Just Look Up

You don’t need to clean your room to leave it; we don't need to fix the world to look beyond it.

I’d recently returned to my hometown after one of my long sojourns abroad, and while wandering down the main street decided to pop into the local independent bookstore to check in on the place. Behind the counter was a recently minted PhD holder I’d known for some years, having undertaken my own studies at approximately the same time as him. He was a humble, slight, soft-spoken, stoop-shouldered guy with a shaven head and spectacles ... the very picture of the young intellectual. We’d always been on good terms, and after chatting for a bit decided on grabbing a beer at a local pub when his shift was done.

He’d done his doctorate in the Cultural Studies program, a sort of catch-all degree in which the name of the game was applying critical theory to any topic the student chose, with wide latitude given to what constituted dissertation-level work. Initially I’d found the concept intriguing, having always liked the idea of maximal intellectual and creative freedom. In retrospect I understood it to be a vanity studies degree dreamt up by post-modern Marxists as a means of training up cadre for the culture war.

He’d chosen as his subject matter science fiction, with some sort of connection to indigeneity or some such fashionably justicicy intersectionalism. I don’t really know; I never read it, and don’t care to. The purpose of such documents is not to be read, nor is it to generate knowledge or otherwise advance scholarship. They are confessional documents, intended to demonstrate to the panel that the student has successfully internalized the core precepts of the para-religion of critical theory and social justice. In any case, we’d connected over his interest in sci-fi, that also being a long-standing passion of my own. Inevitably, our conversation turned to interesting novels we’d come across over the last few years. We’d both read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and he asked my opinion on it. I hadn’t liked it at all, which surprised him, and he asked why.

Robinson is best known for his Mars trilogy – Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars – which as the names of the three books imply concern the settlement and terraforming of the red planet. The Mars trilogy is widely and justifiably seen as a masterpiece, deftly weaving together geophysics, ecology, and plausible extrapolations of space exploration, with sociological speculation and psychology to tell a generational epic that erases the distinction between hard science fiction (focusing on the technical and scientific mechanics of the future) and soft science fiction (stories with an anthropological or sociological focus).

Aurora tells the story of a generation ship carrying colonists to Tau Ceti. The colonists spend the first part of the novel putting out various ecological fires as their ship slowly breaks down towards the end of its voyage. They’re not all happy to be on board: they’re present by no choice of their own, their ancestors having committed them to their interstellar aluminum terrarium before they were born, and the protagonist in particular often wishes she’d been born on the fabled paradise of Earth instead. Upon their arrival around Tau Ceti, their attempt to settle the water-world moon of a super-Earth is rapidly thwarted by a local microbial nasty that neither their immune systems nor their medical instruments can recognize much less fight. After a brief and bloody civil war, the colonists divide the ship in two, with half of them staying behind to attempt settlement of an airless moon of a gas giant, and the other half trying for a desperate return to the solar system for which their vessel was never intended. Contact is quickly lost with those who remain, the final message reporting the failure of some critical life support element. On the way back the ship’s ecology breaks down entirely, and the surviving colonists make it back to Earth only after cryosleep is developed, which enables them to get around the collapse in their food supply. The protagonist then spends the last quarter of the novel or so getting to know the Earth, in the context of helping to repair the damage done by melting ice caps.

The novel was well written, and in true Kim Stanley Robinson fashion the technical and scientific details were thoroughly and carefully researched. As a purely literary creation, it was excellent. And yet, it left a foul taste in my mouth. As I explained to my drinking buddy, the core message of the work seemed to be that the exploration of space was folly – that we are not meant for the stars, or even the other planets; that our proper place is and only ever will be the planet of our gestation; and that our proper focus of attention should not be heroic expansion into infinite space, but sessile stewardship of the Earth.

My friend took the precise opposite view. Space exploration, he said, was in the modern moment, a folly. We have so many problems here on Earth, he explained, that it is our responsibility to address those problems before shirking them for adventures on the high frontier.

The best argument that I could come up with at the moment was that this was to misunderstand the advantages to be gained from settlement of heaven. Technologies developed for space exploration, for example, have already had dramatic, and often unexpected, benefits for life on Earth – communications and weather satellites being the most obvious examples, but also including things such as advanced composites.

“But,” he replied, “Social justice is also a technology.”

He said this with his eyes shining with the beatific certainty of the true believer, radiating a religious bliss that annihilated any chance of fruitful contradiction.

A chill went down my spine.

I think it was in that moment that I truly realized the nature and magnitude of the memetic threat to our civilization. Before that I’d sensed it dimly, intimating it in the non-sequiters of privilege-obsessed graduate students demanding that all conversations revolve about the intersectional axis of the oppressions of race, sex, sexuality, and gender; I’d heard it in the howling Internet mobs that had even then started to collect scalps. But this was the first time I’d seen it for what it was: a new and perverse spirituality of soulessness, so deeply committed to its inverted ideals that it would sacrifice everything our species had built since the neolithic and do so with the calm contentment of a Hindu cow.

I finished my beer, made my excuses, and left.

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This notion that we should fix the problems of the Earth before making a serious commitment to establishing a permanent, self-sustaining, and profitable human presence in space is nearly as old as the space program itself. It is utter folly. It is akin to saying that one must ensure one’s room is spotlessly clean before one leaves the room, and thereby becoming a hikikomori because of course, one’s room is never really perfectly clean. It reflects not a correct ordering of priorities, but a pathological insistence that one particular priority take such absolute precedence over any others that the others are completely neglected. Life does not work like that. Virtually everything we do is necessarily done only partially, left incomplete; we have many responsibilities in life, many balls to keep in the air, and to focus exclusively on one of them is to find oneself tossing it up and down as the rest clatter to the floor.

