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The immediate reaction by some was that we should regulate and close these loopholes. That is the traditional regulatory way of dealing with distortions.

Economists, however, tend to believe in the power of incentives and the invisible hand of markets: closing down existent tax havens and loopholes will only open new ones somewhere else in the system.

However, those frustrated with the world’s response to COVID-19 or climate change may find hope in the international legal tradition explored here. The times of Third World activism have long passed, but as we have seen, the international tradition that conceives of global problems as problems of inequality, and has amassed a set of legal and diplomatic tools to achieve interstate redistribution, persists. COVID-19 is a difficult case to test the tools. The job has been done at UNGA, calling for international solidarity in the fight against the pandemic. When viral sovereignty is not an option, as the pandemic has spread globally, what can be done to force equitable solutions?

We have seen developing countries linking their demands across regimes. Could they press for equitable solutions in global public health, demanding redistribution for their uncompensated contributions to global public goods in other areas? How could the humanitarian, environmental, cultural or security contributions of the global South be invoked across international regimes to demand equitable solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Although Biden’s democracy/authoritarianism framework may have served a good purpose in rallying Western allies and partners on Ukraine, on issues like trade or tech rules and standards, allies do not always agree, and, in cases like Ukraine, this framework has proved divisive with much of the non-Western world.

Clubbism: Not the Answer

Although studies have investigated the impact of IMF loans on poverty in borrower states, no works have attempted to unpack the multiple different conditions of Fund arrangements on poverty in debtor countries. In this paper, we have developed the first study to distinguish between the effects of structural and stabilisation conditionality on poverty and found that countries under IMF structural conditions tend to experience increases in poverty while countries under stabilisation conditions tend to see fairly minimal changes in poverty. Consistent with much of the literature (Easterly 2003; Garuda 2000; Oberdabernig 2013; Pastor 1987; Vreeland 2002), we also note that countries under IMF arrangements are more prone to observe an increase in poverty. However, this study moves beyond earlier research (e.g. Oberdabernig 2013) by showing the IMF conditions that are most likely to produce increased poverty.

All told, the findings presented here hold important policy implications and substantive meaning, given that 1.28 billion people (or 32.7% of the cases in our sample) live in poverty. First, most studies in the IMF literature have lumped together loans with all types of conditions, and treated them equally, as if fund programmes are all the same. By showing that variations exist among programmes in terms of the conditions imposed upon borrower countries, our study helps explain differences in poverty outcomes among borrower countries. Focusing on the specific IMF conditions and how they fit under structuralism or stabilisation also provides possible clues as to why scholars in the literature have reached disparate conclusions regarding the impact of the fund on economic development in the developing world.

To see what the problem looks like, consider a recent IMF loan. In March, Ecuador signed an agreement to borrow $4.2bn from the IMF over three years, provided that the government would adhere to a certain economic program spelled out in the arrangement. In the words of Christine Lagarde – then the IMF chief – this was “a comprehensive reform program aimed at modernizing the economy and paving the way for strong, sustained, and equitable growth”.

But is it? The program calls for an enormous tightening of the country’s national budget – about 6% of GDP over the next three years. (For comparison, imagine tightening the US federal budget by $1.4 trillion, through some combination of cutting spending and raising taxes). In Ecuador, this will include firing tens of thousands of public sector employees, raising taxes that fall disproportionately on poor people, and making cuts to public investment.

Following this, we re-run analyses on our original set of controls but using the same four variations of our selection equations described in robustness checks for inequality (Table A8). Results are substantively unchanged. Lastly, findings are robust to the inclusion of IMF fiscal adjustment outliers for all poverty headcount measures from GCIP, but not for headcount and gap measures from the World Bank (Table A9).

Discussion and Conclusions This article incorporated new data on the intensity of fiscal adjustment to examine the effects of IMF austerity on poverty and inequality. In so doing, we overcame limitations of earlier studies that treat the extent of fiscal consolidation required from programs as homogenous. We used a dataset of up to 79 countries observed in the period 2002 to 2018 and deployed an appropriate econometric strategy to find that greater austerity leads to greater income inequality and higher poverty. Probing this relationship further, we found that the effect on inequality is exerted for up to two years, and is driven by concentrating income into the top ten percent of earners. For poverty, the effect is apparent across multiple poverty headcount measures—on the World Bank’s $1.44 and GCIP’s $1.86, $1.90, and $2.50 measures—and one of our two poverty gap measures—at $3.20. Confidence in our findings was bolstered by the fact that our results were consistent across a range of different models estimated in robustness checks. These findings call into question the flattering results of the IMF’s own studies on the impact of its programs on vulnerable populations (Gupta et al., 2020).

The IMF fails to enforce the requirements it imposes. Even when the IMF is specific and actually manages to recommend economic policies that might encourage long-term growth, it is ineffective in holding countries accountable for violating these agreements. The IMF repeatedly has entered into agreements with countries that have a history of violating their contracts. Even when the Fund has established that a country violated reforms outlined in the loan agreement, it often will negotiate with that same country for a new or altered contract, and the loans continue.

For example, Peru entered into 17 different arrangements with the IMF between 1971 and 1977, and continues to receive money from the IMF today.21 During the same period, Peru failed to meet the conditions for most of these agreements. Instead, the government continued its self-destructive economic policies. For example, in 1971, Peru's external debt was $2.7 billion; by 1977, Peru had signed 17 agreements with the IMF, yet its external debt had soared to over $9 billion.22 Even though Peru failed to meet the conditions for these agreements, it continued to receive IMF funding.

The failure of the United Nations to act on the Russian invasion of Ukraine should not surprise anyone. This appears to be merely the latest demonstration of a two-decade-long trend of the growing ineffectiveness of global multilateral institutions in addressing the world's diplomatic, security, and socioeconomic challenges.

In its place, two competing forces seem to be at play. First, there has been a rise in the use of informal arrangements, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). Second, there has been a proliferation in the use of regional arrangements.

Some hope that multilateral institutions can subdue geopolitical rivalries. Le Drian and Maas hint at this potential in asserting that “some [international] players are increasingly engaging in power politics, thus undermining the idea of a rules-based order with a view to enforcing the law of the strong.”33 If the return of geopolitical competition is a choice made by states, then investing in multilateral systems could stymie power politics — it just requires rallying the determination to collectively will our way out of the adversarial mindset.34

Unfortunately, this is a misdiagnosis. Great-power politics, particularly their relative absence, always have been the foundation underlying the multilateral order. If great-power competition is returning, reshaping states’ baseline assumptions, then it is a driving, structural force in international politics to which nations must respond. Multilateral tools must adapt to function within those parameters, not try to master them. A danger, therefore, lurks for those advocates of multilateralism who try to preserve the post-Cold War multilateral order in amber. Relying on multilateralism defined by the hallmarks of the post-Cold War era — universal in membership, focused on existing institutions, and centered primarily on maintaining broad cooperation on shared challenges — falsely assumes the past quarter-century as the historical norm, rather than an aberration. 35

Ups and downs in the lives of individual international institutions are not new, but the malaise that now afflicts multilateralism is unprecedented in range and depth. It transcends issue-areas, and occurs at a time when the need for sensible rules of international cooperation has greater urgency than ever before. Even as trade wars rage outside, the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) finds itself paralysed due to the blocked appointments/re-appointments of judges in its Appellate Body. Public awareness of climate change as a global emergency may have increased, but the United States has at the same time delivered a serious blow to the mitigation regime by moving to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In his remarkable interview with The Economist in November this year, French President Macron declared the “brain-death” of the NATO and pointed to the fragility of Europe. Impending Brexit is one thorn in the side of the European project; the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany is another. Multilateralism, in both its universal and non-universal versions, and across economic and security issues, is under severe strain.

Explaining the malaise

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

What about freedom? There’s a strong strain of libertarianism among recent space expansionists (as well as among many Silicon Valley types, especially when it comes to the regulation of technology), but it is not obvious that the project will enhance human freedom overall, whether for remaining Terrans or in space. This is in large measure a product of the perpetual war footing on which such adventurism will place us all. Each world in the space archipelago can legitimize steep political hierarchies as a necessary means for dealing with perceived external threats. And such security-based political hierarchies inevitably bring more or less severe restrictions of individual liberties, at least for those on the bottom of the heap. Deudney concludes: The association of space expansion with the preservation and expansion of individual freedom is probably extremely dubious. Space expansion, far from being a form of freedom insurance, is more likely to produce the perfection of despotism and the complete subordination of the individual to the collective. Those who value individual liberty should be strong skeptics and opponents of space expansion, not enthusiastic supporters.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

That brings us, finally, to the other two attempted justifications for space expansion: that the program will safeguard the long-term future of our species and that it will enhance human freedom. The first idea arises from the observation that given the inevitable heat death of the sun a billion or so years from now, our career on this planet is ultimately doomed, so we’d better figure out a way of transporting ourselves out of the solar system as soon as possible. The idea seems to be that discovering the planet’s finitude has somehow massively accelerated the imperative to leave it. In a remark quoted by many space expansionists pushing this line of thought, Tsiolkovsky once said that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.” This is a stunningly silly argument. It’s a bit like learning you will have to leave the family nest several years down the road, then deciding you had better start packing right away. As Deudney notes, we have a few hundred million years to prepare for the Sun’s death, making that event completely irrelevant to our policy choices in the coming decades and centuries. Perhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two. Just a suggestion.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

We might shrug off this worry. After all, we are talking here about wars among humans and semi-humans unfolding at the farthest reaches of traversable space. But the risks to Earth security posed by even minimal expansion—say, establishing a fully independent Martian colony—is just as dire. Earth will be extremely difficult to defend from hostile galactic groups since we Terrans are stuck at the bottom of a relatively deep gravity well. Rockets must achieve an escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull, which is why almost all the rocket’s fuel is burned in this stage of the flight; getting back is comparatively easy. So, unfortunately, is lobbing weapons down at us from the elevated height of the Moon, a nearby asteroid, a space platform or Mars itself (whose gravity well is shallower than ours). We might suddenly find ourselves occupying catastrophically low strategic ground vis-à-vis our Martian (or other interstellar) enemies. The failure to grapple with this kind of scenario underlines what Deudney takes to be an entirely unexamined assumption of space expansionists: that “humanity will be succeeded by creatures who are significantly better than humans.” He calls this the ascensionist assumption, the notion that by going up we will inevitably become morally and politically better. So of course space colonists and their descendants pose no threat to us. Again, the point is not limited to space cowboys. Most techno-utopians—the giddier boosters of geoengineering, Artificial Superintelligence, nanotech, de-extinction, genetic enhancement, you name it—operate with some version of this background assumption. And that is putting the case charitably, because the other alternative is that they simply don’t care about the potentially catastrophic consequences of their dreams and schemes. But evolutionary theory gives us no reason to endorse any version of the ascensionist assumption. It is obviously not the case that over 3.5 billion years of development, species—including Homo sapiens—have become appreciably more tolerant of each other. Life has always been, and remains, red in tooth and claw. In fact, while appealing to evolutionary arguments, space expansionists are covertly counting on the magical disappearance of this aspect of the evolutionary process. It appears that even as we bring life generously to space, we run the very significant risk of erasing our own future: Habitat space expansionists are in effect saying that humanity will—and should—pursue a series of steps that will lead inevitably to its own demise. Space expansion may be an agenda of survival for life, but for humanity it is an expensive suicide cult.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

Deudney arrives at this insight by placing the drive to colonize the heavens in the larger context of the twentieth-century development of weapons of mass destruction as well as the efforts we have made—via bilateral and multilateral treaties and other legal regimes—to contain the threat they pose. The book’s thesis is that unfettered space expansion is likely to increase the threat of large-scale violence and generally exacerbate human insecurity. If we adopt this approach, Mars colonization should be shelved, for now at least, while we expand and enhance the terms of the Outer Space Treaty, an international agreement crafted in 1966 that places limits on various forms of space adventurism and militarization (for starters, nobody can own the moon). Because it is unapologetically boring, hard-core expansionists will loathe the CSP. With its focus on rules and restraints, it can sound like the over-anxious parent wagging a scolding finger at the impetuous teenager who just wants to have some harmless fun. The problem is that there’s nothing harmless about space expansion. Deudney’s book exposes the persistent refusal of its advocates to think meaningfully about the consequences of their proposals. So just as we parents seek various ways of restraining the teenager who sees no problem with doing hard drugs, binge drinking, or driving at breakneck speed, we should find ways of curbing the urge to “leave the Earth.” Dull advice if your dream was to, say, terraform Mars. But perhaps boring is not so bad in this area. “Space choices,” Deudney remarks drily, “are too important to be left to space cadets.” The same has been said about several other meeting places of science and society in the twentieth century—the development of nuclear weapons, above all. For Deudney, it is crucial to emphasize that the intercontinental ballistic missiles we already have are in fact “the quintessential space weapon.” They mark a major weapons innovation because they arc through space on their way across the globe. The frictionless medium allows them to travel at roughly 10,000 miles per hour and thus reach their intercontinental targets in under half an hour. (For a sense of scale, recall the Earth’s equator is just shy of 25,000 miles long.) In the beginning we went to space with the express mission of winning the Cold War and becoming more efficient at killing each other, a historical reality that tugs against the breathless visions of the technologists. In fact, this past looms over the whole subsequent project of space expansion. The quest to inhabit other worlds, Deudney suggests, has piggybacked on this darker purpose without ever fully coming to terms with it. If this is right, we must look beyond the breezy pleadings of space expansion’s most ardent advocates and examine the actual arguments for this grand vision. There have been three broad patterns of attempted justification. The first appeals to evolution, the second to long-term human security, and the last to the expansion of human freedom.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

To get a sense of the first attempted justification, by far the most ubiquitous of the three, return to that SpaceX promo-video. Narrated by Musk himself, the “case” for Mars it lays out has been invoked by space expansionists since humans began fantasizing about occupying other celestial bodies—asteroids, moons, and planets—and building rockets powerful enough to take us to them. The simple idea is that expansion is the next step in evolution and that we ought to push it forward. Life has evolved from single-celled organisms, has migrated from the oceans onto land, has exploded into myriad forms of multi-celled organisms, and has somehow produced consciousness. The next step, Musk says, is surely to make life “multiplanetary.” With characteristic inarticulacy he summarizes the argument this way: “if something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it’s important.” It’s not obvious whether that’s a tautology or a non sequitur, but in either case it is breathtakingly facile. You get the impression that the appeal to evolution is semi-intellectual cover for Musk’s sense of wonder at his own chutzpah. This feeling that they are doing something so big that it defies all attempts at rational comprehension shows up frequently among technology’s high priests. To take just one example, neurosurgeon and entrepreneur Eric Leuthard launched a neuroprosthetic startup some years ago, with the aim of connecting the brain in various ways to a digitized environment. Why? “Maybe for no other reason than I think it’s amazingly cool.” Musk’s comment is no deeper than this, but there is something uniquely problematic about all the talk of evolution. For Deudney it represents the typical space expansionist “fusion of technological Prometheanism with large-scope narratives of the tendencies and trajectories of life,” and is thus “fundamentally troubled.” On Earth, speciation can occur when spatially expanding populations become geographically isolated from one another (the unique diversity of species on the Galapagos Islands is the paradigm example of this phenomenon). Because of the vast distances between planets it is likely that similar fragmentation would eventually occur in outer space. Along with the interplanetary spread of cyborgs and artificial intelligences, the result, centuries after a viable Mars colony is established, will probably be a plethora of intelligent species, all of which will have evolved to fit their distinctive ecological constraints—an archipelago of politically distinct worlds. The idea is common in sci-fi, from Verner Vinge’s 1993 A Fire Upon the Deep to Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby’s The Expanse, both Hugo Award winners. Multi-world pluralism can look attractive if we assume that everyone will get along, regardless of the profound morphological, technological, and ideological differences that are bound to grow up around and between these groups. Here, however, the space expansionist invocation of natural selection bites back. Radiating and diversifying species notoriously compete with one another for available space and its resources or, in the case of intelligent species, just for glory and prestige. This is all familiar enough from the history of life on Earth, as is the mostly sorry result of the human interaction with other species as well as earlier human groups. We exterminated the Neanderthals (after breeding with them for a while) and are, according to the United Nations, currently in the process of eviscerating the non-human biosphere. Doesn’t it seem likely that our deep-space descendants will inherit these destructive tendencies and turn them on each other? A space archipelago will be composed of mutually suspicious and competitive groups, millions of them eventually. But the bonds of sameness that can foster respectful recognition or mutual forbearance will surely diminish with increased interplanetary spatial dispersion and the ordinary workings of evolution. Not that we should expect a space-based Hobbesian war of all against all. There will doubtless be a good deal of room for interspecies and interworld diplomacy in this scenario. However, in the absence of a pacific trans-planetary government—and given our inability to create a single world government here, the chances of that seem slim—opportunities for plunder and general mayhem will likely abound. The temptation to cast the interplanetary Other as subhuman will be pronounced. Remember that the intelligent aliens in Starship Troopers are “bugs,” and in Battlestar Galactica they are “toasters.” Even in our fiction, it seems, we have a difficult time imagining what peaceful co-existence among wildly disparate beings might look like. Because of this, all minimally viable colonies will have compelling reasons of state to stockpile awesome weapons of mass destruction: not only hydrogen bombs, but more importantly the ability to convert asteroids into planetoid bombs. Somehow this possibility—potentially genocidal or xenocidal wars of worlds—seems not to matter much to space expansionists, even though it’s standard fare in the well of sci-fi from which many of them have drunk so deeply.

(Bruce, , 5-25)

