Human Adaptation and Permanent Human Space Settlement

Abstract

Chapters 2 and 3 have shown us aspects of biological adaptation necessary to consider in the project of human space settlement, while in Chaps. 4 and 5 we have examined some cultural aspects of such a project. In those chapters we were introduced to humanity’s adaptive range and capacities, and some of the tools of human adaptation, from genes to complex behavior including culture and technology. Chapter 6 gave us some examples of the use of tools in humanity’s deep past, showing that they are not unusual but should be considered entirely common and ‘natural’ to use. In this chapter we sharpen focus on these tools, refining our concepts as needed, to arrive at a practical, preliminary set of cultural and biological adaptive variables we deem to be necessary for human biocultural survival and sufficient to sustain it in environments beyond Earth. These tools may be thought of as the minimum adaptive toolkit of our species, significantly and informatively analogous to the HOX gene family common to all multicellular animal life. In these ways this chapter establishes a minimum set of adaptive tools for space settlement that may be studied as part of space anthropology and applied to the adaptive programme of space settlement established throughout this book.