Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos recently debuted a new lunar landing module, to be constructed by his space exploration company, Blue Origin.
As he has in previous speeches, Bezos — who also owns the Washington Post — made it clear that the moon is only the beginning. He wants to help kickstart a new multigenerational era of space exploration, which would culminate in millions of human beings living in space colonies.
His vision is spurred by the ideas of the physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who proposed such colonies a generation ago, but it is firmly embedded in debates within science fiction. O’Neill was engaged in fights that spanned science fiction and space exploration. New fights have emerged over the intervening decades. These fights help to explain the politics around Bezos’ proposal.
Colonising planets in the solar system would require people to live in enclosed spaces within extraordinarily hostile environments. Mars would be a very unpleasant place to live. So why not just live in an enclosed space?
O’Neill was opposed to traditional proposals for space colonisation, which aimed at colonising planets. In his presentation, Bezos played excerpts from a famous televised argument between O’Neill and the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov over the genre’s lack of imagination. Asimov used the term “planetary chauvinism” to refer to the systematic bias of science fiction toward planetary exploration. O’Neill proposed an alternative vision in which human beings would not seek to colonise planets, but instead build their own enclosed cylindrical space habitats.
Some people — including Bezos’ chief rival in privatised space entrepreneurship, Elon Musk — have taken up the traditional idea of colonising other planets. Musk wants to get people to Mars. Bezos attended O’Neill’s lectures and was clearly convinced by many of his arguments.
Many attractions
Colonising planets has many attractions. However, it also has a variety of associated problems. First, colonising planets in the solar system would require people to live in enclosed spaces within extraordinarily hostile environments. Mars would be a very unpleasant place to live. So why not just live in an enclosed space? Second, planets are at the bottom of gravity wells, which make them poorly suited to serving as bases for further exploration (without as yet undeveloped technologies such as space elevators). Finally, from an engineering perspective, planets are inefficient habitats: Living creatures inhabit the planet’s surface (or are relatively close to it, with the possible exception of some extremophile microorganisms), making little use of the rest of the planet. It is easy to envisage alternative structures that would have a more efficient ratio of surface to mass, including O’Neill cylinders and (depending on exotic physics) more speculative megastructures.
Science fiction writers have proposed rings surrounding stars, spheres of matter that enclose them, and swarms of structures that do much the same thing. Bezos is a fan of the late Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, who described “Orbitals”, built out of vast flat plates orbiting a sun. Several novels by British writer Alastair Reynolds are set in a “Glitter Band” of O’Neill cylinders, orbiting close to a quasi-inhabitable planet, while Linda Nagata’s new novel Edges explores a future in which human-built Dyson swarms appear to have collapsed.
Disagreements
These are disagreements about how humans should colonise space. The more fundamental debate is over whether human beings should colonise space at all. Charles Stross has written a classic rejoinder to both O’Neill’s arguments about the “High Frontier” of space and proposals for planetary colonisation. Space is really big, and really hostile to DNA-based life. More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of a classic series of books about “terraforming” Mars to make it more friendly to human life has written a novel about interstellar exploration, Aurora, that is clearly intended to push back against the fascination with space exploration as an alternative to fixing our problems on Earth.
One side of this fight is driven by concerns over inequality and global warming. Writers like Robinson worry that we have only one world — and we are messing it up. They suggest that dreams of solar and extrasolar colonisation are ways of ducking the real fight over figuring out how to prevent the one environment that we know human beings can inhabit from being irrevocably degraded.
Making the leap to space
The other side is driven by the belief that there are effectively infinite resources available — once human beings figure out how to sustain a version of their civilisation in space. Bezos argues that human beings either face a future of rationed resources or a future of infinitely expanding possibilities. He wants human beings to make the leap to space — and is prepared to put billions of dollars behind this ambition.
Unsurprisingly, this disagreement sometimes spills over into politics. The prominent science fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s recent novel Seveneves depicts humans having to flee the Earth at short notice when it becomes uninhabitable. One of the major characters is a thinly disguised and unsympathetic portrait of Hillary Clinton. Poul Anderson’s 1989 novel, The Boat of a Million Years, presents an equally unflattering caricature of a politician based on the-late senator Edward Kennedy (Democrat, from Massachusetts), impeding the space programme in favour of social spending. Other novels by writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi depict humans trapped in a world that has been ruined by global warming, while the triple Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin shows humans being overwhelmed by vast geological forces.
To say that these fights are science fictional is not to dismiss them. As writers like the late Thomas Disch have emphasised, science fiction has had an extraordinarily influential role in setting the scale of our social ambitions (Disch lamented that the literary science fiction writers whom he favoured, like Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and Paul Park, had less influence than those who were more interested in the engineering). Science fiction provides the basic intellectual vocabulary that we use to think about big issues that connect technology, society and the environments we live in. As these issues become existential, science fiction is becoming increasingly important.
Henry Farrell is professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. He works on a variety of topics, including trust, the politics of the internet and international and comparative political economy.
