Facing Space-Based Reality
I’d just written about my disaffection from the tech right when More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity arrived. This book, by Adam Becker, a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics, argues persuasively against expansive tech visions, such as an AI-enabled “Singularity” or space “colonization” (a term to which Becker objects). I’d never been much of a believer in AI-transforming-everything (ATE, an acronym I made up), but space has been, and remains, a fascination of mine. It’s with glumness that I acknowledge that Becker cogently describes various problems and limits confronting any substantial human presence in space.
A Mars metropolis, for instance, would have to deal with radiation, toxic dust, and low temperatures, gravity and air pressure; “exposure to Martian air would boil the saliva off an astronaut’s tongue while they asphyxiate.” The people there would probably live underground and rarely, if ever, see the sky. The moon is in some ways harsher yet, with even-lower gravity and no atmosphere at all, but has the advantage of proximity to Earth, enabling easier supply shipments and retreats to the home planet. Other possibilities, such as orbital communities in the Venusian clouds, also entail technical difficulties.
Ideas such as Mars providing a “backup” for human civilization (as Elon Musk propounds) or vast numbers living in free-floating space cylinders so there’d be “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins” (as Jeff Bezos has raptured about) aren’t going to manifest on any timescale people can plan for today. Still, research aimed at incrementally expanding capabilities for future space settlements makes sense to me. Another book that recently arrived, The Future of Gardens, by Mark Lane, notes that China’s Chang’e-4 mission enabled cotton seeds to sprout in a sealed container on the moon’s far side, though they didn’t survive the two-week lunar night. Future experiments, Lane writes, could include “exploring ways to extract essential minerals and nutrients from lunar soil to support plant development.” Experiments in growing plants in lunar regolith brought to Earth show promise, though the plants show signs of stress.
Having dismissed various tech visions, Becker contemplates what alternative aspiration to advocate. He gravitates to the concept that “There should be no such thing as billionaires.” I find this less-than-inspiring. If self-seeking behavior by billionaires, and concentration of power and influence in their hands, has warped American politics in recent decades—as I believe is the case—there’s still much to fear in any government able to impose some hard limit on how much wealth anyone could ever obtain. Better to try to shore up the laws and norms that prevent any individual, however wealthy, from undertaking evil, destructive acts, such as when Musk consigned children to starvation and disease by feeding USAID into a “woodchipper” (an act rightly condemned by fellow billionaire Bill Gates).
Becker displays a healthy aversion to sweeping visions and utopias, writing that “anyone who claims to know the one inevitable future, or the one good path for humanity, is someone who deserves your deepest skepticism.” He also makes the point that tech titans and visionaries are prone to “humanities denial,” dismissing non-technical knowledge, especially about history, in favor of an engineering mindset. This fosters hubris; as science writer John Horgan suggests, the humanities “keep us from being trapped by our own terrible desire for certainty,” though Horgan’s also noted such disciplines give no guarantee of humane behavior: “One third of the officers in the German SS had advanced degrees in humanities.”
If, far in the future, humans (or post-humans of some sort) develop technologies that enable widespread space settlement, such as transporting comets to Mars for terraforming, it will take diplomatic skill to prevent such tools from triggering arms races and wars. Becker writes: “Imagine space drones that can bring comets in from the outer solar system and direct them to hit the surface of Mars. Now imagine that your country doesn’t have them, and its greatest rival does. How do you think the leaders of your country would feel about that?” Similarly, he notes, a capacity to launch moon rocks for construction of space cylinders would also enable raining them onto any location on Earth, with massive destruction.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky