The Non-Euphoric Case for Human Space Expansion

A guest post by Chris Mott

Guest post by Chris Mott

Hubble image of the exoplanet Fomalhaut b.

Thanks to a decadent billionaire class and their duped fanboys, dreaming of a future in space seems to have lost its cool outside of relentless technophiles. Such hopes now appear in the zeitgeist as a kind of idle fantasy best left to those who are euphoric and those in the ruling elite who, having wrecked planet Earth, now dream of wrecking the worlds beyond, too.

I do not believe that the goal of human expansion off of one world should be surrendered to such people. A human race with infinitely broadened horizons for exploration and growth should not be beholden to one singular vision. In fact, it is the infinite horizons of the cosmos that allows us to avoid this teleological fate. Those of us who recognize that human history is cyclic, that new solutions to old problems often introduce their own set of new problems, and who generally hold a skepticism towards the techno-optimists stand the most to benefit by seeking a future in the stars.

First, let us examine what little we know about the universe outside our planetary bubble. The vast majority of it is utterly uninhabitable to us, and extreme danger lurks in the void. To quote H.P. Lovecraft:

“I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim,

Where they roll in their horror unheeded,

Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”

Upon actually traveling into space, no less a symbol of our bright future in the stars than William Shatner proclaimed that experiencing the void filled him with “overwhelming sadness” and a longing to preserve Earth’s majesty as our true home. This type of sentiment would no doubt increase as people left this world to set up mining and research colonies in our Solar System. The psychological stresses would be unimaginable. A high price to pay to access the resources that we could use that wheel around our solitary habitable world.

But let us imagine a bit further out, past our present limitations of observations and travel. The odds of this being the only world humans could live on in the entire Milky Way seem low. It is improbable to find such worlds nearby. But if it happened here it could happen elsewhere. Furthermore, some environments could be adapted, such as exploiting niche climatic conditions such as Venus’ upper atmosphere, building around underground water reserves, or any number of adaptations that may or may not require some physical alterations to the settlers. The human race is nothing if not the pinnacle of adaptability.

This brings us to the confluence of habitability and vast spaces separated by necessary lifestyle adaptations in order to make them sustainable. This is a recipe not for some utopic dream of human linear progress to a singularity, but rather one of endless divergence and experimentation. With the ability to strike out to get as far away from other people as possible, the cosmos becomes a true laboratory of cultural diversity like never before seen. So many of our Unthought Leaders are incapable of conceiving the centrality of geography and logistics as limiting factors to their dreams even on Earth, but when geography becomes astrogeography the ability to escape the fate of techno-feudalism and situational oppression actually increases. And there is never a limit to the space one can escape into, to boot.

There is likely no easy trick to get around some physical limitations that the real world imposes that science fiction often conveniently ignores. We know of no way to go faster than the speed of light. Nor have we any experience in terraforming alien environments. We don’t even have artificial gravity generation. These are critical issues which are often ignored by those who dream of star empires and interplanetary corporations. It is why we should begin our non-euphoric assumptions by accepting these may well be hard limits on what we can do in the future. Generation ships, carrying people who are cryogenically frozen not only across vast amounts of space but also time, depositing them in a far off future, further increases the differentiated future that humanity could expect in the cosmos. And avoiding monoculture increases the rate of long term survival.

One vision of what a world of space exploration without faster than light drive or easy terraforming would be like are the hard science fiction novels written by Alastair Reynolds. The few habitable worlds are connected by lifelong space jockeys piloting trade ships, who appear to the planetbound as almost immortal due to a lack of ageing stemming from constant exposure to the time dilation of traveling near the speed of light for much of their existence. The planetbound led much more cultured and anchored lives, but at the cost of seeing less of humanity. Even a simple tourist trip to another system means returning long after everyone you grew up with has died. In such settings, people adapt both physically and mentally in a grand scale version of how islands serve as “cauldrons of evolution” on Earth.

This theme is taken even further in Reynold’s best work, House of Suns. A somewhat more life-forgiving setting than the author’s other works, Reynolds gives us the view of perpetually travelling anthropologists who live most of their lives under conditions of time dilated travel. This order of scholars, existing many thousands of years after humanity left the Solar System, does perpetual circuits around the galaxy, cataloguing the perpetual rise and fall of human societies on a variety of worlds and returning the new data to a central hub, preserving a record of these societies outside of their own planets that is immune to their inevitable extinction as new ones rise in their place. The scholar’s galactic tours take thousands of years, when next they visit a world their prior subjects have often left nothing but ruins which can be looked upon with either scorn or awe by the new incarnation of the culture on the planet. To quote from the novel:

“We’re still alive and we still have friends, and somewhere to stay, and its a beautiful evening and the dunes of Neume are singing to us. Those dunes aren’t just any old dunes, you know. They’re the shattered remains of provider era megastructures, after their culture fell out of the sky. We’re being serenaded by the twinkling remains of a dead supercivilization, the relics of people who thought themselves gods, if only for a few instances of galactic time. Now- how does that make you feel?”

And what if the euphorics are somehow right about humanity’s potential to truly break all physical barriers? What if we can tap unlimited energy one day, or circumvent the lightspeed barrier by warping space or tunneling wormholes? All on our way to terraform planets to our most bucolic and specific standards? Even then, we still need not fear one monoculture coming to rule it all. There is a hypothetical non-euphoric vision of this outcome too.

The late Jack Vance wrote of flying in space like a cruise, something he as an avid boater and world traveler was intimately acquainted with. His worlds were often environmentally pleasant, but the human settlers on them never became idyllic. A true master of moral neutrality, Vance viewed space as a setting for dispassionate and yet humorous observation. His quaint, sometimes even premodern-seeming worlds often hid disturbing conspiracies. His cultures were never good nor evil, but always fascinating. Even in a world of rapid trans-galactic traversal, the overall vibe of his science fiction is that people will intentionally choose to differentiate themselves from each other. Tribalism can never, perhaps should never, be overcome. But if constructively embraced, it leads to a medley of art, music, and social science research opportunities. The panoply of both adaptation and creative expression was itself the point. In such a setting one planet becoming moribund or unstable was a containable and compartmentalized phenomenon. Likewise, an overly innovative (perhaps euphoric) planet could stumble into a questionable fate, but it would not be one necessarily inflicted on another world. What organizations did exist to uphold law and commerce largely regulated that of the interplanetary, rather than on each world’s internal dynamics.

True freedom, paired with danger, will come for many in being able to diverge from Earth. And even Earth may find itself both more united and tolerant as a pan-Earth identity rises in reaction to the new habitable worlds that exist in rivalry to its dominion. With distances growing between people, rivalry could be less immediate, perhaps less existential. And even two neighboring systems (in the unlikely event that habitable worlds in close proximity are found so near to each other) will require immense resources to skirmish over resource rich asteroids far away from where anyone would live on their core worlds. Wars, which would inevitably follow humanity into space along with everything else, could at least be more remote. After all, the thrillseekers could always go explore new horizons instead.

If indeed we do get a future in space, there is no need to surrender it to the Silicon Valley euphorics. Once we are able to break free of simply thinking about the near-adjacent resource colonies in the solar system, the sheer vastness of the space (meant in both definitions) combined with the ability to always start again somewhere new all but guarantees that if the future is anywhere near as rosy as the optimists think, it is not merely them who will benefit. If anything, those who know to expect more cyclic rise and falls and hard work rather than some utopia will likely be better suited for a life where a kaleidoscope of cultures and evolutionary adaptations move in any number of directions, even ones that might seem retrograde to those who view the human experience as a linear march of progress.

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