Blank Space
Why Human Colonization of Space is More Fantasy Than Our Future
(Welcome to all the new readers from Substack Reads. My Netflix piece coming in at number one - and beating out something Margaret Atwood wrote - is perhaps the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to me. I hope you enjoy our regular programming here on Thursday mornings and I greatly appreciate you reading!)
Perhaps nothing typifies the mixture of retro and futuristic that defines me more than being a fan of space exploration, something seemingly futuristic while simultaneously dropping out of the public interest back when Zeppelin was still naming their albums after themselves. And yet, I admit, I am a space nerd. And I have been ever since as a third grader I got to meet the greatest of all heroes: astronauts. Since then, I’ve been that particular type of nerd who has a NASA t-shirt and watches launches. And I’m not sure I can remember a year as wonderful for space exploration as 2022.
We started receiving stunning images from the most powerful telescope we’ve ever put in space. NASA’s Artemis I – the first step in NASA’s return to ambitious human exploration – was a success and makes the future of the program seem more plausible. And, giving NASA the most impressive hat trick of 2022 – sorry, Kylian Mbappe – they managed to beat up an asteroid. This is both the most important thing that happened in 2022 in any field and gave us the sweet dopamine hit of nostalgia for a bad 90s movie.
But it wasn’t just NASA dominating the field. Private companies like Boeing, Blue Origin, and SpaceX all had massive successes this year, even if their overall record was somewhat uneven. South Korea got into the moon game, China has a space station, and Japan’s private sector has a lunar rover now.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I sense a broad-based optimism about the future of humanity and space. And I think that means it’s important we all acknowledge that humans will probably never regularly live in space.
I bet you didn’t see that thesis coming. But it’s true. And as we progress further into being a regularly spacefaring species, it’s helpful to center this perspective. Because for all the fantasies burgeoning about us living out our sci-fi dreams and being able to move to the moon, work as a belter mining an asteroid, or just live in New Muskopolis, it’s just that, a dream. Will there be humans who live in space? Sure, there have been for decades. Will it ever be home to full time populations? Probably not.
I certainly want to lead off by acknowledging that I hate this. I am a fan of sci fi and I would love if our wildest dreams of being an interstellar species came true. But it’s not going to, and there’s a simple reason for it: we evolved to live on this planet, not anywhere else. This is one of those truths that is obvious but ignored. Humans are adapted to live in Earth’s gravity and living in anything else is incredibly difficult and changes the human body. Humans are adapted to require water and food for survival, and we have found no signs of potable water or digestible food off Earth. There’s the incredibly annoying fact that humans evolved on a planet protected by an impressive radiation shield that is not easy to duplicate. And the human body is adapted to live in a relatively narrow range of temperatures which aren’t well represented in space.
But worst of all was that damned Paleoproterozoic Era when the Great Oxygenation Event occurred and Earth, like a mopey teenager getting super into Morrisey and throwing out all their pop albums, got super into oxygen and chucked into the trash all those non-oxygen breathing species. So, for 2.4 billion years we’ve had this pesky need for oxygen. I doubt I need to explain how important oxygen is or that space doesn’t quite meet our needs there.
These are not mere inconveniences. It means that we must take extreme measures to avoid certain death to inhabit space. We need to bring with us all the oxygen, food, and water (or tools to create it) as well as radiation shielding and build habitats that keep the oxygen in. That perhaps would not be a dealbreaker except because of gravity it is absurdly expensive to put weight into space. But we need to bring a lot of stuff with us just for basic survival. Any analogy to past human exploration is utterly useless. It would be the greatest challenge we ever faced.
I wouldn’t have entitled this newsletter Technopoptimist if I didn’t have great faith in our ability to engineer stuff. Maybe we can engineer more efficient rockets or fuels or perfect habitats or any of the other things that would make this feasible. But that raises the question: why would we?
In lieu of coming up with those arguments for why myself – always an intellectual minefield rife with strawmanning – I decided to ask for help. I typed into Chat GPT “What are the best reasons for humans to colonize the solar system?” Our midwit friend gave me five reasons. In order:
Exploration and scientific discovery: The solar system is full of fascinating and intriguing places, from the barren surface of the Moon to the gaseous atmosphere of Jupiter. By exploring these places, we can learn more about the origins and evolution of the solar system and our own planet, and we can make new scientific discoveries that could benefit humanity.
It is indisputable that there is an immense, possibly limitless, amount of exploration and scientific discovery waiting for us in the stars. But this doesn’t answer my question. I asked about colonization, not exploration. Currently, the most inhospitable place on Earth is Antarctica. It’s been fruitful for scientific research. Which is why a few thousand people live there. That’s it. Despite being so accessible Anthony Bourdain could film an episode there.
Antarctica is orders of magnitude more hospitable than space. We can breathe there! And yet, we only have a small amount of people doing research. Why do we think space would even reach these levels? What do you have better than this, AI?
Resource extraction: Many of the planets and moons in the solar system contain valuable resources, such as water, minerals, and helium-3, that could be used to support human life and industry. By colonizing the solar system, we could potentially tap into these resources and use them to support our growing population and our expanding technological capabilities.
