I’m not sure why I find this thought so upsetting, but last year or the year before, it began to occur to me that interplanetary colonization is pretty unlikely, if not practically impossible. While the vast distances of space are one major impediment, these are not really the central problem. The central problems preventing long distance space flight revolve around just how hostile the environment of space is, coupled with the effects of low gravity on the human body. With respect to the first, space is filled with cosmic rays of all sorts that have a tremendous negative impact on both our own bodies and electronics. With respect to the second, human bodies suffer from severe muscle and bone degeneration when in low gravity environments. While we have found ways of mitigating this latter problem, it’s difficult to imagine a ship large enough to mitigate these problems for large numbers of people. Nor is it easy to imagine how we could create an electro-magnetic field around a ship sufficient to protect us from cosmic rays.
Now, there’s nothing really implausible about colonizing Mars. It’s likely that it would even be possible to terraform Mars, turning it into an Earth-like planet over the space of a few centuries by, ironically, creating global warming on the planet. For those interested in what such a process might look like, read Kim Stanely Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, which is one of the greatest explorations of eco-marxism ever written. However, even if such terraforming is possible, the big problem with Mars is that it has no electro-magnetic field to speak of. The Earth’s magnetic field– which, incidentally, is weakening –keeps our atmosphere from burning off, protects us from harmful solar and cosmic particles that cause mutations and cancers, and protects our electronics. As a consequence, it’s difficult to see how Mars could provide a plausible place to live for large numbers of people. Moreover, with current technologies, were we able to solve the problem of low gravitation and the production of an electro-magnetic field around a ship, we still would have no idea where to go in the galaxy to find other, potentially inhabitable planets.
What I find disturbing about this thought is that it entails that we’re pretty much stuck with this planet. There is no truly feasible escape hatch. At least not at this time. This, of course, is not such a terrible thing as it’s a great little planet. However, the fact that I’ve found these thoughts traumatic suggests to me that unconsciously I harbored the fantasy that we could always go elsewhere if things got too bad environmentally here; that like the humans of Wall-E or the citizens of Caprica in Battlestar Gallactica, we could set out to find another earth. Given the prevalence of science fiction films driven by this theme and their popularity, it would appear that I’m not alone in harboring this fantasy. However, perhaps confronting this fantasy as a fantasy and recognizing the improbability of such travel and colonization is an ecologically healthy thought to have. Aren’t we more likely to treat this planet with care if we recognize that we don’t have an escape hatch? Then again, there are many respects in which this fantasy is the fundamental fantasy of all capital. Is not capitalism rooted in the unconscious fantasy that we have unlimited resources and that the environment is infinitely sustainable, allowing for the endless expansion of capital without limit?
June 18, 2010 at 8:31 pm
I’ve not seen “Wall-E,” but for “BSG,” what is at work isn’t a fantasy of escape, but the nightmare that there is no escape no matter where you go: New Caprica is destroyed, Earth was destroyed long ago and New Earth at the end of the series fast-forwards to our present. The best we can hope for is that the robots destroy most of us thus forcing the survivors to start up somewhere else where they too will be destroyed eventually. Not an especially comforting fantasy at all!
June 18, 2010 at 9:19 pm
There are actually a lot of other reasons that distant space travel and colonization isn’t likely. First of all, we’ve been doing the colonizing thing for thousands of years, and it hasn’t solved our problems yet. Are we simply doomed to continually expand, leaving deserts and wastelands in our wake? That alone should be cause for a new paradigm.
Practically speaking, though, we have to consider the enormity of resources it would take to initiate such a mission. Just think of all the energy expended to get one lousy shuttle or rocket into Earth orbit – how many tons of fossil fuels go into making the liquid hydrogen that is combusted within a few hours for those simple trips. How much more would we need to actually send a ship to Mars or out of the solar system? That’s not to mention the minerals, water, and other resources they’d need to take with them.
I love science fiction, because I think it provides a good venue for exploring the boundaries of humanity, but I recognized long ago that we’d never be exploring space the way they do.
I think people continue to hold out hope that some technological advance will save us all, whether it’s space travel (which Tim Leary advocated late in his life) or other technofixes. I think we need to learn to make do with what we have.
June 18, 2010 at 9:29 pm
If you find time, I would strongly advise reading Clive Hamilton’s (2010) Requiem for a Species, wherein he systematically unpacks many of the main social, political and psychological reasons why people deny the evidence of climate change and the forthcoming environmental disaster. Some of the things you mention would fall under his heading of “wishful thinking” (of the escape fantasy and technology and science will sort everything out variety), and he too talks about the trauma and necessity of recognising the fantasy as a fantasy.
