History proves space won’t better/transform humanity- belief in expansion is a death 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)

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.