Complexity model and Mars colonization

Extract The idea for this volume was first conceived in the autumn of 2016, at the inaugural meeting of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA). It was there that two of us (Linda Billings and James Schwartz) wondered aloud to one another about putting together an edited volume dedicated to progressive, radical, and “counter-culture” perspectives on space exploration and the culture of spaceflight. Perhaps, we thought, we could assemble a spiritual successor to Stewart Brand’s 1977 edited collection Space Colonies (A Coevolution Book), which platformed a variety of environmentalist critiques (and defenses) of space exploration during the public commotion surrounding Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill’s advocacy for orbital habitats in the 1970s. Beginning in the 2010s, however, it was no longer O’Neill’s “high frontier” that was captivating spaceflight culture. Instead, it was Richard Branson’s and Virgin Galactic’s efforts to grow the space tourism industry. It was Jeff Bezos’s and Blue Origin’s plans to create space-based industrial workforces. It was Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s mission to make humanity a “multiplanetary” species. In other words, we are heirs to a spaceflight culture, ensconced as the “NewSpace” movement, that by all appearances is dedicated to promoting the interests of the most wealthy and powerful Earthlings.

After 2010, the international space scene was showing signs of deep change. Private investments began to look at the cosmos with different eyes, seizing opportunities that had previously been neglected. Characters like Space X’s Elon Musk, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, who had accumulated wealth with other businesses, were now directing their business ventures beyond the Earth, becoming the new visionaries of space, moving towards destinations that space agencies were reluctant to address. Private individuals were transformed into the protagonists of the new Space Economy, launching initiatives not only in the West, especially in the United States, but also in Russia and China.

Currently, NASA and several outer space industry multi-billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g. Elon Musk (Space X), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)), are actively engaged in outer-space research that reports innovative advances such as, outer space: mining, tourism, medicine labs, terraforming Mars and the Moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extra-terrestrial survivability. All these advances unearth serious ethical concerns of human identity and cosmic sustainability that we address here. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development (SD) is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth is meant solely for man’s use), and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic and pro-human project. We expand SD to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and trans-human developments. We view this complex problem by distinguishing anthropocentric (nature is for man) versus non-anthropocentric (man is for nature) modern views of natural sustainability; Each view can be made to include either natural outcomes / processes of nature, or industrial uses and outcomes of nature to provide a four-fold framework of Natural Sustainability within which we explore ethical implications of outer space advances (OSA). We discuss managerial implications and limitations and suggest directions for future research.

Executive Summary Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

Currently, NASA and several outer space industry multi-billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g. Elon Musk (Space X), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)), are actively engaged in outer-space research that reports innovative advances such as, outer space: mining, tourism, medicine labs, terraforming Mars and the Moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extra-terrestrial survivability. All these advances unearth serious ethical concerns of human identity and cosmic sustainability that we address here. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development (SD) is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth is meant solely for man’s use), and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic and pro-human project. We expand SD to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and trans-human developments. We view this complex problem by distinguishing anthropocentric (nature is for man) versus non-anthropocentric (man is for nature) modern views of natural sustainability; Each view can be made to include either natural outcomes / processes of nature, or industrial uses and outcomes of nature to provide a four-fold framework of Natural Sustainability within which we explore ethical implications of outer space advances (OSA). We discuss managerial implications and limitations and suggest directions for future research.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the richest person on Earth, is of course a man who thinks big. But exactly how big is only now becoming clear. "The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins," he told a private aviation group at the Yale Club in New York City this past February. "Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be." The pragmatic entrepreneur went on to say that "the first step [is] to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle." And that's precisely what he is doing with his private aerospace firm, Blue Origin. Blue Origin is not just a company; it's a personal quest for Bezos, who currently sells around US 1 billion of his own Amazon stock each year to fund Blue Origin's development of new spacecraft. The first, called New Shepard, is a suborbital space-tourist vehicle, which should make its first crewed flight later this year. But it is the next, a massive rocket called New Glenn, that could enable cheap lunar missions and kick-start Bezos's grand vision of human beings living all over the solar system. New Glenn's first stage will use seven enormous new BE-4 engines, each powered by methane (the same fuel used in some of Amazon's less-polluting delivery vans in Europe). Like SpaceX's Falcon booster, the New Glenn's first stage will also use its engines to steer itself gracefully back down to a landing ship for reuse.

Since the time of Robert Goddard, philanthropic contributors have supported the work of rocketeers. In the case of Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, the business owner became his own philanthropist. McCurdy explains how Bezos’ wealth allowed him to start Blue Origin without significant outside investment or much government help.

