I think I’ve figured out how [to/I] think about space travel

A week ago I posted, Space Travel: What we have here is a failure of imagination. That was in response to a discussion of the topic at Crooked Timber, No planet but this one. The discussion has gone on since then, but the basic ‘battle lines’, if you will, had been drawn. On one extreme: We’ll do it all, journey to the stars faster-than-light, colonize the galaxies! At the other: No way, no how, never! Too inhospitable, too expensive! Various positions in between and me in the middle, trying to figure out what I thought. One thing I thought is that the vehement negative extreme bothered me more than loopy positive one. Why? Perhaps because unqualified optimism is a better way to proceed into an uncertain future and killjoy defeatism.

Here’s what I’m thinking: Yes, of course, there are limitations, always have been and always will be. But, we don’t really know what they are, not until we’ve tested them. And we’re a long way from having done that.

At this point the value of manned spaceflight, much less a Mars landing and a colony, is imaginative, not practical. Whatever we need to do in space, for practical reasons (mining the asteroids?) or scientific, can best be done with robots and AI. Let’s give them a workout. There are better things to be done on earth with the 100s of billions of dollars that would be required to even attempt colonies on the Moon or Mars.

For at least the next century, and probably more, we’ve got to deal climate change first of all. And we’ve got to do that at the same time we cope with international economic inequity. Everyone has to be lifted out of poverty to roughly the same level of material comfort. That requires economic growth.

It may also require adjustment to the earth’s total population. Here and there I’ve read of guestimates that the population will stabilize at 10-11 billion by mid-century. Assuming that is so, can the earth sustain that population in reasonable material comfort? That’s not at all obvious to me. Maybe we’ll have to slim down to 2-3 billion. That will be painful. At worst, catastrophically painful (environmental collapse, large scale possibly nuclear war). If not that, then several generations of suppressed reproduction.

Assume this all works out so that in a century or two (maybe three, post a New York 2140 stage) we have established equitable and sustainable arrangements. That would certainly include more effective means of international governance. I think an international government, a United States of the World, unlikely. It’s quite possible nation-states as we know them will cease to exist or will have become shells, with more power devolving on cities, plus new arrangements we don’t yet imagine.

We’ll also know a lot more about many things than we do now, including about computation and the mind. We’ll be in a post-Singularity world, not the fantasy nonsense of superintelligent machines, but a world in which our understanding has gone up a level as, say, Newton’s understanding surpassed Galileo’s.*

That’s the world I’m imagining. And in THAT world human space travel will still be on the imaginative table. It will still require heroic effort to establish colonies on the Moon, among the asteroids, on Mars, perhaps even beyond. But we’ll be living in a different world. What will we think then?

* William Benzon, Redefining the Coming Singularity – It’s not what you think, New Savanna, May 16, 2017, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/09/redefining-coming-singularity-its-not.html. Downloadable version, https://www.academia.edu/8847096/Redefining_the_Coming_Singularity_It_s_not_what_you_think.