Why there aren’t any serious proposals to ban space colonization?
That is, successful attempt to establish a colony will most likely create society that blames Earth for their misery, and “self-sufficient” colony probably requires nuclear technology (Zubrin’s plan states this explicitly). They will have both motive and means to nuke Earth for good. Colonization greatly increases extinction risk, contrary to what space advocates say.
If the reason is like “that is far-future problem”, why it does not work for things like nanotechnology (there are organizations that want ban it right now)?
successful attempt to establish a colony will most likely create society that blames Earth for their misery
That reveals a lot about where you stand on politics.
Sometimes, people mature and stop blaming others for their own shortsightedness. I don’t recall the US ever blaming the UK for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or Jersey Shore.
On a more serious note, the Spanish colonies did fight a war against the Spanish Empire, but it was fought this side of the Atlantic, and it ended when the Spanish left. No Mexican warship has ever bombed the Iberian coastline, nor do they have a reason to do it.
Besides, there is more than one way to settle and run a colony. You can become a neglected corner of the Third World, like Spanish America, or a world superpower able to threaten and bully the rest of the world combined, like English America, or an ascending exemplar of soft power, like Portuguese America, or more or less good friends with the mother country, like French America, or never even become independent, like Dutch America. So motives for resentment are not easily predictable.
They will have both motive and means to nuke Earth for good
Having nuclear capability for self-sustenance does not equal having capability to build nuclear bombs. Also, you don’t know whether the conditions on the planet will be favorable to a nuclear infrastructure: it’s very different to settle a territory abundant in hydrothermal energy that doesn’t even need nuclear plants (like Iceland), a territory prone to earthquakes where it should be obvious it’s stupid to build a nuclear plant (like Japan), or a stable territory where nothing geologically notable ever happens (like Dubai).
The risk of pushing our colonies to nuke us out of spite vs. the risk of destroying ourselves at home before we’ve even reached the stars weighs strongly in favor of launching as many rockets as we physically can.
That reveals a lot about where you stand on politics.
I’m curious. What does it reveal about Lalartu’s politics, and what (if anything) is revealed about my politics by the fact that I don’t share Lalartu’s expectations and also don’t think it’s immediately obvious what Lalartu’s political position is?
It reveals a distinctly right-wing refusal to assign any responsibility to the colonizer for the plight of the colonized (aka victim blaming), which can often be extrapolated to ascertain the subject’s stance on other inequality issues.
You’d be amazed at how fast a colonizing country can dehumanize its own descendants as soon as they breed families offshore. It was white men who sank Britain’s tea.
You’d be amazed at how fast a colonizing country can dehumanize its own descendants as soon as they breed families offshore.
I have strong doubts about that. Can you provide specific examples and expand your argument a bit? Other than the British Empire’s disdain for “going native” not much comes to mind.
I also fail to see the relevance of the Boston Tea Party. Exerting military and political power over a colony does not mean dehumanizing the colonists.
Can you elaborate? I am unaware of the British Empire dehumanizing British settlers in Rhodesia. You don’t have in mind the Boer wars, by any chance? That’s a different country (and the Boers were not descendants of Brits, too, speaking a different language, for example).
I notice that I got the examples mixed in my head. First I had thought of citing the Spanish colonies, but I assumed the examples would not be too familiar to non-Hispanic readers, so I chose to speak of the English colonies instead.
The complication with the Spanish colonies is that the first colonizers didn’t usually bring their wives with them, but instead married the Natives, so there was much more miscegenation here than in English America. The colonial government established a complex ruleset of political rights according to how much Spanish blood and Native blood was present in each individual. Even racially pure Europeans born on American soil had fewer rights than those born in Spain, and at least in the case of Colombia, that was one of the main triggers for independence.
I still don’t see much of dehumanizing. What you have is a fight over political power in the age where the idea that “All men are created equal” wasn’t either widespread or popular (outside of the religious context).