Interestingly, he also gives two or three pages over to a reading of Wall-E.
June 18, 2010 at 9:53 pm
I think you’re absolutely right that the fantasy of unlimited resources – and thus the infinite expansion of capital – is fundamental to the continued life and success of capitalism itself. For that reason, I don’t think that the answer to the question as to whether or not we’d ever be able to colonize other planets (or create colonies on huge space stations or ships, or whatever) would actually make a difference. There are many people (probably too many not to warrant being seriously frightened) who really believe that we have basically infinite resources here on Earth. Despite the fact that, you know, the planet is roughly a sphere and thus finite in volume and surface area. There are crackpot theories that call global climate change a myth, that assert a non-biological origin for oil deposits (thus calling peak oil a myth), that look to zero-point energy as a viable hypothesis, that inexplicably deny the direct relationships between food production and population size, etc. All of these, along with simple denial and/or ignorance, seem like they’ll be feeding back into the self-maintenance of capital well into (and probably past) the foreseeable future.
June 18, 2010 at 11:44 pm
I forget where I read this, but one NASA scientist has a great essay somewhere on the web about how Mars colonization really is doable if we would just give up the idea that any of the colonists or their descendants are going to come back to earth (at least within the next few hundred years).
What makes everything so prohibitive is that every mission plan involves the astronauts coming back to earth. So I do have some hope that we’ll leave earth.
Finally as far as the logic of capitalism ties into this, I don’t think planetary colonization is sufficiently analogous to taking away other people’s lands for us to make any firm predictions about how it has to work out (though if you had to pick one you could do a lot worse than the original kibbutzes in Israel). But the point is, if we could get enough people on enough different planets and moons then in all probability culture and economics would shift as a function of the radical environmental shifts. You’d get a new set of problems and hopes and have to develop new theories in reaction to what comes up.
June 19, 2010 at 1:54 am
I get what you mean by the fantasy of Capitalism, and yet I’m not convinced this is some ultimate horizon for serious talk of space-travel and colonization. There’s just something fishy about parsing space-travel and tending to the Earth as fatal choices. It’s always given as either only Mother Earth deserves our love or some kind of consumerist pilgramage where we leave the Earth only because we’ve used it up.
I agree with Jon’s point about traveling to and from colonies. Kim Stanley Robinson even recognizes this in the Mars Trilogy; it takes a long time before anyone else comes to Mars, and longer still before anything like a return-trip. All of the First 100 go to Mars basically giving up life as they know it, and assume they will never see Earth again.
They do that, and yet most of us are still on Earth, and that’s what I think really irks people about space-travel and colonization. Even if we do establish a viable colony on Mars, or even the moon, most of the people alive when it happens will NEVER get to go there. Generations would pass, and pretty much everybody born on Earth would die on Earth, never stepping foot on another planet or planetoid. It feels unfair, but only because we accept that space-travel happens because it’s the ONLY thing worth doing. We are rabidly jealous when we think about the handful of select humans who would get to go on that adventure, never mind that they’re actually qualified for it and are giving up the security of an atmosphere and ozone layer and gravity and the rest of the god-damn species. I feel I’m beginning to beat a dead horse, and I think you get my point.
I think that working through that crisis of separation would go a long way to repairing our pathological relationship with the Earth.
June 20, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Yes. I had trouble with Bostrom’s transhumanist essay in Collapse for precisely this reason. There’s every reason to suppose that extraterrestrials will have reached a similar conclusion.
June 21, 2010 at 8:33 am
On an economic blog (here: http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/04/american-wage-stagnationposner/comments/page/2/#comments), a one Chris Graves makes a very philosophical argument for a hierarchical human existence — there are many things to think about here, like the implicit theological ideas behind them, but the question remains: is there a differential and hierarchical structure to the human object as it has appeared in history and to what extent is this inherent in humanity itself? Here is his comment, and I post it in full:
It seems that the natural condition of humanity is inequality and hierarchy. It is a matter of degree though, and generally the more social and economic equality, the happier are the people. Even so, there are still inequalities in all modern societies. Personally, I would like to see the natural aristocracy that Jefferson believed would arise in a regime characterized by liberty. Unfortunately, liberty does not seem to consistently facilitate such a meritocracy as I have pointed out previously. In fact, Goethe had a more realistic understanding of liberty observing that if people were freer, average people would marginalize the most talented, but leave people like himself free to pursue their own goals in peace. A hereditary aristocracy has shown that it cannot consistently produce a genuine meritocracy either. Certainly, by its very nature, any regime on the left eschews an aristocracy, at least in theory. Equality and merit are distinctly opposed organizing principles of a society unless one believes talent, intelligence, integrity, insight, creativity, etc. are all evenly distributed throughout a population. Such an assumption is obviously and tragically false. Even more certainly false is G.A. Cohen’s Marxist vision where we all serve one another out of kindness and empathy allowing everyone to reach their fullest potential. Real life Marxist regimes have all been characterized by extreme inequality of wealth and power. Lenin recognized the brutal fact that the proletariat need forcible direction imposed on them by a “vanguard” if the desired distribution of wealth and power were ever to be achieved.