So Far Away The Apollo astronauts could fly to the moon in just a few days, but a trip to Mars would take anywhere between six to nine months. With the distance between Mars and Earth varying between 35 million miles and 249 million miles due to their elliptical orbits, there’s only a small window available when the two are ideally aligned for space travel. That makes logistics much trickier. With lunar exploration, “there’s always the prospect of rescue or provisioning or supply from Earth or from a midway space station,” said Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide and a member of the advisory council of the Space Industry Association of Australia. “That’s not going to be the case for Mars.” Solar Killers A long flight would expose humans to one of space travel’s biggest terrors: solar flares. The most powerful type of explosion in the solar system, a flare is the equivalent of 100 million hydrogen bombs. The Earth’s magnetic field can shield astronauts in orbit, but a deep-space traveler hit by such radiation would not be able to survive more than a few days. “It’s a very gruesome way to die,” said Lewis Dartnell, a professor and specialist in astrobiology in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Westminster in London. He does research linked to life on Mars. The Apollo program didn’t address this issue, choosing instead to take the chance that the few days of a lunar mission wouldn’t coincide with a solar event. It would be a different story for multi-month trips to Mars. Water tanks onboard the spacecraft could act as shields if positioned properly, said Dartnell, so in the event of a flare, travelers could retreat to the spacecraft’s version of a panic room surrounded by water tanks. The problem is detecting activity on the Sun, especially on the side not facing the Earth. “How can we make our space weather prediction good enough that we can give the crew notice?” he said. “We don’t have established capacity to observe the Sun from different angles for tracking solar storms.” Radiation isn’t just a problem en route. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth and doesn’t have a global magnetic shield, so humans on the planet’s surface would be at risk of exposure to solar and cosmic radiation. Moreover, the surface itself is largely dust, and massive storms can create dust clouds that block out the Sun, said Nilton Renno, a professor at the University of Michigan whose research interests include astrobiology. During such a storm, “it’s almost like midnight on the surface of Mars for two months,” Renno said. “If you are there with solar panels for power, you very likely don’t survive. You don’t have enough energy to keep things warm enough.” One solution would be for humans to use that dust to protect themselves, lining shelters with sandbags filled with Martian soil that could block out radiation, said Joseph Michalski, an associate professor who explores the habitability of Mars at the University of Hong Kong. Humans could also return to their cave-dwelling roots by finding temporary shelter in some of the planet’s many lava tubes, large caverns from ancient times when Mars had volcanic activity. Food, Water and Oxygen In “The Martian” -- the 2015 Hollywood blockbuster -- Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut grew potatoes by fertilizing the planet’s soil with his own feces. Elisabeth Hausrath, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has more modest farming ambitions. For the past year and a half, NASA has been supporting her research into growing snow algae, a type that’s common in the Nevada desert and other high-altitude, low-nutrient environments on Earth, in conditions mimicking those of Mars. “They’ve been growing great,” she said. The idea is that the algae could grow in greenhouses made of flexible material similar to that of a space suit. Growing algae in such conditions could not only create a source of food but also produce oxygen. The research is still in its early stages. Scientists also still need to resolve how humans could get enough water to survive on Mars. The planet does have some sub-surface ice that could be water sources and a future Mars mission will need to use radar to map its distribution, said Victoria Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Once you know where the ice is, those are locations where you might send humans,” she said. Getting Back Home Unless everyone signs up for a one-way trip, humans traveling to Mars will need to take a rocket back to Earth. Figuring out how to get fuel to power that spacecraft back into space is the biggest technological hurdle would-be Mars explorers face, said Michalski. “It’s not the case that we would bring the rocket fuel with us,” he said. “It’s just too heavy.”

(James Prell is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He reads and writes about science, technology, and society. )

