article:

> The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing
> into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially
> secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as
> SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity
> migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can
> different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when
> sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy
> entire civilizations?

> Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some
> of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had
> deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a
> “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with
> respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that
> turn out to be shallow.

~~~
avmich
The last phrases of the article sound like we didn't think long ages already
about colonizing space.

We're thinking about it from times immemorial, and last century we think about
it too, taking into account our latest understanding of possibilities and
dangers. One would hopefully think our expansion is limited mostly by our
abilities, not by our doubts?

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skinney6
Space? ... no. Another planet maybe?

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AtHeartEngineer
We should think a lot about colonizing space, and plan, and then do it.

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tomrod
> But for many “space expansionists,” escaping Earth is about much more than
> dodging the bullet of extinction: it’s about realizing astronomical amounts
> of value by exploiting the universe’s vast resources to create something
> resembling utopia.

But they literally just quoted the argument from Elon Musk where he says:
“there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to
safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic
were to happen.”

This article is an interesting mix of philosophical essentialism (lives
outside of a single, united planet would be meaningless and dystopian: "But
would these trillions of lives actually be worthwhile? Or would colonization
of space lead to a dystopia?" \-- requiring that life having meaning before
being considered worthy of existence) and fear-mongering (being close-ish to
other settlers-diverging-to-species would result in asteroid throwers). It
also presumes the outcomes of capitalism are necessarily negative.

Is this some iterated form of Luddite-ism?

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fallingfrog
I have to say this is not a very well thought out argument. Plus the kinds of
arguments he makes about hierarchy, control and the state are extremely
authoritarian. It seems to boil down to, we can't enforce a galaxy wide police
state, so let's stay here on Earth where we can really keep people under
control. There might be lots of reasons not to colonize space but that's not
one of them.

Also, if it takes decades or centuries and a huge amount of resources to even
travel from one system to another, what reason could there possibly be to send
an _invasion fleet_? The idea is ludicrous. If you can't meaningfully control
some other system, doesn't that _remove_ the justification to go to war?

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fallingfrog
This guy seems to think that the reason people get into wars is because they
don't like each other's faces, or something. That's not a reason to risk your
life in a violent conflict. The reason wars start is because the
king/emperor/CEO or whoever is at the top of the food chain has an _interest_
in expanding their dominion because it _makes them richer_. That's why wars
get started. To think that wars just randomly start because people are crabby
or don't have an adult to supervise them- that's the thinking of a child.

But he says right in the article that there's no meaningful way to actually
control people in another system! So what would be the reason to go to war?

~~~
fallingfrog
You can downvote me but it's still true. Wars of conquest are started by
princes not peasants.