After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and US policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. NASA garnered more than 0.7 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, but is only around 0.1 percent of GDP today. Meanwhile, space has become big business, with $300 billion in annual revenue. The shift from public to private priorities in space is especially significant because a widely shared goal among commercial space's leaders is the achievement of a large-scale, largely self-sufficient, developed space economy. Jeff Bezos, has stated that the mission of his firm Blue Origin is “millions of people living and working in space.” Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has laid out plans to build a city of a million people on Mars within the next century. Both Neil deGrasse Tyson and Peter Diamandis have been given credit for stating that Earth's first trillionaire will be an asteroid-miner. Such visions are clearly not going to become reality in the near future. But detailed roadmaps to them are being produced and recent progress in the required technologies has been dramatic. If such space-economy visions are even partially realized, the implications for society will be enormous. Though economists should treat the prospect of a developed space economy with healthy skepticism, it would be irresponsible to treat it as science fiction. In this article, I provide an analytical framework—based on classic economic analysis of the role of government in market economies—for understanding and managing the development of the space economy.

“Global Participation in the ‘Space Frontier’ ” connects spaceflight’s geopolitical past to its present. According to international agreements between the space-faring nations of the world, the bodies of the Solar System are the province of all humanity, and are made off-limits to imperialist annexation. Because of this, it might be thought that extraterrestrial space exploration and exploitation must be undertaken only for the benefit of all nations. Unfortunately, those charged with interpreting these agreements often do so in ways that generally discourage equitable distribution of space resources, and instead promote neo-imperialistic attitudes toward developing and settling space. Given the grand technotopian rhetoric emerging from the space industrialists, such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk, and from science fiction soap operas like Star Trek—where we are told all humanity will share in the final frontier—it can also be seen as a betrayal of the humanitarian ideals of spaceflight.

With the early 2020s fostering an array of intensified climate-driven catastrophes, a key question is how humanity will respond to its impending transgressions of climatic and ecosystemic tipping points. In this light, this article explores how some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs and companies resort to desperate science fiction, that is, to increasingly drastic techno-optimistic ventures. More precisely, the article zooms in on plans put forward and financially supported by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Google in order to show how these ventures manifest as (1) fanciful plans of leaving Earth and settling on other planets, (2) major geoengineering schemes in which the Earth System becomes the object of terraforming and (3) attempts to manipulate human behaviour via big data. Furthermore, the article argues that these three forms of desperate science fiction are deeply problematic, because they siphon attention away from important democratic conversations about which degrowth-models societies across the planet should pursue and seek to develop. To change this, the article argues, we need to see the three forms of desperate science fiction advanced by Musk, Bezos, Gates and Google for what they are: deceptive attempts to preserve a deeply unjust and destructive economic system.

Today figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have become high-profile evangelists for private space exploration, arguing that interplanetary colonization is necessary to save humanity from extinction. Although they may have the sheen of innovation, however, these ideas are not new. A century ago a coterie of British novelists, scientists, and social theorists writing during the interwar period became preoccupied with the possibility of human extinction and believed that such a fate might be avoided by taking human civilization to the stars. Watching these intellectual developments with a wary eye, a young C. S. Lewis was increasingly skeptical of both the “extinction panic” that gripped his contemporaries and the utilitarian and environmentally exploitative imagination of planetary conquest they championed. In response Lewis penned Out of the Silent Planet (1938), a novel that imagines three sentient species that have the means to prevent their own extinction but choose not to do so. Reading Lewis’s novel as a critique of the rapacious ideologies that defined this strain of interwar speculation, this article suggests that the novel models how the humanities might effectively respond to the extinction panic and cosmic adventurism that grip our own imperiled twenty-first century.

Prominent public figures are important representatives of their fields, potentially becoming influential role models, especially for young people. The identities of these famous people can shape and stereotype their respective domains, impacting diversity and inclusion. This paper examines young people’s awareness of the notable people in the computing and technology field, utilising data from a questionnaire with 4,112 entries from 1,788 young people aged 11–16 in England. Our study unveils two prominent groups of famous people: the tech entrepreneurs and the historic academics. The top 10 famous people identified are Bill Gates, Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Ada Lovelace, Stephen Hawking, Grace Hopper and Charles Babbage. We also analyse how young people’s demographic background, such as gender and enrolment in computer science study, predicts their awareness of famous individuals. We discuss the possible meanings and implications of these famous individuals as the leading figures in young people’s available discourses, especially the dominance of entrepreneurial white men and the fascination of wealth through technology. We consider famous individuals as potential role models for young people and discuss the challenges we face to broaden dominant discourses of who represents the computing and technology sector.

Historically, any endeavors, involving the term ‘space’, were perceived as operations undertaken by large government organizations with an emphasis on the scientific aspect, rather than a business one. However, over the last two decades, the structure of the space industry is rapidly being transformed and privatized due to the growth in commercial applications and the catalyzing entry of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. This paper offers a case study analysis of the private sector’s growing influence in the space industry through a combination of a quantitative analysis and an in-depth review of the surrounding literature. The results show that the commercial economy now accounts for almost 80% of the monetary size of the space industry and is expected to drive most of the growth in future. Further, a forecast of the future size of the space economy suggests it could touch almost US$1.5 trillion by 2040, dominated by the private sector. A regression analysis conducted to assess the quantum of private sector investment that will be required if the industry is to achieve its forecasted potential in the upcoming decades revealed that private investments must go up to US$48billion by 2025.