In an interview with the American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2010, Stephen Colbert called astronauts “the supermodels of science.” The bit was satirical, but Colbert had a point: for many, spaceflight is sexy. The serious question is: do we actually need to send people into space—supermodels or not? In recent years, buzz has surrounded the partnership between NASA and SpaceX, a company whose founder, Elon Musk, has famously stated that he will launch the first manned mission to Mars in 2024. On February 6, SpaceX ran its first test launch of the Falcon Heavy, a rocket system with three reusable boosters that Musk says is the precursor to the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket, that he intends to build in order to carry the first colonists to Mars. For Musk, an independent colony on Mars would function as a way to "back up the biosphere." If anything were to happen on Earth that could cause an extinction event, such as nuclear war or a meteor strike, Musk sees Mars as a way to ensure that humanity survives. This existential reasoning for traveling to the red planet does come with a problem. We have barely developed the technology to consistently launch these rockets. Musk is confident in the tech behind his reusable boosters, but experts like Dan Dumbacher—a former NASA employee—remain skeptical. “We tried to make [the space shuttle] reusable for 55 flights,” he told SpaceNews in 2014. “Look how long and how much money it took for us to do that, and we still weren’t completely successful for all the parts. I want to be realistic: We are not as smart as we think we are and we don’t understand the environment as well as we think we do.” The cost of each launch during the space shuttle program, with refurbishment costs taken into account, ran between $450 million and $1.5 billion. SpaceX’s account of their costs have been well below those figures, averaging between $61.2 million and $42.8 million per launch. However, the private company does not have 30 years’ worth of data on refurbishment costs at this point, so it is too early to celebrate its success. And that’s just getting off the ground. It would cost between $121 and $48 billion per person per year to sustain a Martian colony according to data from Popular Science Magazine in 2013, but the real cost is impossible to know without actually going. Why should we spend time and resources trying to survive on Mars when we could be working to understand how to survive on earth in the event of the kind of catastrophe that set Musk’s eye on Mars in the first place? If some group were to attempt the journey today, they would need access to technologies that would make them as self-sufficient as possible. After all, Earth would be nearly 33.9 million miles away during its closest pass to the red planet. Water recovery systems that reclaim vapor, wastewater, and urine — like the ones currently installed on the International Space Station — would have to be used on the journey, and sent ahead to Mars along with habitats ready for assembly upon the astronauts’ arrival. According to NASA such a system would have to have an efficiency much higher than the current 74% in order to be viable for deep space missions. The same goes for oxygen regeneration and carbon dioxide removal, which, as of today stands at around 40% efficiency and “must increase significantly” before anyone attempts the journey to Mars. As for food, astronauts would have to rely on a one-time supply of food sent ahead, or attempt to grow it themselves along the way. Since self-sustainability is key, a mission hoping to survive on the dead surface of Mars would likely rely on greenhouses, such as the inflatable ones in development under Dr. Ray Wheeler at NASA. These greenhouses use hydroponic farming techniques to grow crops and “sustain astronauts on a vegetable diet,” with the added benefit of helping carbon dioxide, oxygen, and wastewater management. While all of these systems might be ready for use by a small crew within a few years, a colony of a size large enough to safeguard humanity from extinction would push them to the breaking point. It would take, optimistically, decades before Mars was truly self-sufficient, and that time and money could be spent working to prevent the kind of disasters that threaten our existence on Earth, such as natural disasters related to climate change. On its best day, Mars still barely has an atmosphere. Its core is inactive, which means that it lacks any kind of magnetic field to block out the most intense solar radiation. It is a dead planet that would take efforts only dreamed about in science fiction to colonize. Even Earth after total nuclear war would be easier to live on. There is scientific value in the exploration of other planets, but discoveries can be achieved without the steep added cost of having to keep an astronaut alive during the trip. Compared to the projected cost of a Martian base, NASA’s Curiosity rover cost a fraction of that, coming in at $2.5 billion. Curiosity has far exceeded its life expectancy of two years and continues to operate today, with the added benefit of not needing to eat, breath, or worry about dying from radiation exposure.

(Zahaan works for Google and is a recipient of Nasa’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal for YouTube Space Lab. )

The most polarising issue in the Mars debate is arguably the tension between those dreaming of a second home and those prioritising the one we have now. Before his death, Stephen Hawking made the bleak prediction that humanity only had 100 years left on Earth. Faced with a growing list of threats – climate change, overpopulation, nuclear war – Hawking believed that we had reached "the point of no return" and had no choice as a species but to become multi-planetary – starting with the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk has also said on numerous occasions that we need a “backup planet” should something apocalyptic – like an asteroid collision – destroy Earth. However, not everyone agrees. In the Pew survey mentioned earlier, a majority of US adults believed that Nasa’s number one priority should be fixing problems on Earth. The billions – if not trillions – of dollars needed to colonise Mars could, for example, be better spent investing in renewable forms of energy to address climate change or strengthening our planetary defences against asteroid collisions. And of course, if we have not figured out how to deal with problems of our own making here on Earth, there is no guarantee that the same fate would not befall Mars colonists. Furthermore, if something truly horrible were to happen on Earth, it’s not clear Mars would actually be an effective salvation. Giant underground bunkers on Earth, for example, could protect more people, more easily than a colony on Mars. And in the event of apocalyptic scenario, it is possible that the conditions on Earth – however horrific – may still be more hospitable than the Martian wasteland. Let's not forget that Mars has next to no atmosphere, only one third gravity and is exposed to surface radiation approximately 100 times greater than on Earth.

(Tom covers breaking news and writes features. He has reported for U.S. News & World Report, Slate and Atlantic Media. , June)

