Methodological Issues in Astropolitics: The Case of Space Settlement

The Value of Science in Space Exploration provides a rigorous assessment of the value of scientific knowledge and understanding in the context of contemporary space exploration. It argues that traditional spaceflight rationales are deficient, and that the strongest defense of spaceflight comes from its potential to produce intrinsically and instrumentally valuable knowledge and understanding. It engages with contemporary epistemology to articulate an account of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and understanding. It also parleys with recent work in science policy and social philosophy of science to characterize the instrumental value of scientific research, identifying space research as an effective generator of new knowledge and understanding. These values found an ethical obligation to engage in scientific examination of the space environment. This obligation has important implications for major space policy discussions, including debates surrounding planetary protection policies, space resource exploitation, and human space settlement. Whereas planetary protection policies are currently employed to prevent biological contamination only of sites of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, it contends that all sites of interest to space science ought to be protected. Meanwhile, space resource exploitation and human space settlement would result in extensive disruption or destruction of pristine space environments. The overall ethical value of these environments in the production of new knowledge and understanding is greater than their value as commercial or real commodities, and thus, exploitation and settlement of space should be avoided until the scientific community adequately understands these environments.

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.

An adaptive paradigm for human space settlement

The Martian: Possible Scenarios for a Future Human Society on Mars

Strategies for Mars: A guide for human exploration: by Carol R. Stoker and Carter Emmart Univelt Inc., San Diego, CA, 1996 644 pp., $70 hdbk; $45 pbk

Snapshot: The Process of Change in International Space Law Politics

A defining feature of animal life is that it moves. Early in life, with little knowledge of its environment, each life form is engaged in exploration. As information about its environment is accumulated by exploration, the animal may decide to remain where it is, or go elsewhere; various external ‘push’ and/or ‘pull’ factors also tend to move animal life across geographies. Repeated, cyclic movement is often termed migration, as when birds fly to distant feeding grounds for months at a time. Other life forms, in particular some aquatic species, move one-way, leaving the place where they were born to settle permanently elsewhere. Humanity is engaged in many such movements on Earth. The one most pertinent, however, to the case of space settlement is emigration, a permanent, one-way phenomenon, in the human case an intentional one. This chapter examines the emigration experience in general and proposes a four-stage model for permanent human space settlement. As in the other chapters of the book, I highlight the evolutionary aspects of our topic, identifying the main trends in animal migration and emigration so far identified, and applying, when appropriate, lessons from evolutionary biology to the prospect of human space settlement.

The information catastrophe and space settlement

Human and robotic exploration is foreseen to be one of the next steps in human space colonization, and it is growing the common vision that Moon, on the pathway to Mars, is the outpost to extend human presence in deep space. At the same time, technologies and knowledge derived from space exploration tests, key factors for a more affordable, easier and quicker access to Space, will expand our understanding of the Universe, and create economic opportunities. In this scenario, CIRA intends to support the national community, involved in space colonization projects, through the Mars research project. The project is conceived as a technology-driven effort aimed at maturing a number of technologies and engineering tools necessary to enable future space exploration and colonization missions. Indeed, the project goal is to develop experimental infrastructures and necessary competences for future human and robotic Martian, Lunar and cis-Lunar exploration and colonization missions, supporting industries, universities and national research centres, to meet the challenges of this extremely promising and competitive sector. The present paper gives an overview of CIRA development plan related to Moon and Mars exploration and colonization, focusing on the design and realization of test analogue facilities and the development of enabling technologies. In the definition of the roadmap, a particular emphasis will be given to the facilities concept proposed and constituted by the following research areas: Environmental facility, Robotic laboratory, Aeolic Tunnel and Life Support System area.

Why space colonization will be fully automated

Just as the human genome will be changed as it adapts to conditions beyond Earth, our second channel of adaptive capacity—culture—will also change. Indeed it has been more than a million years since biology was our main mode of adaptation; rather, since the evolution of complex cultural behaviors including complex tool use, symbolism, and language, we as a species have survived and adapted less because of our biology than despite our biology. It is behavioral flexibility that led Inuit people of the high Canadian Arctic to invent effective cold-weather clothing and to mark their broad landscapes with cairns and statuary as aids to navigation, and it is behavioral flexibility that led Australian aborigines to carve hunting territory maps directly on their hunting tools. In the same way, adapting our “ways of living’’, our cultures, to conditions new to the human experience will allow us to survive and ultimately thrive, long-term, beyond Earth. And we need not simply guess about how our cultures will change, or what parts of them will change, we can once again use the tools and insight of evolutionary processes to help us predict, or at least anticipate, cultural adaptation beyond Earth. In this chapter we use these tools to describe and evaluate the adaptive potential of some ‘Cultural Universals’, complex, nongenetically-transmitted behaviors or domains of behavior found globally in all cultures, but somewhat differing by both the cultures’ material and cultural selective environments. We may expect these—at least—to change as new environments are encountered beyond Earth, and we may productively predict some of this change so that it does not come as a shock, and even productively make recommendations about how to tailor some of our behavior in these domains to the new conditions of space settlements. At the least, this allows a structured, evolutionarily-informed approach to the obvious and fascinating—but very fuzzy and open-ended—question, ‘what will change when we go to space?’.

We have seen how humanity’s adaptive trick of niche construction has allowed our relatively frail genus, Homo, to proliferate across the globe. We have also argued that this survival technique is a normal part of our evolution, and that to cease it now would be to move counter to evolution itself, a poor choice. Before describing some ways to better inform our adaptation to space it is necessary to dismantle some of the more common critiques of the concept of human space colonization. Inasmuch as wide public support will be necessary for human space colonization - and we argue that while that would be useful, it is decreasingly necessary as space is increasingly becoming privately accessible - then the usual argwnents against human space colonization will need to be defused. Our central point in this chapter is that while there are plenty of Earth issues to address, human space colonization would not be about abandoning Earth, but about adapting to space; two very different things.

This chapter introduces two central concepts: first, human space settlement as adaptive evolution, and second, how evolutionary and anthropological sciences can aid in making the project of human space colonization more likely to succeed. I then continue by defining some basic concepts and terms, and the essential time- and space-thoughtscapes addressed in this book.

While many efforts have been made to pave the way toward human space colonization, little consideration has been given to the methods of protecting spacefarers against harsh cosmic and local radioactive environments and the high costs associated with protection from the deleterious physiological effects of exposure to high-Linear energy transfer (high-LET) radiation. Herein, we lay the foundations of a roadmap toward enhancing human radioresistance for the purposes of deep space colonization and exploration. We outline future research directions toward the goal of enhancing human radioresistance, including upregulation of endogenous repair and radioprotective mechanisms, possible leeways into gene therapy in order to enhance radioresistance via the translation of exogenous and engineered DNA repair and radioprotective mechanisms, the substitution of organic molecules with fortified isoforms, and methods of slowing metabolic activity while preserving cognitive function. We conclude by presenting the known associations between radioresistance and longevity, and articulating the position that enhancing human radioresistance is likely to extend the healthspan of human spacefarers as well.

Ballet not for everyone: A reply to Szocik