One recent quote for the role of CEOs and other C-Suite executives on the innovation of a firm is: "Innovation executives are not expected to be the innovators, but the great ones can facilitate ideation processes effectively to generate great ideas" (Soloman, 2005). This paper explores the role of CEO/Top Executive participation in innovation in modern business. At the turn of the 20th century, there were many great inventors who also became successful businessmen. They founded and played key management roles in firms that created the backbone in the infrastructure and business growth of the country. Thomas Edison (GE), Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T) and the Wright Brothers (Aircraft) are just a few that come to mind. However, as the 20th century wore on, America's big business organizations became more bureaucratic with CEOs and executives leaving entrepreneurship and innovation primarily to their R&D divisions (e.g., Bell Labs and RCA Labs) and to outside organizations that could be acquired if necessary. However, recent trends indicate that this may be changing. This paper looks at today's state of innovation and examines the current role of innovation as it pertains to CEO and Top Executives. This subject of CEO/Executive innovation is approached with a view of: (1) examining if the spirit of innovation is alive at the CEO level; and (2) if it is, determining if today's CEOs/Executives are contributing to innovation in U.S. major firms. A literature review addresses some of the authors and academicians who have contributed current major ideas concerning innovation. Joel Barker is a futurist who has spent his career focusing on paradigm shifts and innovation. A famous MIT professor, Clayton Christensen, was another who developed and documented key ideas in innovation that are now mainstream e.g., the theory of disruptive innovation. Lastly, most graduate books on Business Strategy address innovation in a separate chapter and describe the latest ways that a firm can embrace innovation to be successful. Much insight into this topic was gained by examining a recent Forbes list of Executive Innovators (Forbes 2019). At the top of the Forbes list are found some common names of U.S. CEOs and Executives. Quite a few have recently displayed a healthy penchant toward reaping the benefits of innovation. Included in the list were: Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (Google); Jeff Bezos at Amazon; and Elon Musk at Tesla. Three major recent CEOs who epitomized the best in the successful harnessing of innovation over the past 30 years are also discussed in some detail: Steve Jobs (computers and other related fields), Edward Whitacre (Telecommunications) and E. Hunter Harrison (Railroads). While examining these leading CEO/Executives, deregulation in the United States economy was identified to be a potential important construct that may well have influenced positively the changing role of modern CEOs and top Executives in innovation. It is concluded that all innovation does not necessarily have to be driven by intrapreneurs within a firm or acquired from outside a firm. In fact, CEOs are more active today in driving innovation than at any time since the earliest 20th century. It appears that innovation at the CEO/Executive level has been revived and is far from being defunct!! Future CEO and Top Executive position hires should be examined with innovation in mind. At a minimum criterion for selecting a new CEO or Top Executive needs to include how well they have delivered innovation in their past executive assignments, as well as what ideas they have for generating innovation in their new job. Recommendations are also made as how to further research this topic to provide definitive factors that are driving innovation at the CEO and Executive levels today. Such research on innovation should not be limited to just technological innovations, but needs to be expanded to include innovations in such functional areas of business as marketing, operations, procurement, R&D etc. Lastly, future research could also be undertaken in innovation using techniques such as data analytics. A data-centric technique could be employed which would focus on using machine learning algorithms to identify themes that are driving the recent upsurge in CEO and Executive innovation.

This article introduces the outcomes of the conceptual analysis of motivational speeches delivered by prominent public figures, obtained by means of the UAM Corpus Tool – a cutting-edge software renowned for conducting both automated and manual text annotations. Furthermore, the study is enhanced by a conceptual metaphor analysis, revealing that ontological and structural components are the predominant and efficacious elements in constructing a frame-slot model. In accordance with Minsky’s theoretical framework, the frame-slot model consists of the main concept, and frames as complex structures, resembling multi-layered networks. It is figured out that these intricate structures are formed by slots and subplots [17]. Accordingly, the concept of MOTIVATION comprises a combination of frames reflecting embodied speakers’ experiences such as A LIVING BEING, DIFFICULTIES, PURPOSE, MATERIAL OBJECT, STATE, COGNITION, MOVEMENT, INSPIRATION, LIFE, WORLD, EDUCATION, and LANGUAGE. These components collectively serve as a comprehensive reflection of the perceptual paradigms employed by the selected public speakers, whose speeches serve as the primary corpus for this research. Consequently, the corpus comprises 20 speeches delivered by eminent male and female public figures, featuring Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, Kamala Harris, Melinda Gates, Angelina Jolie Voight, Arianna Huffington, Condoleezza Rice, Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, David Beckham, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay Shetty, and Steven Spielberg. This research underscores the significance of conceptual metaphors in understanding how motivational speeches shape our perception of the world and influence our actions. By dissecting the linguistic elements that construct these metaphors, the insights into the strategies employed by public figures to inspire and motivate their audiences are received and elaborated.