Musk has long favored Mars colonization as a means to survive what he calls an “inevitable” extinction event on Earth. On its website, SpaceX says that the company was founded in 2002 “with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” The tech entrepreneur reiterated that survivalist message in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, saying humans have to become “a multiplanetary species” and build complete cities on Mars with all the amenities, including “iron foundries, pizza joints, you name it.” Voices in popular culture and social media have echoed this argument for why NASA and its presumed international partners should spend years of work and billions of dollars sending humans to Mars. Interviews with a broad range of scientists and futurists, however, reveal skepticism about the wisdom and feasibility of selling Mars as “Planet B.” The implication that Mars colonization should be prioritized over fixing Earth’s problems, such as climate change, unsettles Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “Mars is not an escape hatch for planet Earth,” Hayhoe says. “If we do not take action to reduce and eventually eliminate our carbon emissions, they will overwhelm human civilization as we know it, long before Mars is ready to be colonized by large numbers of people.” A Mars colony would need a huge investment of supply ships to keep settlers alive in the toxic, freezing Martian environment, but the numerous abandoned bases in Antarctica show that building cities in less hazardous places on Earth is difficult enough. Advocates of a colony tout the potential to mine water and rare minerals on the red planet, but searching for resources or avoiding a potential asteroid strike on Earth are not immediate enough motivations to inspire a Mars settlement, says Andy Weir, author of “The Martian,” which depicts an astronaut stranded on Mars. “I don’t believe there will ever be a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon or anywhere else off Earth until there’s an economic reason for it,” Weir says. “Whatever Earth’s problems are, it’s considerably easier to fix Earth than it is to colonize Mars.” Weir and others consider Mars an inhospitable place where the first goal should be research rather than settlement, at least for the near future. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, points to exploration of Antarctica as a realistic model for how Mars might be studied. International research stations on Antarctica host rotating scientific teams, and this strategy has kept a sustained but limited human presence there. “There is an escapism to wanting to go to Mars and start anew,” Lee says of the appeal of colonization. “The issue with that particular enticing concept is — ‘to go to what?’ You would need an entire infrastructure set up in advance to support people there.” Missions to Mars don’t need to result in colonization to improve humanity’s chances of survival, says Robert Zubrin, president of the nonprofit Mars Society, which advocates for research to explore and study the red planet. The Mars Society is training people at research stations in the Canadian Arctic and the Utah desert to simulate life on Mars. “A culture which is going to Mars is going to be much more adept at furthering its prospects on Earth,” Zubrin says. Zubrin is bullish on exploration, but says he “doesn’t see merit” in the concept of colonizing Mars to ensure that at least some humans would live on after a catastrophe on Earth like a massive asteroid strike. That said, Zubrin expects “Mars will be a pressure cooker for innovation because you have to adapt.” By exploring Mars, scientists and engineers could uncover new technologies to deflect asteroids and also improve medicine or grow more productive crops on Earth. “By becoming a spacefaring species we will gain greater control over our environment, which is essential to our long-term survival,” he says. If colonization were to be attempted, how might that work? A future where millions of humans live on Mars is central to the story of “The Expanse,” a TV show on the Syfy Channel inspired by novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Abraham says logistics would be a challenge to making this fantasy a reality. “Moving large populations from one planet to another with present or foreseeable technology is like drinking a lake through a coffee straw,” he says. “The more likely scenario to me is that we make Mars, Venus, Europa or wherever we’re aiming for a habitable, sustainable environment and then build up the population in the traditional way.” Humanity’s need to explore and expand has not always been a positive instinct, Franck says. On the show, the vision of colonization is far from utopian, as an independent Mars government and a crowded Earth are on the brink of war. He and Abraham caution against looking at Mars as an escape from the side of human nature that Hawking fears could threaten life on Earth. “Humanity isn’t likely to change much, whatever context you put us in,” Abraham says. “If the barrier to space exploration is that we have to change human nature first, we’re kind of sabotaging the project at the start, right?”

