Far Reaches of Space
We should be thankful for large distances. The universe is rife with dangers that attenuate in the vastness of space. Astronomer Phil Plait was shaken, he wrote, upon realizing collisions of supermassive black holes release gravitational waves that briefly have greater energy than the combined emissions of all the stars in the observable universe. Fortunately, by the time these gravitational waves hit Earth, they’ve weakened to a whisper.
Similarly, the risks posed by asteroids and comets that could hit Earth are limited by their probabilities of missing our planet amid the vast spaces through which such objects travel. Humanity’s own space vehicles also pose risks to Earth, but these are largely limited to the moments of launch; though it’s possible a spacecraft deployed into space might later crash back to Earth, especially in a gravity-assist flyby or “slingshot effect,” it’s unlikely.
Why haven’t we been conquered or exterminated by extraterrestrials? It could be they don’t exist, or embody benign enlightenment, or have placed us on a list of planets, species and civilizations to avoid. But a plausible explanation is just that vast distances hinder any alien bad actors from getting here; possibly, they haven’t yet even picked up our TV and radio signals, traveling at the speed of light but still taking decades to reach even nearby star systems. For better or worse, our solar system may be a backwater few care to visit.
Certain fears attach to large distances. Agoraphobia is often described as fear of open spaces, but that’s just one of its manifestations, along with fears of crowds and public embarrassment. Astrophobia is fear of outer space (whereas astraphobia is fear of thunder and lightning), selenophobia is fear of the moon, and kosmikophobia is fear of celestial phenomena such as meteor showers or auroral lights. Uranophobia, or ouranophobia, is fear of heaven or the sky, while apeirophobia is fear of infinity, eternity, or endlessness. If there’s life below the surface of icy moons such as Europa, one wonders what phobias those beings might have, as cold, dark oceans that would terrify us would be their norm.
There’s an intriguing idea that space might be our salvation if a super-intelligent AI were to endanger humanity. This wouldn’t mean a human escape into space, as in Battlestar Galactica, but instead that the AI, under certain conditions, would itself leave Earth. Substack commentator Noah Smith has suggested maximizing this possibility, by fostering space technology so that AIs might have “their own domain in the heavens, where they wouldn’t have to compete with humans for resources... To this end, we should improve cheap launch systems and space-capable robots as fast as possible.” Smith, who’s been critical of AI doomerism, recently surprised readers with a prediction that humans will become “pets” of our technological creations, but later noted that he wrote that while in a bad mood because his pet rabbit was ill, but now was better.
Plutarch wrote that Alexander the Great “wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, ‘Is it not worthy of tears,’ he said, ‘that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’” This is sometimes misquoted as Alexander saying there were no more worlds to conquer. In the 19th century, British imperialist Cecil Rhodes expressed a similar dissatisfaction with the limits of his territorial grasp: “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far away.”
Yet megalomaniacs’ inability to annex nearby planets is beneficial, particularly amid a revival of territorial aggrandizement as a focus of international relations. For the best, also, is that the outer solar system, let alone areas beyond, will be accessible only through uncrewed science probes for a long time. Freeman Dyson spoke of the Kuiper Belt, a vast array of comets beyond Neptune, as “a rather convenient place for living” if one had “a plant that’s able to grow a greenhouse around itself so it can keep warm in the light from the sun, even when the sun is far away.” This would be “a friendly place for life,” because of the slow speeds of the comets out there, he thought. Dyson’s timeframe, though, allowed time for deliberation: “Not in the next hundred years, but maybe in 500 years.”