Colonization produces different species of humanity- security dilemma guarantees this produces war with planet killing weapons

(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.