Off-Earth: Thinking Deeply About Possible Futures
Extracurriculars
I frequently identify the main goals of futures work as helping people build both their imagination and sense of agency about future possibilities. The recent book Off-Earth by Erika Nesvold is posed as an exploration of 13 major ethical questions related to future settlement of space1. It definitely does this exploration, and it’s also a great example of deep futures work: in order to appreciate the ethical issues likely to arise, Nesvold has to expand our imagination; in her repeated arguments that the best time to start this exploration is before we settle space, and that we aren’t bound by any single approach, she expands our agency to build the future we want. A quote from the introduction illustrates both of these masterfully:
As you ponder these Big Questions about “the future of humanity,” try shifting your perspective. Picture yourself as one of the settlers. What does your day-to-day life look like? Will you have a job you enjoy? Will you worry about how to put food on the table? What will your kids do all day? What will you miss about Earth: fresh fruit, thunderstorms, a clear view of the sky? What will you dream about at night?… Yes, this book is about questions that will determine the fate of our species in space, but it’s also about you, and the kind of world you want to build there.
This envisioning work has a lot of overlap with the way Jim Dator describes the work of experiencing alternative futures:
Whatever you may initially feel about the future into which you have been so suddenly placed, please suspend your disbelief!… This is your life. Love it, because you can’t leave it.
For the next few minutes, make the best of the future you find yourself in…. Please just accept it, and try to respond positively (according to whatever you think is “the best you can do”) to the world in which you find yourself.
This frame of personal imagination serves as a complement to more macro methods of building out an understanding of a future world, such as incasting based on a sensemaking framework like STEEP, by taking it down to a personal, human-scale view of the world.
Here are a few of the ways my imagination about a future in space was expanded by reading this book:
Nesvold uses the term “settlement” instead of “colony” not just as a more polite word that avoids the baggage of colonialism, but because there are important differences: compared to English colonization of America, no indigenous people on Mars2 means that there’s no harm caused via conquest and disease, but also there’s no Wampanoag to teach us how to survive the winter.
The different breadth and depth of skills required for a small population of humans to survive in space vs on Earth, and the scarcity of those skills, bends the ethics of almost every aspect of life: selecting who gets to go in the first place, how justice is administered, how healthcare is triaged in an emergency, etc.
Putting settlements in space is a huge defense liability: if we send people to mine in the asteroid belt, we’re giving them access to giant rock and putting them 180M kilometers above our heads3 on what is essentially a cosmic overpass.
Even if humans can effectively reproduce off-world4, the intersection of the settlement’s need to control the rate of population growth and the reproductive rights of individual settlers is a nightmare, scrambling lots of otherwise much easier decisions and raising questions about whether we can avoid specters from our past, like eugenics.
My biggest reaction as I was reading the book was that it may be unreasonable to apply the ethical standards of our current abundant society to a space settlement that’s always one mistake away from annihilation. My guess is that the first colonies will be run very much like ships at sea, with a captain in absolute command, until either terraforming or decentralized life support makes survival less perilous, rather than some post-capitalist system without private property or prisons. I’m also much less convinced than Nesvold that each settlement should self-evidently have a representative mix of the Earth’s cultures, languages, etc; this seems like it adds unnecessary complexity to an already difficult environment5.
But, again, these criticisms serve to underscore the quality of the futures work that takes place in the book, because it not only illuminates many issues I hadn’t considered, but it also convinced me that we as a species have a broad range of options for dealing with those issues. That sense of expanded agency - going from predictions or extrapolations to a sense of the vast space of possibility from which we can choose - represents the best of what foresight as a discipline has to offer.
It’s the extension of a limited-run podcast Nesvold conducted in 2018 doing interviews around these same questions.
Though our obligation to potential Martian microbes is also explored.
I still struggle to understand/remember that most of space isn’t “out there” but “up there”, because of Earth’s gravity well; this is despite the best efforts of sci-fi like Ender’s Game and The Expanse to make this point clear.
This is by no means settled, with unknown effects of microgravity and radiation on every step of the process, from reproductive fitness to child development.
As one example, imagine how much extra risk is added by having people working on critical systems that aren’t fluent in a common language.