As David Hume observed, due to scarcity and limited generosity we need a concept of justice to regulate human society. It seems from historical experience and what we know of human nature that the best that we can do is a “circulation of elites,” as Pareto put it, as we offer the most ambitious rewards to serve the public. There is never anything approaching full equality for all. If we did not offer greater opportunities for the most talented and most driven to excel, then we would not have civilization. Professor Domhoff makes this point himself as he discussed the rise of civilization. Liberal left philosopher John Rawls accepts this truth of the human condition in his “Difference Principle.”
So, since we are only able to circulate elites of the various groups vying for power, we can consider the question, is a leftist elite better for the average person than a business elite? The historical record does not look good for the left. I would agree though that the focus on business practices and efficiency while having some place should not be all-encompassing in issues of governance. Nor should the technocratic reliance on social science statistics, as I have argued early-on in this week’s discussion. Each of these considerations taken too far dehumanize individuals treating them as if they were cogs in a machine. Reducing all human institutions to a factory that can be organized de novo from the top down is especially demeaning to individuals as well as being ineffectual in meeting human needs as we have seen in real life social experiments. For example, in recent years China forced an indigenous nomadic tribe to live close to a city in shelters the government constructed for them on the grounds that they could have better access to government services if they were not roaming around in the wilderness. Tragically, many of these people were killed just a few weeks ago in the earthquakes that hit central China. If the nomads had been allowed to maintain their own way of life regardless of whether someone on high deemed their lives better lived in a welfare state, they would have all survived the earthquake. Even without an earthquake, people should have the freedom to form their own distinctive ways of life regardless of how they fit into some overall distribution. That is my primary objection to even considering these philosophical issues as if they were all mathematical puzzles whose abstract solution resolved the real human dilemmas that have to be lived out by living individuals in a particular time and social setting.
Reading Marx, I do have to say he might not agree that we must obliterate all “natural,” or individual talents, weaknesses, and abilities, such that, even in a communist society and mode of production, elites or hierarchies would emerge (so some of the above might be against a kind of strawman). But this question is an interesting one as it relates also to object-oriented thought, I think — yours, Levi, unfolds in a very Marxist, or post-Marxist, political context, whereas I can discern nothing explicitly political in Graham’s whatsoever. How might you both respond to these points made by the commenter, above? There seems to be, somewhere above, a real philosophical debate worth having. Or not, I don’t know, but I thought I would just put it here to see if it’s worth respond to at all.
(In the interest of so-called “full disclosure,” I am in general much more sympathetic to the Marxist perspective — but the question is still open, I think.)
June 21, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Brief comment-
On rereading my comment, I’m a little mortified to realize that it’s open to misinterpretation.
I did not mean to equate the establishment of kibbutzes with “taking away people’s land,” and didn’t intend to say or implicate anything at all about the post 1967 situation in Israel and Palestine.
I meant that I really do think that kibbutzes present an extremely interesting case of non-capitalist living arrangements both on the appropriate scale to be successful and that should be replicated if we ever get our act together and colonize space.
I recently tried to reread some Heinlein I’d loved in grammar school and found it almost painfully stupid. The psychological and historical implausibility just grated too much.
I initially thought this is because I enjoy fantasy much more now, but Dan Simmons’ two Hyperion series and his sci-fi series where the aliens recreate ancient Troy remain canonical (actually the Hyperion ones might be philosophically interesting from the perspective of an OOP ethics). So people are still doing great sci fi.
June 21, 2010 at 6:18 pm
The phantasy of capitalism has also been analysed by Murray Bookchin, several times, and he had given a definition of capitalism’s primary injunction as “grow or die”. Its worth reading some of his work, but always with heavy pinches of salt.