Dark Skies Book Review

Book review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney.

Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book.

Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are careful to distinguish between value differences and claims about objective facts.

Bad in the senses that the good parts make the occasional unfair insult more gratuitous, and that Deudney provides little support for his predictions that his policies will produce better results than those of his adversaries. I count myself as one of his adversaries.

Dark Skies is an opposite of Where Is My Flying Car? in both style and substance.

I read the 609 pages of Where Is My Flying Car? fast enough that the book seemed short. The 381 pages of Dark Skies felt much longer. It’s close to the most dry, plodding style that I’m willing to tolerate. Deudney is somewhat less eloquent than a stereotypical accountant.

The book is nominally focused on space colonization and space militarization. But a good deal of what Deudney objects to is technologies that are loosely associated with space expansion, such as nanotech, AI, and genetic modifications. He aptly labels this broader set of adversaries as Promethean.

It seems primarily written for an audience who consider it obvious that technological progress should be drastically slowed down or reversed. I.e. roughly what Where Is My Flying Car describes as Green fundamentalists.

War

One of Deudney’s more important concerns is about how space expansion will affect war.

Because the same powerful technologies enabling space expansion also pose so many existential threats, whether and how humans expand into space assumes a central role in any consideration of humanity’s survival prospects.

Deudney imagines that the primary way in which war will be minimized is via arms control and increased political unity (although he doesn’t want world government, at least not in the stereotypical form).

Large-scale space colonization would make such political unity less likely.

It seems likely that large-scale space colonization will make it harder to achieve that sort of unity. In fact, some of the ideas behind space colonization actively resist political unity, since they’re directed toward increased experimentation with new types of political systems.

Deudney focuses on obstacles to political unity that include large distances between space colonies (less communication, less intermingling), culture drift, and genetic changes.

Deudney’s analysis seems fairly weak when focusing on those specific mechanisms. His position seems a bit stronger when looking at an historical analogy.

Imagine back when humans lived only in Africa. How should they analyze a choice between everyone staying in Africa, versus allowing humans to colonize Eurasia? Hindsight tells us that the people who expanded into distant regions diverged culturally and genetically. They became powerful enough to push central Africa around. It’s not obvious how that affected political unity and incidence of war. I understand why Deudney finds it a worrying analogy.

Another analogy that I consider worth looking at is Britain circa 1600. Was it good for Britain to expand to North America, Australia, etc? It wasn’t good for many non-British people, but that doesn’t appear to have any analogue in space colonization. It did mean that North America became more militarily powerful than Britain. It seemed to cause some increase in British war between 1776 and 1815. It looks like there were about 11 years of war out of four centuries in which Britain had mostly cooperative relations with the colonies. That seems fairly peaceful compared to typical countries that have relationships with each other. This ought to reassure Deudney.

Deudney says lots about avoiding war, but says surprisingly little about the literature on the causes of war.

There’s been a decline in war deaths that seems loosely correlated with advancing technology:

war deaths since 1400

From my review of War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat, some leading theories of what caused this decline are:

increased wealth makes people more risk averse
war has become less profitable
young males are a smaller fraction of the population
increased availability of sex made men less desperate to get sex by raping the enemy (“Make love, not war” wasn’t just a slogan)

Space colonization won’t directly have much affect on these factors, but the technologies related to it that Deudney opposes will likely increase wealth and life expectancy, thereby making war less likely.

I’m less optimistic than is Deudney about arms control being stable and effective, and more optimistic that some of these other factors will make war less likely.

War is the kind of problem where we don’t have strategies that come close to guaranteeing good results. So it’s hard to resolve the disagreement I have with Deudney here.

The preponderance of the evidence says that Deudney is wrong about the effects of space colonization on war. I’m uneasy that I can’t make stronger claims than that. I hope that this is studied more carefully by someone with more expertise on war that Deudney or myself.

Inhuman Descendants?

Where Bostrom sees a future with 10^32 people, Deudney sees 10^32 aliens.

The default outcome of massive population growth into new environments is that humans will adapt to those environments. Humanity will fragment into different species.

Deudney’s hostility to such adaptation is partly due to concerns about it contributing to war. But he also strongly implies that he attaches little moral value to most beings who have adapted to new environments.