Basically, you need to show that the metropoles treat the colonists much worse than comparable groups in the metropolis itself. For example, if you have an uprising in the colony, it was suppressed much more harshly than, say, a similar uprising in the metropolis.
Your example of Spanish colonies seems to speak to racism much more than to the metropolis dehumanizing its own colonists.
Interesting. I’m definitely on the left rather than on the right, which is consistent with what you say; but I have to admit that I don’t see where Lalartu says or implies anything about whether Earth will actually deserve any blame for the colonists’ misery. (And, not so consistently with what you say, my own opinion is that if the colonists freely chose to be colonists and the home civilization on Earth didn’t do anything terribly awful to them, then if they’re miserable they shouldn’t blame Earth.)
I’m mystified by some other features of Lalartu’s speculation, though. I don’t see why we should expect any colony’s existence to be miserable, at least once it’s past the earliest struggling-to-survive stages that it might well face; I don’t see any good reason to expect that the colony—especially if it’s struggling to survive—would want to nuke Earth; I see still less reason to think they could nuke Earth hard enough to cause anything like extinction.
Lalartu simply says that the colonies will resent Earth, which rests on the unquestioned presupposition that the colonies will live in misery.
I agree that the colonies should not blame Earth for any harm they do to themselves, but, from reading Lalartu’s tone, it seems to assume that Earthers can do no wrong.
the unquestioned presupposition that the colonies will live in misery
I agree that that’s weird and probably wrong, but it’s not clear to me what it tells us about Lalartu’s politics.
it seems to assume that Earthers can do no wrong.
I don’t see that it even assumes that Earthers won’t be responsible for the (alleged) misery of the (hypothetical) colonies. You may well be right about where Lalartu’s coming from, and that may well be because you’ve picked up reliable signals of right-wing-ness in what he wrote, but if so I think they are subtler signals than you are describing.
Having nuclear capability for self-sustenance does not equal having capability to build nuclear bombs.
That is wrong. Society able to build a reactor can build bombs, political limitations aside.
I see still less reason to think they could nuke Earth hard enough to cause anything like extinction.
How many nukes do you think is enough? Will 1 million be? Modern USA can build that in few years if they want so. Do you think colony (with some future technology) will definitely be unable?
distinctly right-wing
That is true, but I don’t see why it is relevant.
I don’t see why we should expect any colony’s existence to be miserable
Because Mars, Moon, rotating space habitats and so on are just terrible places to live.
Spanish colonies did fight a war against the Spanish Empire
I don’t think it is a meaningful comparison. Inhabitants of Cayenna penal colony will go better.
I don’t see any good reason to expect that the colony—especially if it’s struggling to survive—would >want to nuke Earth
Because Earth is responsible for their miserable lives (assuming that primary offenders, first-generation colonists are mostly (or completely) dead at that point).
The risk of pushing our colonies to nuke us out of spite vs. the risk of destroying ourselves at home >before we’ve even reached the stars weighs strongly in favor of launching as many rockets as we >physically can.
How many nukes do you think is enough? Will 1 million be? Modern USA can build that in few years if they want so. Do you think colony (with some future technology) will definitely be unable?
How did you get that idea? Quick search for the cost of a single bomb is $20 million. That means you are looking at a cost of 20 trillion$. Given that the amount of cheaply minable uranium isn’t infinitive the cost is likely more.
That means you are looking at a cost of 20 trillion$.
So? Obviously this means war-time economy and devoting industry to making nukes. Point is that it can be done in principle. Also, major part of nuke’s cost is plutonium, and it’s production is strongly affected by economies of scale. 5 trillion$ would be more reasonable estimate.
Given that the amount of cheaply minable uranium isn’t infinitive the cost is likely more.
Cost of mining uranium is really small compared to cost of building and maintaining reactors.
I’m not even sure they need to. There is an enormous assumption of “There will be a war of independence” built into a heck of a lot of Science fiction, because a lot of it was written by americans wanting to do analogies with the american independence war in space, no matter if that makes sense or not.
