Kim Stanley Robinson on why we're earth-bound

Aslı Kemiksiz and Casper Bruun Jensen interview Kim Stanley Robinson.

KSR: It has not been a program on my part, but just a matter of taking it one story at a time. Maybe it’s revealing that I find these stories interesting. Mars is the main example for me, and that came about because of my interests in wilderness and utopia, science and history, all combining with the revealing of the next planet out by way of the Mariner and Viking missions. Those robotic explorations gave us so much new information about Mars that the first response was a kind of science fiction story from scientists themselves (just as Percival Lowell generated a science fiction story from his data, 70 years earlier)—the new notion that Mars might be amenable to terraforming. I took that as a way to write what was both science fiction and metaphor or allegory, or a kind of modeling by miniaturization or what Jameson called ‘world reduction’—Martian society would be smaller and thus simpler, and it would be very obviously revealed to be necessarily also a place where people were actively engaged in making the biophysical substrate that we need to live. All this was analogous enough to our situation on Earth that I found it the right story to tell at that time.

Aurora (2015) was an attempt to explain why that same process of terraformation and human inhabitation that might work on Mars would not work outside this solar system, for reasons the novel tried to dramatize. The problems of alien life being possibly dangerous, while a dead world would need terraforming without much physical force being available to apply to the project; also, the sheer magnitude of distance from Earth, and the resulting huge gulfs of time needed to get anywhere, or to terraform a dead world once we got there—all these were points that needed to be made in a case I had become convinced of, that we are stuck in our solar system and aren’t going to be leaving it. So that was a completely different kind of project, although obviously it does shine light from a different angle on the difficulties of terraforming even Mars, where now we are not sure if it is alive or dead (when I wrote my Mars novel it was agreed it was dead), nor does it seem to have enough volatiles to make terraformation possible.

Then the moon is different again—too small and volatile-free to be terraformed, and thus just a rock in space, a place for moon bases perhaps, but not for habitation as we usually think of it. Most of the solar system is like the moon in this; Mars is an anomaly. So the full consideration of possibilities leads to the conclusion that there is no Planet B for us, although Mars might be made such over thousands of years, perhaps. But for the most part, these stories have together convinced me that we co-evolved with Earth and are a planetary expression that needs to fit in with the rest of the biosphere here, that we have no other choice about that—and this is an important story for science fiction to tell, given there are so many other kinds of science fiction stories saying otherwise.