Quite a few chuckles in this Slate article (see below). I especially liked Lowell
Wood's and Robert Zubrin's clueless invocation of some human "manifest destiny" of
eventual Mars settlement. Lowell Wood has always been an incorrigible flamer --
during the Star Wars debates in the 1980s, he once described the doctrine of nuclear
deterrence as "terrorist", and by reasoning that I thought could apply equally well to
taking karate lessons. In this case, I can only guess that both Zubrin and Wood
snoozed through a certain part of their American history lessons.
American Manifest Destiny -- the after-the-fact ideological underpinning for westward
expansion in the 19th century -- was "manifest" because it was, well ... unlike space
settlement currently, it was a bonanza that was obviously happening. Therefore it was
clearly God's will for America (why, any fool could see that, right?), an agenda that
American Protestants could unify around for purposes of invading the territories of
those Papist Mexicans, so enfeebled by imperial overstretch and corruption. Somehow,
I don't think Zubrin et al. realize how close they've come to qualifying for federal
funding as a Faith-Based Initiative.
Politically, "manifest destiny" is also a bad echo of some sorry history. Scholars
have since elucidated a number of social forces behind the Manifest Destiny expansion.
Some were merely demographic. However, few of them were morally impeccable. Far
from it. Ulysses S. Grant wrote that the war with Mexico sparked by the friction of
expansion was the most "wicked" war America had ever embarked upon, confessing that he
didn't quit the Army at the time only because he lacked the moral courage to do so. I
suppose we won't be fighting Martians any time soon (or herding them onto
reservations), so it would seem that these moral issues simply don't appear. (No,
PLEASE don't start with me about your Photoshop-enhanced "Alamo on Mars" image
library.)
Well, there is at least one ethical issue with whether Mars is Ours, one that didn't
apply to the ... um ... "liberation" of Texas: science vs. civilization expansion.
Knowledge of inestimable value, available to anyone interested, versus territory of
little likely value even to the few who would hold it.
In his essay, "The Mars Trainwreck", Donald Robertson pointed out that what currently
makes Mars most interesting -- the possibility of proving the existence of
extraterrestrial life -- also stands in the way of human habitation. Until the
probability of life on Mars can be reduced to some infinitesimal figure (a huge
long-term project), having human beings on its surface poses the risk of compromising
the experimental protocols. For better or worse (and it can be looked at both ways),
for the time being, we have to think of Mars as a fragile petri dish containing a
fragile biology sample that happens to be both irreplaceable and of potentially
enormous scientific significance. The recent handwringing over Japan's unsanitary
Nozomi probe brought this issue back to the fore.
(Some have proposed manned missions to the Martian moons as an acceptable substitute.
I happen to like this idea. But it's far from clear that this reasonable compromise
would enjoy anything like the same level of popular support.)
In any case, if it is somehow our "manifest destiny" to populate other worlds, there
is a much closer, and more certainly dead, world to "conquer", for a start. As far as
I can tell, the main reasons this world hasn't received as much attention in recent
years are
(1) Kim Stanley Robinson didn't write an opus magnum SF trilogy about its
colonization;
(2) there are no plausible terraforming scenarios. You'd have to settle for
monochromatic trilogy titles like "Book One: It's Sure Grey Here," "Book Two: After 50
Years, It's Still Grey", and "Book Three: Did I Mention That It's Grey?"
Is Mars ours? Please. Better to ask: "Whose Earth is this, anyway?" Then ask about
the Moon, before getting more ambitious.
Personally, I'm sharply ambivalent about being a member of a species that can't even
decide on how to administer its home planet's atmosphere. Irrelevant? Far from it.
This is an issue that takes us straight back to the problem that the late Gerard
O'Neill was trying to address with L5 (and later, with his strong but less publicized
interest in ultra-efficient mass transportation): we don't even know that human beings
have a manifest destiny in settling the surface of the Earth, much less Mars. As Kim
Stanley Robinson has said, we're already terraforming Earth, and we don't know what
we're doing.
If there is a moral duty incumbent on space settlement enthusiasts, it is the same one
O'Neill woke up to in the 1970s: we have to come up with truly practical proposals for
using space resources to manage Earth resources; proposals in which settlement is a
prerequisite. I don't rule out the possibility that space property rights of some
kind would be key to any such proposals. I'm all for market mechanisms. In the
meantime, however, any talk about who would has a (salable) right to what, in space,
should be driven by an overriding concern that is both humanitarian and utilitarian:
how the proposed property-right concept might incentivize more ethical terrestrial
resource management.