This has fed back into the thinking of a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the political settlements of earth, and has made “Space; Where you go to be free of political control” a reasonably common idea. So the terminal goal of a certain faction of those arguing for space colonization is to break with earth. No matter how painfully illsuited for the kind of society they want space actually is.
I don’t think banning space colonization is a very sensible “solution” to this problem however as there are much simpler ways to ensure any colonies don’t get any stupid ideas. Like: “Don’t hire any libertarians”.
How one treats the workers in the space industry doesn’t even really come into the worry I’m entertaining. The most plausible way to get an Earth-space war isn’t the staff of a space telescope suddenly discovering a yen for nation-founding—That’s just so unlikely I can’t be bothered to work out how unlikely it actually is.
The only semi-plausible way to get there is for a couple of very specific groups to go into space colonization specifically because they have mythologized both the american independence war, and space as a conveniently natives-free analogy of the american west—IE, radicals with a hardon for revolution, and the impression a height advantage will make it more feasible. I’m not worried about people getting radicalized in space, but about existing radicals concentrating there. Which is still pretty bloody unlikely, but tbh, if I was hiring miners for the belt, I’d be .. rather reluctant to hire people with radical political views. It only takes one person who has read too much Heinlein to deliberately set off a collision cascade in LEO*, and there comes bankruptcy. Also the inevitable death of everyone on the high side of the shit-storm when it turns out self-sufficiency is much harder than it looks, but that doesn’t clean up the mess.
*I have no idea why the “American Revolution 2.0” books never use this as a weapon, but instead insist on killing massive numbers of people on earth. Blocking access between space and earth for a couple of decades is bloody well trivial if that is really what you want to do—Grind an asteroid into sand, put the sand into the right orbits, and now going up and down is suddenly very, very unsafe until it deorbits. Very hard to undo, but.. if you are dropping rocks on earth, that comes with even /less/ options for changing your mind later.
If history is any indication, separate cultures tend to end up fighting each other if they want the same resource. Whether space colonies end up in such a situation is unclear, but seems unlikely. There are also religious reasons one culture would try to convert or remove another, and that’s a bigger worry. Hopefully establishing hundreds or thousands of colonies would mitigate this risk, since diversity tends to help to stave off extinction.
Why there aren’t any serious proposals to ban space colonization?
That is, successful attempt to establish a colony will most likely create society that blames Earth for their misery, and “self-sufficient” colony probably requires nuclear technology (Zubrin’s plan states this explicitly). They will have both motive and means to nuke Earth for good. Colonization greatly increases extinction risk, contrary to what space advocates say.
If the reason is like “that is far-future problem”, why it does not work for things like nanotechnology (there are organizations that want ban it right now)?
That reveals a lot about where you stand on politics.
Sometimes, people mature and stop blaming others for their own shortsightedness. I don’t recall the US ever blaming the UK for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or Jersey Shore.
On a more serious note, the Spanish colonies did fight a war against the Spanish Empire, but it was fought this side of the Atlantic, and it ended when the Spanish left. No Mexican warship has ever bombed the Iberian coastline, nor do they have a reason to do it.
Besides, there is more than one way to settle and run a colony. You can become a neglected corner of the Third World, like Spanish America, or a world superpower able to threaten and bully the rest of the world combined, like English America, or an ascending exemplar of soft power, like Portuguese America, or more or less good friends with the mother country, like French America, or never even become independent, like Dutch America. So motives for resentment are not easily predictable.
Having nuclear capability for self-sustenance does not equal having capability to build nuclear bombs. Also, you don’t know whether the conditions on the planet will be favorable to a nuclear infrastructure: it’s very different to settle a territory abundant in hydrothermal energy that doesn’t even need nuclear plants (like Iceland), a territory prone to earthquakes where it should be obvious it’s stupid to build a nuclear plant (like Japan), or a stable territory where nothing geologically notable ever happens (like Dubai).
