Australias in Space

As far as space settlements go, I think we could do much worse: Space pioneers look to Australia’s colonial past

While the images from popular movies, television shows and books tend to shape most people’s concept of space travel, the research team has now boldly gone where no researchers have gone before.

In an attempt to come up with scenarios for what they say is the inevitable colonisation of other worlds, they have analysed attitudes toward space exploration.

Dr Toni Johnson-Woods says she and her colleagues found there is a prevailing belief that other planets and their natural resources are there simply to be exploited.

“The focus is on exploitation of the minerals. Basically, it’s just Australia all over again,” she said.

“You go out like the British did to Australia, you take everything you bloody can out of a place, and then you ping off.”

She says the “spirit of exploration” that has marked the space age appears to have given way to thinking that is closer to that of pre-20th century colonialism.

“There’s also an idea that there’s nothing already on Mars, which I presume there isn’t, in the same way that Australia had that terra nullius, like there’s nothing in Australia, so, ‘we’re just going to go there, take what we need and leave’,” she said.

Huh…last time I checked, Australia wasn’t a mined-out, barren, uninhabited wasteland, it was a thriving, prosperous nation. Eh, what do I know…

It’s easy to dismiss Dr. Johnson-Woods’ findings as the same old anti-space luddism that’s been with us since hippies discovered the logical end of their fraternity of flower-power in knee-jerk technophobia and universal misanthropy. What makes it especially easy to dismiss is the lack of information presented on methodology — we’re told that her “team” has “analyzed attitudes towards space exploration”, but the how is left open. We’re left ignorant as to whether this research consisted of in-depth surveys of space settlement advocates, exhaustive analyses of scientific and engineering publications, or merely a gaggle of postmodernist literature criticism undergrads sitting around at a coffeehouse at UQ sharing their unexamined “conventional wisdom” about the ostensibly dire state of this planet and how it illustrates Man’s unfitness to join the cosmic community until he learns the proper care and feeding of celestial bodies. I suspect the “research” consisted more of the latter, given that Johnson-Woods’ academic background is non-scientific, and even there is not in one of the “soft” disciplines like sociology or anthropology which might offer some useful insights into the humanism of space settlement.

But let’s look at what else the article has to say:

The researchers concluded that the digging up and processing of minerals is likely to be a factor driving future planetary colonisation and Dr John Cokley says that is where Australia’s experiences could provide valuable lessons…

Dr Cokley says the social and environmental mistakes made during the opening up of Australia – and in particular its rugged mining regions – could serve as examples of how not to establish communities in space.

Oh…you mean…we might actually be capable of learning something from past mistakes and excesses, and we humans might not be hardwired to rape and pillage the environment for our own trivial amusement? Who knew? (Evidently not the “Trashy Fiction of the 19th Century” majors Dr. Johnson-Woods consulted for her study.)

Seriously, though, there is an important ethical and economic question here: have we learned from the excesses of past periods of colonization? I would say the answer is an obvious “yes” (after all, we’re reminded every damned day about the inescapable existential guilt of the West by our moral proctors in the mainstream media, and frequently get our noses rubbed in the “horrific legacy of colonialism” by those prim and earnest scholars of the international intelligentsia who in contrast see nothing wrong with representing or at the very least defending the world’s most thuggish dictatorships and shameless kleptocracies — how could we not have learned by now what those mistakes were, or the incessant nagging and whining that would be the price to pay were we to forget those lessons for an instant?), but that most of those lessons will be irrelevant to space settlement.

The primary lessons to be learned from past colonial periods can be lumped together under a single, general commandment: “Be nice to the natives“. The obvious and traditional aspect of this amounts to: Don’t kill or enslave the local sentients, and don’t convert them to your religion or culture against their will. But if there aren’t any local sentients, this aspect doesn’t apply, and need not be considered further until that distant day when we might again encounter members of an alien (in this case extraterrestrial) culture.

The more trendy application nowadays is: To hell with the sentients, don’t change the local natural environment in any way whatsoever. It would be accurate if somewhat flippant to also say this doesn’t apply to space settlement, because the concept of “natural environment” commonly used on Earth also doesn’t to our current knowledge apply in any meaningful way to any planet in the solar system (let alone asteroids or free space). So far as we know, there is no “nature” anywhere but on Earth, in the sense of the sum of the biological activity in a given area. Trivially, no biology = no nature.

“Ahah,” an environmentalist might say, “but it’s not only life that defines and environment”. And that is true — nature or “the environment” includes the geographical surroundings, including the non-living elements. Here, too, attitudes have changed over the past century. Where once the American West was considered a useless wasteland, it is now seen as a unique repository of beauty, valuable in itself. We have come to value the natural environment (living and nonliving elements alike) for aesthetic reasons, and have a better appreciation for what could be lost if we disregard the broader effects of our activities. Nowadays the balance is often tilted much too far towards the inviolability of nature, and as the history of protecting Yellowstone shows protection itself is sometimes as damaging as development, but the point is that we have indeed learned from past excesses to take the aesthetic effects on the environment into account. This is promising, because it is this aspect of the natural environment on other bodies that space settlement is most likely to affect.

So where does economics come into play? Aside from the aesthetics-based objections, the major environmental concerns with development on Earth are with the byproducts of industrial activity (pollution) and with the using up of certain limited resources (and especially the concentrated stores of those resources available in the natural environment). There is little if anything that we can use directly from the environment in supporting a space settlement, particularly on a planetary surface. There are no forests, no wild game, not even freely available water…or air, for that matter. As for mining in particular, the very different geological processes on the Moon and Mars will probably have done less to concentrate valuable elements in ore bodies rich enough to mine economically with technology commonly used on Earth. In short, everything required to live on another planet (or asteroid, or free space settlement) will have to be extracted or manufactured, if it isn’t simply imported from elsewhere. The costs involved will drive settlers to “everything but the oink” efficiency, and will spur the development of new technologies for increasing that efficiency (phytoextraction, for instance — it makes economic sense to use the bioaccumulation properties of certain plants for pollution remediation since you’re dealing there with a diffuse source, but not for “mining” of most elements since other, richer sources are available — but on the Moon or Mars, diffuse sources may be all you have to work with, which changes the economics). Given the lack of cheaper or richer alternatives readily available in the environment, every waste stream becomes a potential resource. To simply dump polluted water or industrial waste into a nearby crater would be irresponsible stewardship, it’s true, but even worse it would be a squandering of valuable resources vital to the settlement’s economic viability.

Clearly Dr. Johnson-Woods’ study doesn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps space settlement advocates do see a future of mining space…but they see that as a part — one part — of building a new branch of civilization, much as Australia has over the past two centuries become not a sterile desert of worked-out mineshafts and abandoned tailing piles but a self-sustaining, economically powerful branch of Western Civilization.