Let's take a case in point: the Helium 3 resources of the Moon. Helium 3
fusion-energy research currently appears to be somewhat bottlenecked by a lack of
funding. This funding shortage isn't due to some shadowy conspiracy. For all its
vaunted advantages (far cleaner, among other things) there are known problems with 3He
as a fusion fuel, relative to the others. Worse, even if breakeven 3He fusion were
possible today, nobody can be too sure that mining the Moon for 3He could be made
practical in short order -- or at all, for that matter. If tax money is to be spent
on nuclear fusion as a future energy source, it makes sense to focus on the more
established and plausible scenarios.
Still, you'd think there'd be some kind of securitization of lunar 3He already,
freeing up more funding (and more important, optimism) for exploring the technical
risks in both 3He energy extraction and lunar 3He mining. IF 3He fusion energy works
out, and IF mining 3He from the ores on the Moon (in which it's almost vanishingly
dilute and very energy-intensive to extract) can be made practical, lunar 3He will
probably be worth on the order of millions of dollars per pound, using current oil
prices as a basis for computing its fuel-replacement value. And oil prices can only
trend dramatically upward over the next 50 years, as we steadily run out.
It's been said that if Fort Knox were on the Moon, it wouldn't be worth going to get
the gold. But what about something worth a thousand times more per pound, and getting
more valuable by the day? I bet you could assign very low probabilities to overcoming
both technical risks (3He fusion breakeven and lunar 3He mining), and securities
markets could still arrive at a price for the stuff. Would you pay $3 for
transferable rights to buy a pound of 3He some time in the future, at some smallish
fraction of its potential price? I don't know if I would -- I just turned 48, and I
don't think it could ever help fund my retirement unless I lived to be a hundred. But
if I had kids, I think I would buy some. It would be a nice college graduation
present, don't you think?
Securitization happens. (I think Alan Greenspan said that.) But only when there are
enforceable claims. Speculative trading in lunar 3He hasn't started probably only
because nobody knows who will be allowed to own it. (Whose deuterium is that in our
oceans? Shrug.) In any fingerpointing argument about why we don't know who can own
it, be prepared to go abck to the Outer Space Treaty, and to private-sector oriented
space development factions who bitterly contend that this treaty is an obstacle to
space resource exploitation.
I don't think it has to be this way.
Even within some conceptualization (as per the Outer Space Treaty) of lunar resources
being the "heritage of all mankind", there is an ethical and humanitarian basis for
speculative pricing of lunar 3He within a trading framework for something else that is
also the heritage of all mankind: the Earth's atmosphere. Current and future
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading can provide a potential basis for pricing lunar
3He right now, if the Outer Space Treaty could be amended accordingly. Believe me, if
O'Neill had survived leukemia long enough to see the Kyoto Protocol conference, he
would have thought of this. For that matter, he probably would have showed up himself.
The price of lunar 3He could be based on how much carbon emissions reduction could be
attained by burning 3He instead of oil. Nor need the price necessarily crash to zero
if either 3He fusion or lunar mining of it turn out to be impractical. It depends on
how you structure it. You could hedge the key financial instrument somehow with SPS
solar power futures, since any work to reduce the technical risks of lunar 3He mining
scenarios will probably have spinoff for SPS feasibility. You could also hedge any
such instrument by using tracking stocks for patent portfolios in the enabling
technologies, which will probably generate useful intellectual property for other
space exploitation schemes, and for other technologies, even if the original scenario
doesn't pan out.
Then think what will happen if the technological precursors DO blossom: everybody will
start taking the space property rights issues seriously enough to agree on whatever it
takes to exploit this resource for its fuel market value, not just its carbon trade
value. Ink would be applied to treaty paper and contract paper, not just to SF pulp;
mountains of money would move; and soon enough, so would lunar marium dust.
