extraterrestrial It will amaze you: on almost every page, your jaw drops in response to a startling revelation, and your head nods wildly at the sudden realization of some of your own half-realized thoughts. (assuming you’re thinking about something like It would also make her resign with a mournful shake of her head to the many immense challenges described by writer Erica Nesvold.
But surprise will win. Extraterrestrial: Ethical Issues and Conundrums of Life in Outer Space Really, really good.
Drawbacks of STEM education
Nesvold is an astrophysicist. She worked at NASA. She can easily run equations to calculate the amount of fuel needed to bring people, life support and mining equipment to Mars.
But at some point, she realized that was the easy part. So she began interviewing ethicists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, lawyers, economists, and policy experts to find out their insights. collected in a podcast. create a new worldThis book expands on many of the ideas originally explored there.
The chapter headings are all questions, which are a good indication of the issues she highlights in her book. Need to reserve space? why? who’s going How will ownership be distributed and finite resources allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? how do you do that? What if someone breaks the rules or needs medical attention? The issues underlying all these questions have not yet been addressed by any public or private agency currently launching rockets into the air. Who decides?
Many of these issues have been dealt with extensively in fiction. However, Nesvort does not actually mention these works other than to warn against the risk of viewing them as prophetic.
Lessons from history do not bode well
Each chapter begins with three fictional vignettes set in the year 2100: past, relative present, and future. All three are about different people leaving home. What types of people leave, their motivations, and the circumstances surrounding their decision. Her goal is to remind us that settling space is not just an endeavor that concerns humanity as a whole. Rather, it will involve and affect the many individuals that make up its whole . It’s a more effective conceit than it sounds like it should, and her narrative skills in relating them betray the lack of humanities education she laments.
The metaphor most commonly used when thinking about and talking about space settlement is the colonization of the New World by Europeans and the expansion of these settlers into the frontiers of the Wild West by Manifest Destiny. is centered on. This view depicts space as an empty blank canvas waiting for civilized people to build utopias within it. To the advocating Americans, this analogy may be the most convincing. For those who weren’t raised on this myth, it likely isn’t. Another problem is that these precedent results aren’t all that encouraging.
Nesvold demystifies the many ways that space settlement could repeat the mistakes of colonialism. It wasn’t the workers who went to new territories to build the land and its infrastructure (unless that was the case, that’s what happened in Jamestown). In the 18th century and into his early 19th century, indentured servants who landed on the shores of America would exchange unpaid labor for travel expenses upon arrival. Vulnerable workers in new environments far from home were at the mercy of their employers.
In 2020, Elon Musk said that people who wanted to go to Mars with SpaceX but couldn’t afford it could take loans to cover the $200,000 fare and clean it up once they get there. proposed. Nezbolt wonders what would happen if their working conditions were terrible. How to stop the employers who manage their oxygen supply from holding them hostage even after they have paid off their debt? You can not. In space, we never live off the land or grid.
But Nesbolt isn’t pessimistic. She said that if we don’t want to bring war, inequality, exploitation, resource depletion and injustice when we finally settle in space, we just need to eliminate those things on Earth first. And you have to do it now, not after all the technical challenges are solved and you are ready to leave the earth. If you want a civilization worth exporting ito space, here must be created.
