[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Further Notes on Space Colonies

[rfmcdonald]

On A Voyage to Arcturus, my post on space colonization seems to have sparked some commentary.



Troy Loney commented that:

I think [. . .] Randy McDonald [. . .] may have missed one of the primary reasons for a group deciding to create a settlement in space: isolation from the otherwise-pervasive influences which draw their members (especially the children) away from the community and its values.

Consider the fears of many Islamic nations in the Middle East; they see what has happened to many other cultures as Western civilization makes its seductive invasion, and they want nothing to do with that -- but here on Earth, there is no effective way they can avoid it. Even China hasn't been able to prevent subversion by the Internet and by broadcast media.

But (as Turner so eloquently points out) the vast distances of space will make that task far more manageable. People (mostly religious, but not exclusively so -- think of the hard-core communists) who now attempt to isolate themselves in, say, northern Idaho or the Carolina mountains, could easily find the greater isolation of space attractive.

All it will take is the mature technology which allows them to live there effectively and reasonably cheaply, and I think they'd go. I feel sorrow for their children, for whom escape will be much harder -- but then, wasn't that the case for the whole world until very recently?

Actually, I agree. I think--as I suggested in part 2--that it will be quite possible for small, well-outfitted, and determined groups of people to go out into the asteroid belt or to the Jovian moons or to places even further afield to build their own outposts. Some of these might be quite nice places to live in; others might be hell to live in. I'd imagine that someone unfortunate enough to be born non-heterosexual in (say) a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim outpost several months travel time from anywhere would suffer horribly.

However. I don't think that these small groups will be alone. Consider: If it is possible to build a self-sustaining economy somewhere in space using the relatively meagre technical and human resources available to a small group of people, what could large and wealthy nation-states (or even transnational corporations) accomplish? (And if it isn't possible to build a self-sustaining economy in space using those meagre resources then in a generation's time the survivors and their few descendants will coming sheepishly back.) Space would be a massive untapped market, and it doesn't make sense to assume that it would remain forever neglected while a few intrepid colonists would spread.

And if it isn't possible to build self-sustaining economies in space over any time periods short of the longue durée, then it's all the more likely that, sooner or later, the colonists will be drawn back into the orbit (metaphorically speaking) of Earth or Earth's expensive and massively-subsidized colonies. If it's a choice between that and death through any one of a number of unpleasant ways (asphyxiation, freezing, starvation, et cetera) ... Some colonies might choose that fate, but they won't be the ones that survive.





According to Jay Manifold,

Old Arcturus hand Bill Walker asserts, with characteristic bluntness: "We're not in space for one reason: lack of property rights." He also questioned Randy McDonald's analogy:

Newfoundland didn't have 3He or billion-ton nickel-iron nuggets that can be moved billions of miles with a minor push. I agree with you that only 5% of the population will be involved in resource extraction ... but that doesn't mean that expending our resources by a millionfold won't have an effect.

• I'm skeptical that lack of secure property rights is what's preventing space from being colonized. I'm aware this is a major issue among proponents of space development, and I am quite sure I'll miss points, but still. It just seems, well, more likely that people aren't living on the Moon and mining asteroids because there is neither any immediate likelihood of profits nor a sustainable technological and human base for this outward expansion. True, space colonization could be politically driven for reasons of prestige, but then without any compelling need to expend vast amounts of capital on a project with uncertain results I suspect that political support would fall away once a short-term goal was achieved. (Like, oh, going to the Moon.) Perhaps we might have to wait a couple of generations after all. Too, I agree with Jay Manifold that

An undefined property rights framework is certainly a problem, but it's just not clear -- to me, anyway -- that one can precede habitation.* The colonists will create the institutions they need. Vehicles for getting truly large numbers of people into space, and a market comparable to the cruise industry, are -- in my view -- the next steps. We'll probably have to have nanotech for small groups of people to be self-sufficient; it's no good relying on Earth, dominated as it is by interventionist politics, to maintain a community elsewhere.

• Newfoundland didn't have helium-3 (potential fuel for aneutronic fusion reactors, incidentally) or billion-ton nickel-iron nuggets, no. But then, no one in Europe needed, much less wanted, either of those things. Cod was Newfoundland's hot resource; cod was the food that fed Europe's Catholic masses on Lent; cod, in short, was a vital extra source of protein for a population that (too frequently) could be felled by famine or famine-related events (a plague's spread exacerbated by nutrituional deficiencies, for instance). And the first vessels that crossed the Atlantic in the 15th and 16th centuries were as technologically advanced as any Earth-Mars cycler or high-impulse ion-drive probe.


• Now: There are prospects of resource shortages, and fuel shortages, in our world's future, but the need for asteroidal metal or fusion-reactor fuel is not nearly so pressing to us 21st century types as the need for cod for our 16th century ancestors in Europe. On Earth, there seems to be more than enough mineral resources available to keep industrial and post-industrial civilizations going for a long time yet. What could be done with a billion-ton nickel-iron asteroid? (Apart from building vast space constructions, but then we get into a loop.) How would you bring the metal down? And so on. Besides, we don't have working fusion power reactors yet. Perhaps we should wait until we can actually use--and reach--the resources of space before we go out.