My key point stands apart from my (admittedly amateur) financial embroidery and the
details of international treaties: space settlement enthusiasts should try to frame
the debate over tangible space properties AND related equities in terms of concrete,
securitizable benefits for all mankind, not merely by appeals to inequitable
intangibles like "destiny." "We" need to go to Mars "for all mankind? As things
stand, why should a malnourished child in a Lagos slum care in the least? In the case
I talk about here, amending the Outer Space Treaty for GHG-linked trading of 3He
futures COULD mean less future climate disruption even for those on this planet whose
children may never own a car, but who will have to disproportionately suffer from the
driving habits of those who now do own one. Some such financial framework,
internationally ratified, could go a long way toward making peace (and wealth) over
the issue of Who Owns What Out There.
If it works out, everyone could win something, or at least not lose as much as they'd
otherwise lose. And the bigger winners might be able to pay their own way to Mars,
confident that it's truly an earned privilege.
And if it doesn't work out? It would at least set useful precedents and foster
productive negotiating relationships for other space futures. And those are two
things we don't have enough of right now.
-michael turner
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 1/8/2004, "LARRY KLAES" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>science
>
>Is Mars Ours?
>
>The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet.
>
>By David Grinspoon
>
>Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 4:26 PM PT
>
>What a joy and a relief that we're back on Mars. The fourth stone from the sun has
>taunted us for centuries with shifting but persistent visions of nearby alien life.
>Finally, after several conspicuous failures, we have a conspicuous success: a
>six-wheeled, mini-Cooper-sized robot preparing to crawl across an ancient lake-bed,
>scratching and sniffing for subtle signs of past habitability.
>
>What we will do on Mars for the next few months and, with future missions, for the
>rest of the decade, is clear: dig in the dirt and take in the air to learn the
>history of landscapes far more ancient than any left on Earth.
>
>But what should we plan to do on Mars over the following decades, centuries, and
>millennia? The Mars Society, an organization dedicated to the proposition that we
>must send people to Mars ASAP, has an answer: build enclosed colonies there in the
>next few decades. Then, later in the century, begin to "terraform" Mars痿杯his
>means altering the air and surface, turning the red planet blue and green, making it
>habitable and remaking it in the Earth's image. After that, we'll wander there
>without giant protective domes or even Mars suits.
>
>Reflexively, I am sympathetic. After all, I was a teenage space activist. I grew up
>high on the miracle of Apollo and the wonders of Clarke's 2001 My high-school friends
>and I felt part of a community of smart, forward-looking space and technology freaks.
>We flocked to grok Spock at science fiction conventions, and we eagerly joined the L5
>Society, which is committed to beginning the human migration to space. L5痿蚤
>stable point in empty space where the gravities of Earth and Moon are balanced, so
>objects, including space colonies, will stay put forever痿背as where we would
>build the first colony. We thought that we might live up there as adults. Our slogan
>then was "L5 in '95!"
>
>Yet the disconnect between my youthful space idealism and at least some of today's
>more zealous advocates of the "humans to Mars" movement became evident when I
>attended the "Ethics of Terraforming" panel discussion at the founding convention of
>the Mars Society, held in Boulder, Colo., in August 1998. This event was hailed as
>the "Woodstock of Mars," and although there wasn't any rolling in the mud, there may
>have been some bad acid in the water supply, judging from some of the loose talk
>spilling from the stage.
>
>Bob Zubrin, Mars Society President, stated that mankind has a duty to terraform Mars,
>that given the choice between letting Mars remain the sorry planet that it is and
>transforming it in Earth's image, we have a moral obligation to do the latter. He
>added that it is the Western tradition to expand continually and to value humans
>above nature, that "this is the only system of values that has created a society
>worth living in."
>
>These comments were amplified by panelist Lowell Wood, an architect of Reagan-era
>"Star Wars" space-based weapons plans. Wood stated confidently that terraforming Mars
>will happen in the 21st century. "It is the manifest destiny of the human race!" he
>declared and went on to boast, "In this country we are the builders of new worlds. In
>this country we took a raw wilderness and turned it into the shining city on the hill
>of our world." To hell with terraforming: It seemed that we were discussing the
>Ameriforming of Mars.
>
>Hearing these words, my heart sank. Is this really the way we want to frame our
>dreams of inhabiting Mars? Maybe these guys are simply not aware of the historical
>use of this phrase and its negative connotations, I thought. This hope vanished when
>Zubrin leapt to the defense of Manifest Destiny, shouting, "By developing the
>American West we have created a place that millions of Mexicans are trying to get
>into!" to a smattering of applause (and some gasps of disbelief) from the crowd.