Agreed. I have spent years annoyingly trying to convince everyone I know to start a space mining company with me.1 It’s a Gold Rush in the sky! But, again, this doesn’t seem like it requires human colonization. The 49ers didn’t need to spend $30,000,000 to get to San Francisco.2 Although the idea of a Deadwood on Mars is a reboot I am begging HBO to greenlight, it is a fantasy. These will not be individual entrepreneurs needing to buy goods and visit saloons and brothels. This will be a megaproject to create livable habitats. What in the previous century of economics makes you think whatever corporation or government financing this will spend billions to make these large and bustling with people? There is no incentive to have bullshit jobs in space. As much as can be done by robots will be done by robots. We will even try to make sure we can get robots to do the mining. We’ve been relentlessly replacing humans with robots on Earth, why would we reverse this trend in the place where being a human requires immense effort and spending to not instadie?
ChatGPT then pivots away from good answers to, well, not good answers, but at least ones I’ve heard repeated ad nauseum.
Habitat expansion: As the human population continues to grow, we will need more space and resources to support our needs. By colonizing other parts of the solar system, we could potentially create new habitats and living spaces for humans, which could help relieve some of the pressure on Earth and allow us to continue to thrive and expand.
I have a well-established aversion to Malthusian arguments. Beyond that, this makes no sense. We are nowhere close to running out of space. Whether or not, as the old trope goes, you can fit the entire population of the world into Texas – and Californians are certainly trying in Austin – it’s true that we have far more land than we use. Fighting NIMBYism is a challenge, but it’s not as challenging as surviving in space.
Part of this is spurred by fallacious analogies of the great migrations from Europe to the Americas. But people weren’t coming here because Europe ran out of room. They were coming here for economic and political reasons. I believe the biggest question facing humanity is how we deal with shifting away from an economy that requires bodies to work while our population continues to grow. But any political solution to that is going to remain easier to accomplish than people leaving Detroit for the moon. Similarly:
Backup plan: Some people believe that it's important for humanity to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong on Earth. By colonizing other parts of the solar system, we could create a "plan B" that would ensure the survival of our species, even if disaster strikes on our home planet.
The existential risks to humanity fall into one of two categories. Those that would still impact space faring humans – such as anything happening to the sun or out of control AIs or superior alien life – and those that would merely devastate their Terran bound support system, such as supervolcanoes or catastrophic pandemics. In the case of the latter, we’re still probably screwed. The technological challenge of setting up civilizations in the sky pales in comparison to making them self-sustaining without assistance from Earth. We would have to create entirely self-sustaining settlements, capable of creating oxygen and water and food for masses of people, with limited chance of catastrophic collapse. We’re essentially talking about terraforming a lifeless rock.
It is easier to avoid these risks. We know it’s easier to blow up an asteroid than to set foot on Mars. It’s easy to avoid global thermonuclear warfare: just don’t do it. And even if the worst predictions about climate change are true, that version of Earth is still the most habitable part of the Solar System. It is infinitely easier to work on keeping Earth safe than to create a backup Earth.
Finally, ChatGPT almost sways me as the Tin Man shows it has a heart:
The challenge and the adventure: Finally, some people are drawn to the idea of colonizing the solar system simply because it's a thrilling and challenging endeavor. Exploring the unknown and pushing the boundaries of human achievement is a fundamental part of what makes us human and colonizing the solar system could be the next great adventure for our species.
This is simultaneously the best and worst argument. It’s pretty silly to colonize the Solar System merely because it’s cool. But I strongly believe in the value of the romantic. The benefits we got from the space program are extensive, yet perhaps the greatest benefit is that we showed we could do it. Or, in the beautiful words of Ted Sorensen:
As tempting as this is, we can do that with limited amounts of people. Astronauts, scientists, engineers. And most importantly, robots. There is just no reason for a mass migration into space that outweighs the challenges.
I genuinely hope some technological breakthrough changes the calculus and makes this look hilariously wrong. But I think that, much like travelling through time or visiting Jurassic Park, living on the moon will be a childhood dream not to come true.
If any billionaires are reading this, please, get me on board. I’m ready to go! If this is too ambitious, can I interest you in a social network based on the Dunbar Number? Or an app that rates the best foods at each restaurant? An amusement park for adults where you live out live action versions of classic video games?
But they did need to spend $138 million to get Trent Williams there!
This is going to look so embarrassing when I found Edtopia of Ganymede in 2028, just in time for Kamala Harris' third term in the White House.
I'm with you, though. I think the only way we inhabit space is if we re-engineer our biology to survive in space. Despite what transhumanists may think, most people do not want to change the human animal into anything else.
But I also think chatbot's final answer is the correct one. Humans have done a lot of wildly impressive things because it's cool, rather than because we need to do it. Them pyramids don't exist for utility, for example.
“But people weren’t coming here because Europe ran out of room. They were coming here for economic and political reasons. I believe the biggest question facing humanity is how we deal with shifting away from an economy that requires bodies to work while our population continues to grow. But any political solution to that is going to remain easier to accomplish than people leaving Detroit for the moon.”
I mean… literally at any time Europe theoretically could have solved whatever political problems it had. But it didn’t. Because people are terrible. Which is arguably the greatest challenge humanity faces, and much, MUCH harder to engineer away than something as trivial as oxygen generation. Hence my new motto for NASA:
“SPACE: Let’s explore it so we have somewhere to send all the jerks we disagree with!”