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I don't think "a backup copy of humanity" is the best argument for space settlement. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's not the strongest and you are correct

by api 5y ago

I don't think "a backup copy of humanity" is the best argument for space settlement. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's not the strongest and you are correct that it's not foolproof. The best argument is that frontiers are where innovation happens, and where outsiders can migrate as a "pressure valve" for civilization. Without a frontier there is nowhere to try new things and it's impossible to challenge existing norms without fighting. No frontier means either eternal stagnation or eternal war. (War can take the form of either overt violence or constant political turmoil.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this. We are rapidly approaching a state in which the entire planet is settled, surveilled, and regulated. This is unprecedented in human history, and I think it's going to be fairly dystopian. I can only see two possible outcomes: absolutely total global surveillance state or a global "failed state" resembling a dystopian cyberpunk anarchy like Stephenson's Snow Crash. They're not mutually exclusive; the first could lead to the second. I don't think it's feasible to reverse this trend. It's a natural outcome of humanity's growth and technological advancement. Pushing out to a new frontier is really the only option.

inglor_cz 5y ago
I wonder to which extent our current Western re-orientation towards introspection and a crusade against psychological harm stems from a lack of space for physical expansion, and the exhaustion of the IT revolution. The Zeitgeist tends to concentrate on one or two things only. Maybe a rebooted Space Race could make us again look towards the sky.
- api 5y ago
  Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere. Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat... SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.
koheripbal 5y ago
If you imagine humanity as the first single celled organism of the galaxy, diversification and evolution goes hand in hand with spreading out.
RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Earth still has vast oceans and polar deserts which are virtually unclaimed and uninhabitable, yet still offer a more inviting environment than mars: ample water, protection from radiation, in some cases more available solar power, low-latency communication with other inhabited areas, etc. There's an opportunity to work toward the kinds of radical self-sufficiency that would be needed on Mars without leaving the planet.
- api 5y ago
  I see this brought up often and I think it glosses over a lot of things. Antarctica is a common red herring in these discussions. It's illegal to settle there, otherwise there already would be settlements likely bootstrapped through mining. The entire continent is locked down by treaty. Seasteading is technically possible but there are many issues once it gets to the point of declaring oneself a nation state. It's also worse in certain respects than Mars. The climate is obviously far better, but you can't mine anything and land in the form of floating platforms is vastly more costly. Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    > Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason. This is really key. Once the cat is out of the bag with spacefaring being democratized and relatively cheap, the frontier is truly endless. It won’t peter out like all of Earth’s frontiers have — space will always have more wilderness than we have people.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
NateEag 5y ago
> I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this. But see The Expanse for a strong contradiction of this pattern. It has frontiers but human nature has not suddenly gone through a transmutation that makes it natively good. ...and I'll argue The Expanse is actually way better than most of those optimistic shows. Especially any of the Star Trek series. (Season 1 of Picard was an improvement on most ST, I'll happily grant)
- api 5y ago
  It’s not that human nature will get better with a frontier. It’s that it gets worse without one. The best scenario I can think of for a closed Earth is Singapore but with more surveillance and a much more stagnant culture. Oh, and a very high rate of suicide and mental illness.
ModernMech 5y ago
The problem with frontiers is that one culture’s “frontier” is another culture’s homeland. Look what happens to native populations every time they encounter a more technologically advanced civilization. My worry about a lawless infinite frontier is that it will encourage lawless exponential exploitation. What happens when one of these spacefaring humanoids innovates a planet-eating or sun-eating machine. Just a vessel that consumes an entire planet. Or a death star type weapon? Now you have a civilization of innovating planet eating humans roaming and multiplying throughout the universe like a virus. Does life exist on the planets they eat? Who knows or cares? Who would stop them if it did? I wouldn’t leave it past the human mind to implement this.
- api 5y ago
  There are no guarantees of course, but I am fond of saying “it’s called space for a reason.” There is so damn much of it. Go find one of those “solar system to scale” models. Anyone with interstellar capability could definitely go somewhere else. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t be assholes but it means it’s unlikely that future spacefaring intelligences will be pushed into an aggressive position by scarcity of land or resources. They will at least have the option of just going elsewhere. Personally I think large scale space conflict for rational reasons is unlikely both because of how costly it could be (any spacefaring being has ludicrously overpowered WMDs) and the optionality. So if it does happen I would predict it occurring for irrational reasons. That happens of course.