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Moynihan, however, points out that the "go to space, save humanity" argument isn't as strong as the billionaires present it, especially at this particular moment in time. This century, we face myriad existential threats that are not localised and could easily spread, from bioengineered pandemics to misaligned artificial intelligence. It's possible such threats could reach beyond Earth. "Rushing to become multi-planetary might not provide a failsafe against every worst-case risk, says Moynihan. "In the immediate term, sparking a worldwide conversation on the issue of extreme risks may be more cost-effective than sprinting to Mars." And as for climate change? While it is unlikely to be an existential risk, it promises to cause a huge amount of suffering to billions of people in the near-term – and there's not much that space tourism nor a galactic settlement project in the far future will do to help avoid that today. Amid floods, wildfires and heatwaves, there have been plenty of critics of the billionaire era of space travel. Based on the severity of the problems we face, there are some today who might rather abandon visions of galactic settlement altogether – at least in the near-term. That sentiment was captured in a recent essay by the science fiction writer Sim Kern, who pointed out that space may offer the alluring ideal of salvation and starting afresh, but in truth, "there's no leaving our messiness behind, no matter how many light-years away we travel". And in any case, Kern writes, we have a pretty nice orbiting settlement already: "It is enormous, big enough to bring all our friends and family along. It has excellent gravity and radiation shielding in the form of a breathable atmosphere. It comes with a nearly-unlimited renewable energy source – the Sun – which should last us another billion years before it gets too hot and burns us up. "Our spaceship is peopled with more than eight million different alien life forms for us to study, whose behaviours and languages and intelligences we’re only beginning to understand. These other-species friends provide us with air, food, medicines, water filtration – some even sing for us, perfume our air, and make our ship breathtakingly beautiful." If our descendants in the future were to agree, this is known as the "The Bullerby scenario", named after the idyllic rural life of Sweden in children’s books by Astrid Lindgren. It imagines that humanity eventually decides to ignore space, and instead focus on Earth, building a steady-state society with green energy, sustainable agriculture and so on. If intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisations have made this choice too, this could explain why we haven't seen any yet: perhaps they're living the life of Bullerby instead. What about the really long-term though? If we're talking hundreds of thousands of years, then spreading across the Solar System and Milky Way can be taken more seriously as an argument for ensuring the future of humanity. Even those who disagree with starting the project now would be hard-pressed to justify delaying it until the moment before humanity collapses – that would be a disaster of unimaginable scale. The average mammalian species has a 1-million-year lifespan, which suggests that at some point our time will come if we do nothing to prevent it. Catastrophes that could wipe us out are inevitable in deep time. But unlike other animals, we have advanced intelligence, so many researchers believe that taking the "astronomical" path beyond Earth promises a much longer future for our species. If we have settlements all over the galaxy, humanity becomes far more robust. "I'm very fond of not having all the eggs in the same relatively fragile baskets," says Anders Sandberg, also at the University of Oxford. "Space colonies are way more fragile than planets, and vulnerable, but you can build more of them," he says. "Once you're actually able to build some big ones, you're going to be able to build a lot of small ones too. And at this point, that looks like you can reduce risks." I'm very fond of not having all the eggs in the same relatively fragile baskets Moynihan agrees. "It remains true that for humanity to fulfil its longest-term potential, it must eventually reach beyond," he writes. "Earth will ultimately become uninhabitable as our Sun ages. But the wider Universe will remain capable of supporting life – and the richness of consciousness – for aeons beyond this." The trouble is, even in the deep future, there will always be reasons not to start the project. There will always be urgent problems we need to fix, back on Earth. "Becoming multi-planetary is a great vision and a good thing in the long run, but it might never really be a rational thing to do," says Sandberg. "I think there might even be a weird kind of selection for the slightly exuberant and the irrational." He cites the dictum that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man". "It might be that it's actually unreasonable what Bezos or Musk are doing, but it might still be a good thing." (In the long-run, at least.) Whatever you think of the current generation of billionaires – their priorities, personalities, wealth, attitudes towards inequality or climate change, or treatment of their employees – there's no denying that they have made significant progress in space travel in a short space of time. Could it have been left to future generations instead of them? Maybe. But that doesn't make their contributions worthless. Sandberg recalls a conversation with Musk, many years before SpaceX had sent rockets to space and back, when the entrepreneur visited him and colleagues at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. "[He] was literally doing drawings on a napkin at the Grand Cafe here in Oxford to explain to me how he felt he could totally make something way cheaper than what Nasa was doing," recalls Sandberg. "I was nodding and saying 'I hope you're right'. Well, he proved himself." However, Sandberg points out that if humanity does go on to build a galactic civilisation that saves its long-term future, it needn't be built according to the whims and desires of one or two billionaires in the early 21st Century. "If we don't want space to be set by a few particular people's visions, then the rest of us should also make our wishes known," he says. In the long-run, expanding into space could be a humanity-wide project Those who criticise the billionaire generation worry that their visions fail to take account of many present-day concerns, such as social justice and inequality. However, there might be opportunities to integrate some of these issues within space exploration plans. For example, the linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen has long been making the case for integrating astronauts with disabilities within space programmes. This year, the European Space Agency apparently took her advice, putting out a recruitment call for "parastronauts". And while many might wish to focus their energies on climate change and other problems in the near-term, the future generations who are helped by their efforts may well decide to rejoin the space project in the deeper future. After all, it wasn't always the case that the priorities of space explorers and environmentalists were misaligned. The images of the Earth as a "pale blue dot" helped to show what was worth preserving about our planet, and Sandberg points out that without satellites we'd have a much weaker scientific understanding of climate change. In the long-run, expanding into space could be a humanity-wide project, rather than one decided by a handful of people in Silicon Valley. A galactic civilisation may well lie in our future, eventually. Perhaps Bezos's dreams of an O'Neill cylinder will become reality. Perhaps it could help to save our species. But wherever we end up, that future will be shaped by citizens of the Milky Way with their own priorities and desires – and who are living long after the 21st Century's richest men have gone.