>
>Zubrin has written that we need to go to Mars because it will serve the same function
>that "pioneering the West" did for American civilization, creating jobs and
>opportunity and relieving population pressure. If there were an award for "most
>unfortunate choice of analogies," this should win. It is historically inaccurate,
>culturally clueless, and fails to capture some of the most compelling reasons why we
>really should consider someday bringing Mars to life by inhabiting it and perhaps
>eventually altering its environment with (and for) living creatures.
>
>As of this writing, Mars has no people to be displaced. A better analogy is the
>original peopling of the Earth. The Mars colonists will be more like those brave
>souls first venturing from Africa 50,000 years ago than the European invaders of the
>American West. On Mars and beyond, we may have the opportunity to explore lands that
>are truly unoccupied, giving outlet to our need to explore without trampling on
>others.
>
>Of course, it's possible that Mars is already inhabited by some kind of creature, and
>that could radically change the ethical landscape for future human activities.
>Perhaps some primitive bacteria, or the Martian equivalent, are living large in an
>underground hot spring, safe from the dry, freezing, irradiated surface. This is why
>we need to first proceed with our current robotic explorers, to make sure that Mars,
>today, really is as dead as it looks.
>
>If it is, then bringing life there痿派umans, trees, fish, and slime-mold,
>say痿背ill be the right thing to do. Why? If you find an unused, vacant lot,
>isn't it worthwhile to plant a garden there? Furthermore, as long as we are a
>single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe,
>natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live
>long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
>
>Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot "conquer" a planet,
>even if痿覇specially if痿琶t is your home and your life support system.
>If we go to Mars with the idea that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our
>efforts are doomed. We should rather study how we might learn to help cultivate a
>Martian Biosphere that is balanced and self-sustaining, as is the Earth's. (On the
>other hand, the conquering mentality would save us time and money. We could skip
>planting the Martian forests, which would eventually be chopped down anyway, and go
>straight to sprawling developments of condos, strip malls, Starbucks, and Blockbuster
>Videos.)
>
>But the future peopling of Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step
>of historic and spiritual importance for the human race. Any group that seeks to
>garner support for human journeys to Mars must reassure people that this goal is
>broadly humanistic and environmentally conscientious. There is no reason why this
>can't be the case. The fanatical comments quoted above do not represent the majority
>view of Mars Society members; some are credible, thoughtful activists with an
>inclusive vision more likely to win wide support for continued Mars exploration. I
>hope they succeed in burying the "pioneering the West" analogy before it does any
>more damage to the cause. While we're at it, let's retire the word "colonization,"
>which carries a permanent stain, and talk instead about the "cultivation" or
>"animation" or "peopling" of Mars. I know that some of you Mars hounds will dismiss
>the above as a bunch of PC nonsense. Fine, but it's your movement that is not yet
>taki!
ng the world by storm.
>
>Some extremists have even proposed that we "claim" Mars for the United States,
>although there is a U.N. (remember them?) treaty that expressly forbids this. Many
>others have been engaged, at Mars Society conventions, in thoughtful discussions
>about what kind of governing constitution would be appropriate for the first
>settlements beyond the Earth.
>
>Is Mars ours for the taking? Do we have a right to it? Not to be too Clintonian, but
>the answer may depend on what we mean by "we." Mars does not belong to "America," nor
>to Earth, nor to human beings. But if by "we," we mean "life," then yes, Mars belongs
>to us because this universe belongs to life. I mean, without us, what's the point?
>But before we go there and set up greenhouses, dance clubs, and falafel stands, let's
>make sure that, in some subtle form that could be harmed by the human hubbub, life
>does not already exist there. If not, then by all means build cities, plant forests
>and fill lakes and streams with trout痿巴ring life to Mars and Mars to life.
>We'll then be the Martians we've been dreaming about for all these years.
>
>David Grinspoon, a NASA-funded scientist, is the author of Lonely Planets: The
>Natural Philosophy of Alien Life.
>
>http://www.funkyscience.net/index.html
>
>Photograph of Mars exploration vehicle Rover from NASA/Agence France-Presse.
>
>
==
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