by api 5y ago

inglor_cz 5y ago

I wonder to which extent our current Western re-orientation towards introspection and a crusade against psychological harm stems from a lack of space for physical expansion, and the exhaustion of the IT revolution. The Zeitgeist tends to concentrate on one or two things only. Maybe a rebooted Space Race could make us again look towards the sky.

api 5y ago
Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere. Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat... SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.

koheripbal 5y ago

If you imagine humanity as the first single celled organism of the galaxy, diversification and evolution goes hand in hand with spreading out.

RodgerTheGreat 5y ago

Earth still has vast oceans and polar deserts which are virtually unclaimed and uninhabitable, yet still offer a more inviting environment than mars: ample water, protection from radiation, in some cases more available solar power, low-latency communication with other inhabited areas, etc. There's an opportunity to work toward the kinds of radical self-sufficiency that would be needed on Mars without leaving the planet.

api 5y ago
I see this brought up often and I think it glosses over a lot of things. Antarctica is a common red herring in these discussions. It's illegal to settle there, otherwise there already would be settlements likely bootstrapped through mining. The entire continent is locked down by treaty. Seasteading is technically possible but there are many issues once it gets to the point of declaring oneself a nation state. It's also worse in certain respects than Mars. The climate is obviously far better, but you can't mine anything and land in the form of floating platforms is vastly more costly. Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  > Lastly though, I really think space as a frontier is qualitatively different and people know it. Compared to the scale of current or even foreseeable future human civilization, it's infinite and near inexhaustible even without positing any kind of FTL or near-light-speed travel. The solar system alone is just monstrous. It's called space for a reason. This is really key. Once the cat is out of the bag with spacefaring being democratized and relatively cheap, the frontier is truly endless. It won’t peter out like all of Earth’s frontiers have — space will always have more wilderness than we have people.
  - giantrobot 5y ago

NateEag 5y ago

> I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this. But see The Expanse for a strong contradiction of this pattern. It has frontiers but human nature has not suddenly gone through a transmutation that makes it natively good. ...and I'll argue The Expanse is actually way better than most of those optimistic shows. Especially any of the Star Trek series. (Season 1 of Picard was an improvement on most ST, I'll happily grant)

api 5y ago
It’s not that human nature will get better with a frontier. It’s that it gets worse without one. The best scenario I can think of for a closed Earth is Singapore but with more surveillance and a much more stagnant culture. Oh, and a very high rate of suicide and mental illness.

ModernMech 5y ago

The problem with frontiers is that one culture’s “frontier” is another culture’s homeland. Look what happens to native populations every time they encounter a more technologically advanced civilization. My worry about a lawless infinite frontier is that it will encourage lawless exponential exploitation. What happens when one of these spacefaring humanoids innovates a planet-eating or sun-eating machine. Just a vessel that consumes an entire planet. Or a death star type weapon? Now you have a civilization of innovating planet eating humans roaming and multiplying throughout the universe like a virus. Does life exist on the planets they eat? Who knows or cares? Who would stop them if it did? I wouldn’t leave it past the human mind to implement this.

api 5y ago
There are no guarantees of course, but I am fond of saying “it’s called space for a reason.” There is so damn much of it. Go find one of those “solar system to scale” models. Anyone with interstellar capability could definitely go somewhere else. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t be assholes but it means it’s unlikely that future spacefaring intelligences will be pushed into an aggressive position by scarcity of land or resources. They will at least have the option of just going elsewhere. Personally I think large scale space conflict for rational reasons is unlikely both because of how costly it could be (any spacefaring being has ludicrously overpowered WMDs) and the optionality. So if it does happen I would predict it occurring for irrational reasons. That happens of course.