Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space

Every time someone talks about space travel I'm reminded of the McMansion Hell article Jackson Gilman-Forlini wrote about rowhouses [0]. It's mostly a technical breakdown of the design and aesthetics of rowhouses, but he also mentions how urban neighborhoods had a surprising amount of racial and class diversity before public transit and automobiles: "It made sense that both boss and employee should live near their work, and therefore live near one another... This pattern of urban living changed only with the advent of trolleys, when the wealthy could afford to commute and consequently removed themselves from older neighborhoods and the working class." He cites Mary Ellen Hayward's book (which I have not read) "Baltimore’s Alley Houses: Homes for Working People Since the 1780s"

I currently believe that this pattern will repeat itself should space travel become affordable for the wealthy. I imagine suburbs on the moon and my neighborhood being demolished to make way for a big-dumb ugly space highway so the city planners who don't actually live here can get in and out of my town as fast as possible.

[0] http://mcmansionhell.com/post/163793178726/guest-article-row...

The argument made here has strong parallels to the initial exploration of earth.

Why go and explore and discover the americas and australia when, due to communication and military force delays of several months, there is no way you could ensure peace? A war could break out between colonies and it would take months for the british imperial army to arrive!

History worked out those issues, with a few wars, rebellions, etc., but the final result is a world with more people living hopefully better lives in more places.

I appreciate what the article is saying, but regardless of how likely such an outcome is, “something bad might happen” is rarely a good reason to not do something new and unknown. A modicum of caution is important of course, but if said caution spirals out of control you end up with stagnation which with time is arguably as dangerous as the worst outcomes of attempted advancement.

The article puts forward the notion that "the universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion." However, conflict will most assuredly not be "extremely difficult to avoid" because space is large, and interstellar travel will always be extraordinarily difficult and slow. There will be no war between two groups when they have basically no interaction whatsoever.

This author seems to be really confused about how vast space really is. He keeps talking about "neighbors", but someone who lives light years away from you is in no way a neighbor.

This seems to be conflating dispersal to multiple star systems and trade/regular interaction with the newly colonized planets. Given that it would take 40 years to get a reply to a message, discussion wouldn't be the normal pattern - by the time you see an insult/aggressive message, there is a reasonable chance that whoever sent it is now either regretful about it, or dead, or, most likely of all, has completely forgotten about it.

Colonized planets in different star systems are effectively alone, able to receive old news, and potentially get deliveries of new colonists or technology every once in a while, should anyone on another planet send some. For anything urgent, it would need to be dealt with without calling back home - whether that is disease, local war (e.g. within the star system), or simply resource shortages - there just isn't a suitable way to top them up from elsewhere.

That same limitation means that taking war to another planet is unfeasible - even if you're just redirecting asteroids, the target planet would be able to see them coming, and, importantly, has had as long as you have had, plus the travel time of the rock, to master manipulating rocks in space. Similarly, while you could target computer systems (interstellar cyber warfare), the most recent details about their computers you have is dependent on the last message you received - computer viruses from 20 years ago don't work on modern computers without quite a bit of effort to make them run, and even if you get them to run, the effects are limited.

How are these arguments even valid. If we stay on earth we could just as well kill each other. Nothing changes with going to outer space.

I don't think anyone is going to stop us if we can do it. Our ability to actually do it remains to be written, but it looks like that's coming due soon. Like most things that we do as a species, it's probably going to be messy and nothing like what we expect.

Despite my misgivings - we should probably attempt to colonize Antarctica and the continental shelves before other planets - I think it's a good idea to colonize at least one other planet before a truly global government bans space travel.

Why? Because one thing governments hate is competition.

Think of the European colonial powers - they lost all of their colonies eventually, some quite violently (e.g. USA, South America, Indochina, some Africa), and others out of political / economic necessity (most of Africa.)

And sometimes the colonies are more powerful - USA v UK, Brazil v Portugal, Mexico v Spain (maybe) - which makes them threats, especially in the near term after a secession.

I think some of the notions regarding space colony threats is overblown - after all, space is huge, huge enough to spread political or economic competition pretty thin.

Ok, I was ready to entertain the author of article until I got to this line: >"My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall."

If you have the hubris to state you can accurately calculate such a probability I really have no interest in reading the rest of the article.

If we've been left with the impression that no one else is doing it, then for sure, we should move quickly to try and do it without letting anyone else (who may or may not be) out there know what we're up to.

Beacuse we will be misserable in more planets?