I’m tempted to dismiss Deudney as a xenophobe. But that’s mostly a reflection of my cultural values, not an objectively more moral position. I’m vulnerable to similar criticisms from people with broader notions of what constitutes a person. Let’s just say that Deudney’s culture is alien enough to mine that we’ll have extreme difficulty finding policies on which we can agree.

Species radiation may open new possibilities for biological warfare. As long as all the adversaries in a conflict are human, the employment of comprehensively lethal bioweapons inevitably risks suicidal blowback, but this limiting factor disappears if adversaries have biologically diverged.

I don’t see how that possibility is new. See how smallpox affected the new world.

This risk only weakly depends on the degree of divergence. It depends more on the rate at which defenses against such attacks are developed. A Promethean future will likely create defenses. I’m unclear whether Deudney’s preferred future would.

Freedom and Democracy

Deudney predicts that space colonization won’t produce the freedom that its advocates are seeking. Instead, it will produce colonies that are more despotic than what he expects from his preferred sustainably stagnant Earth.

He only devotes a couple of pages to this topic, leaving me with less understanding of his reasoning than with other predictions. His main evidence seems to be historical patterns of ship governance.

Ships are never governed as democracies, and the rights of all are massively circumscribed by the operational needs of the machine.

I have a clear counter-example: 18th century pirate ships were democratic. Possibly even pioneers in Western civilization’s struggle to adopt democracy.

Those who fear world government as a threat to freedom on Earth and look to space expansion as a freedom frontier fail to consider the effects of a Solar Archipelago on the trajectory of Terran political development. … a sure path to the political unification of the Earth would be the emergence of a threat from beyond

It’s not so much that we fail to consider it. It’s due to a combination of (1) differing predictions about how likely space expansion is to influence such unification, and (2) we consider Earth to be a much smaller fraction of what we care about than does Deudney.

Hype

Deudney complains that advocates of space colonization overstate the advantages and overlook the risks and difficulties.

Those are mostly valid complaints against those who treat space colonization as urgent. It is not yet time for a massive push toward large-scale space colonization. That means that people who currently lead space advocacy have been selected for overconfidence.

I used to share that overconfidence back during the Cold War. In hindsight, I was implicitly assuming that land and natural resources were the primary determinants of a society’s wealth. I’ve changed my mind due to sources such as Julian Simon, and this kind of analysis:

In 2014, natural capital (including both exhaustible and non-exhaustible resources) accounted for about 50 percent of the total wealth of low-income countries. In the same year, it accounted for 3 percent of the total wealth of high-income OECD countries … natural capital only contributed to 10 percent of growth in low-income countries. In advanced economies, it contributed to 3 percent of growth during that period.

I now consider space colonization to be a low priority, most likely something to be started a few decades from now.

Minor Points

In his attempt to warn us of the anarchy that will prevail among space colonies, he writes:

A better analogy for the prospects for a solar federation is to be found in the abortive efforts in the late nineteenth century to establish a British imperial federation.

I gather that he wants us to be scared of the extent to which relations between the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been anarchic. I’m sure his allies are scared of such anarchy. But I think he could have found a better example if he’d focused more on persuading people who didn’t already agree with him.

Deudney has a favorable opinion of Environmental Impact Statements. He cites them as being responsible for the discovery that CFCs were damaging the ozone layer. The short histories that I’ve found on the web do not confirm any role for those statements. I don’t have time to read the books that Deudney cites, e.g. this one. I suspect Deudney exaggerates.

Examples of his insults:

Libertarianism, the political philosophy of the politically naive (or the cynical rich), is adept at privatizing the benefits of public expenditures but is unlikely to propel significant human expansion into space.

Unlimited extensive growth, the goal of Promethean modernity, is the ideology of a cancer cell and a planetary menace.

Conclusion

Deudney is a mostly respectable adversary. Dark Skies helped me understand opposition to technological change.

He overstates the risk that allowing humanity to fragment into diverse populations will cause destructive conflicts. I see plenty of cooperation between humans and cats, and plenty of conflict between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.

There’s a bit of truth behind Deudney’s concerns. I think those concerns are heavily outweighed by the potential benefits of Promethean technologies. Deudney seems mostly blind or indifferent to those benefits.