Are we ethically ready to establish ourselves in space?

Enlarge / Orbiting space station from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Off-Earth will amaze you: on almost every page, it will leave you speechless in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden acknowledgment of certain your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you're thinking about things like settling into space). It will also make you tremble sadly with resignation at the many immense challenges that author Erika Nesvold describes.

But astonishment will prevail. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good.

The shortcomings of a STEM education

Nesvold is an astrophysicist. She worked at NASA; she can easily run the equations to calculate how much fuel we need to transport people, survival gear, and mining equipment to Mars.

But at some point, she realized that was the easy part. Her extensive upbringing hadn't trained her to do what she was truly interested in: building a just, equitable, sustainable, and sustainable human society in space. So she started interviewing ethicists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, lawyers, economists, and policy experts and collated their insights into the Making New Worlds podcast. This book is an extension of many of the ideas originally explored here.

The chapter titles, all questions, give a good indication of the issues she highlights in the book. Should we even settle the space? For what? Who can go? How will property rights be distributed and limited resources allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? How are we going to do this? What happens when someone breaks the rules or needs medical attention? What if that person is the only one who can fix the water purifier? Underlying all these questions, as yet unresolved by any public or private institution currently firing rockets into the air: Who decides?

Many of these issues have been covered extensively in fiction. But Nesvolt does not really mention these works except to warn against the risk of taking them for prophetic.

The lessons of history don't bode well

Each chapter begins with three fictional vignettes, set in the past, the relative present and the future - in the year 2100, in a space colony that was only recently established but already operational. All three are about different people leaving their homes; what types of people leave, their motivations and the circumstances surrounding their decisions. Its aim is to remind us that settling in space is not just a business that concerns the human species as a whole. On the contrary, it will involve and have an impact on many individuals composing this whole. It's a more effective conceit than meets the eye, and her narrative skill in telling them belies her lack of humanities education, which she laments.

The most commonly used metaphors for thinking and talking about settling in space have revolved around the Europeans colonizing the New World and the expansion of those colonists, driven by Manifest Destiny, to the Far Frontier West. This vision depicts space as a blank, empty canvas just waiting for civilized people to build a utopia within it. One problem with this framing is that the analogy may be more compelling to Americans currently advocating moving into space. For those who weren't brought up in this mythology, that's probably much less the case. Another problem is that the result of these precedents is not very encouraging.

Nesvold elucidates many ways in which space colonization can repeat the mistakes of colonialism, labor exploitation being chief among them. The financiers who financed and often profited from colonial enterprises were not usually the workers who traveled to the new territories to build the colony and its infrastructure (unless they were; this is what happened at Jamestown ). By the 18th and early 19th centuries, indentured servants landing on American shores had already traded their unpaid labor upon arrival for the cost of their passage. These vulnerable workers, far from home in a challenging new environment, were at the mercy of their employers.