The risk of pushing our colonies to nuke us out of spite vs. the risk of destroying ourselves at home before we’ve even reached the stars weighs strongly in favor of launching as many rockets as we physically can.
I’m curious. What does it reveal about Lalartu’s politics, and what (if anything) is revealed about my politics by the fact that I don’t share Lalartu’s expectations and also don’t think it’s immediately obvious what Lalartu’s political position is?
It reveals a distinctly right-wing refusal to assign any responsibility to the colonizer for the plight of the colonized (aka victim blaming), which can often be extrapolated to ascertain the subject’s stance on other inequality issues.
Heh. And in this context where we are talking about a moon base, who are the colonized? The Native Moonies?
You’d be amazed at how fast a colonizing country can dehumanize its own descendants as soon as they breed families offshore. It was white men who sank Britain’s tea.
I have strong doubts about that. Can you provide specific examples and expand your argument a bit? Other than the British Empire’s disdain for “going native” not much comes to mind.
I also fail to see the relevance of the Boston Tea Party. Exerting military and political power over a colony does not mean dehumanizing the colonists.
Rhodesia comes to mind.
Can you elaborate? I am unaware of the British Empire dehumanizing British settlers in Rhodesia. You don’t have in mind the Boer wars, by any chance? That’s a different country (and the Boers were not descendants of Brits, too, speaking a different language, for example).
Dehumanize is too strong a word I admit.
“Sold out” would be a better one.
Ah. Well, that happens quite frequently :-/ and is by no means limited to colonists...
I notice that I got the examples mixed in my head. First I had thought of citing the Spanish colonies, but I assumed the examples would not be too familiar to non-Hispanic readers, so I chose to speak of the English colonies instead.
The complication with the Spanish colonies is that the first colonizers didn’t usually bring their wives with them, but instead married the Natives, so there was much more miscegenation here than in English America. The colonial government established a complex ruleset of political rights according to how much Spanish blood and Native blood was present in each individual. Even racially pure Europeans born on American soil had fewer rights than those born in Spain, and at least in the case of Colombia, that was one of the main triggers for independence.
I still don’t see much of dehumanizing. What you have is a fight over political power in the age where the idea that “All men are created equal” wasn’t either widespread or popular (outside of the religious context).
Basically, you need to show that the metropoles treat the colonists much worse than comparable groups in the metropolis itself. For example, if you have an uprising in the colony, it was suppressed much more harshly than, say, a similar uprising in the metropolis.
Your example of Spanish colonies seems to speak to racism much more than to the metropolis dehumanizing its own colonists.
Interesting. I’m definitely on the left rather than on the right, which is consistent with what you say; but I have to admit that I don’t see where Lalartu says or implies anything about whether Earth will actually deserve any blame for the colonists’ misery. (And, not so consistently with what you say, my own opinion is that if the colonists freely chose to be colonists and the home civilization on Earth didn’t do anything terribly awful to them, then if they’re miserable they shouldn’t blame Earth.)
I’m mystified by some other features of Lalartu’s speculation, though. I don’t see why we should expect any colony’s existence to be miserable, at least once it’s past the earliest struggling-to-survive stages that it might well face; I don’t see any good reason to expect that the colony—especially if it’s struggling to survive—would want to nuke Earth; I see still less reason to think they could nuke Earth hard enough to cause anything like extinction.
Lalartu simply says that the colonies will resent Earth, which rests on the unquestioned presupposition that the colonies will live in misery.
I agree that the colonies should not blame Earth for any harm they do to themselves, but, from reading Lalartu’s tone, it seems to assume that Earthers can do no wrong.
I agree that that’s weird and probably wrong, but it’s not clear to me what it tells us about Lalartu’s politics.
I don’t see that it even assumes that Earthers won’t be responsible for the (alleged) misery of the (hypothetical) colonies. You may well be right about where Lalartu’s coming from, and that may well be because you’ve picked up reliable signals of right-wing-ness in what he wrote, but if so I think they are subtler signals than you are describing.
That is wrong. Society able to build a reactor can build bombs, political limitations aside.
How many nukes do you think is enough? Will 1 million be? Modern USA can build that in few years if they want so. Do you think colony (with some future technology) will definitely be unable?
That is true, but I don’t see why it is relevant.
Because Mars, Moon, rotating space habitats and so on are just terrible places to live.
I don’t think it is a meaningful comparison. Inhabitants of Cayenna penal colony will go better.
Because Earth is responsible for their miserable lives (assuming that primary offenders, first-generation colonists are mostly (or completely) dead at that point).
That is a sure way to extinction.
How did you get that idea? Quick search for the cost of a single bomb is $20 million. That means you are looking at a cost of 20 trillion$. Given that the amount of cheaply minable uranium isn’t infinitive the cost is likely more.
So? Obviously this means war-time economy and devoting industry to making nukes. Point is that it can be done in principle. Also, major part of nuke’s cost is plutonium, and it’s production is strongly affected by economies of scale. 5 trillion$ would be more reasonable estimate.
Cost of mining uranium is really small compared to cost of building and maintaining reactors.
I’m not even sure they need to. There is an enormous assumption of “There will be a war of independence” built into a heck of a lot of Science fiction, because a lot of it was written by americans wanting to do analogies with the american independence war in space, no matter if that makes sense or not.
This has fed back into the thinking of a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the political settlements of earth, and has made “Space; Where you go to be free of political control” a reasonably common idea. So the terminal goal of a certain faction of those arguing for space colonization is to break with earth. No matter how painfully illsuited for the kind of society they want space actually is.
I don’t think banning space colonization is a very sensible “solution” to this problem however as there are much simpler ways to ensure any colonies don’t get any stupid ideas. Like: “Don’t hire any libertarians”.
It’s unlikely that you could keep people from having the idea of revolution.
Another possibility is to not treat them so badly that they’re willing to take a serious risk of death remove your authority.
How one treats the workers in the space industry doesn’t even really come into the worry I’m entertaining. The most plausible way to get an Earth-space war isn’t the staff of a space telescope suddenly discovering a yen for nation-founding—That’s just so unlikely I can’t be bothered to work out how unlikely it actually is.
The only semi-plausible way to get there is for a couple of very specific groups to go into space colonization specifically because they have mythologized both the american independence war, and space as a conveniently natives-free analogy of the american west—IE, radicals with a hardon for revolution, and the impression a height advantage will make it more feasible. I’m not worried about people getting radicalized in space, but about existing radicals concentrating there. Which is still pretty bloody unlikely, but tbh, if I was hiring miners for the belt, I’d be .. rather reluctant to hire people with radical political views. It only takes one person who has read too much Heinlein to deliberately set off a collision cascade in LEO*, and there comes bankruptcy. Also the inevitable death of everyone on the high side of the shit-storm when it turns out self-sufficiency is much harder than it looks, but that doesn’t clean up the mess.
*I have no idea why the “American Revolution 2.0” books never use this as a weapon, but instead insist on killing massive numbers of people on earth. Blocking access between space and earth for a couple of decades is bloody well trivial if that is really what you want to do—Grind an asteroid into sand, put the sand into the right orbits, and now going up and down is suddenly very, very unsafe until it deorbits. Very hard to undo, but.. if you are dropping rocks on earth, that comes with even /less/ options for changing your mind later.
If history is any indication, separate cultures tend to end up fighting each other if they want the same resource. Whether space colonies end up in such a situation is unclear, but seems unlikely. There are also religious reasons one culture would try to convert or remove another, and that’s a bigger worry. Hopefully establishing hundreds or thousands of colonies would mitigate this risk, since diversity tends to help to stave off extinction.