The European explorers and settlers of the Age of Exploration did not wait for Europe’s numerous and severe social, economic, and diplomatic problems to be resolved before setting out for the New World. Had they done so, Europeans would never have ventured beyond the continent’s western shoreline, for the simple reason that resolving such problems to perfection is always impossible. No doubt, the social justiciars would be only too thrilled to inhabit that alternate reality, in which technology had never advanced beyond muscle power; in which corsairs still raided the Mediterranean coast for slaves; in which the priests of Huitzilopochtli still greeted the rising sun with beating hearts ripped with flint knives from the chests of captives taken in war; in which China still lay in dreaming quietude under Manchu solipsism. Without the psychic shock provided by confrontation with the alien societies of the New World, the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment would never have happened; without the influx of wealth provided by empire, the industrial revolution would not have been possible; without Enlightenment thought and industrial technology, science would never have blossomed into the systematic, large-scale exploration of nature it has become. The bulk of the world’s populace would be illiterate peasants, living short and malnourished lives, shackled to the earth from which their great-grandparents had come as surely as the grain it was their hereditary lot in life to sow and reap.

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In 2021, the US government spent $54.6 billion on space exploration. NASA’s share of this was $24 billion, with the remainder going to various private contractors. Total global expenditure is about $96 billion.

That sounds like a lot. It isn’t.

The US federal budget for fiscal year 2022 was somewhat over $6 trillion. In other words, the US spends about 0.9% of its budget on space exploration. Compare this to the amount lavished on the military, $715 billion or 13x as much as on space (not counting allocations from the $1.6 trillion discretionary budget, a significant fraction of which finances America’s various overseas adventures); or on servicing interest on the national debt, which is about 8% of the budget or almost 9x as much as space; or on entitlements such as medicare, social security, disability, other forms of welfare, housing and urban development, and so on, which collectively account for around half of the budget on any given year – or about 55x as much as is spent on space.

Any objective analysis of the budgetary priorities of the United States suggests that my friend’s desire – that attention be focused on terrestrial problems before we make a serious effort to industrialize the solar system – is already being satisfied. A considerable fraction of the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget are poured into the black hole of welfare, education, and housing for America’s minority populations ... a two-generation project that has so far utterly failed to bring the supposed goal of uplifting those populations out of poverty any closer than it was when Lyndon B. Johnson announced his Great Society. The remainder of the entitlement budget is lavished on baby boomers, seemingly hellbent on ensuring that they extract every bit of wealth from society that they can before they die, spending their golden years as they spent their youth: hedonistically and with no care for what happens after they die.

It has not always been thus. Looking at historical budget data, NASA’s budget has hovered at or below (almost always below) 1% of US federal spending since about 1970. The exception to this was between 1963 and 1969, when NASA’s budget ranged from around 2% to a high of 4.4% of the budget. It doesn’t seem accidental that NASA’s sole great accomplishment, great in the sense not just of a merely technical feat but in that the imaginations of young men and poets alike are set afire by it, was achieved at the end of this period – that is to say, the landing on human beings on the first, and so far only, extraterrestrial body on which man has so far set foot.

When Nixon came to power, NASA’s founder, the visionary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, was planning a rotating orbital station, a manned Moon base, and an expedition to Mars, the latter to be propelled by a revolutionary nuclear-thermal rocket – the NERVA engine, a working prototype of which NASA had already developed. Nixon, instead, cut NASA’s budget to the bone, forced von Braun out, and replaced him with a time-serving bureaucrat who administered NASA like any other overly cautious government jobs program whose primary purpose was to provide a cushy life for government bureaucrats. The NERVA was left to rust in an open field. The Apollo program was cancelled, and the institutional knowledge necessary to build the mighty Saturn V was lost. NASA focused on developing the space shuttle, intended to be a low-cost, reusable ferry for the construction of a space station that was never built; the space shuttle itself went the way of every bureaucratic project, coming in late, over budget, and lacking most of the capabilities the original design had called for.

The result is that humans have spent the last 50 years paddling around in the shallow end of the great dark deep, sending out the occasional cautious robotic probe, but doing nothing of great consequence ... nothing capable of setting the soul on fire. With time, many came to believe that Apollo had never happened, that the whole thing had been movie magic on Stanley Kubrick’s sound stage. To imagine it was all a dream is less painful, perhaps, than to face the reality that we reached for greatness, flinched, and lost our nerve.

When confronted with their failure to do anything notable following Apollo, defenders of the space program will protest that space is hard. And this is true. It is. Just getting to and surviving in space, let alone settling and taming it, stretches the technical, biological, and psychological capacities of our species to their very limits. Establishing a permanent human presence – mining the Moon for He-3 and the asteroids for minerals, building refineries to turn ore into alloy, factories to transform alloy into habitats, engines, and ships, solar collectors to gather energy – requires a gargantuan up-front investment that will take decades to turn a profit. The eyes of private investors water when they contemplate such a project; only the state is capable of marshalling the resources over the length of time required for such a grand project to bear fruit.

However, when the profits start to flow, they will be immense.

The mineral wealth of individual asteroids is frequently estimated in the hundreds of trillions of dollars; the lowest-hanging fruit, the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu¹, is estimated to be capable of yielding a profit of over $30 billion. Obviously, as mineral wealth pours in from the asteroid mines, the market value of minerals will fall – that’s inevitable, when the scarce becomes abundant. Yet the material wealth of society is not measured in numbers on a spreadsheet, but by the resources available to it. The scarce becoming abundant is the real meaning of wealth.

Importantly, most of the cost of orbital development is in actually getting to orbit. Once there, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system. Once the facilities to not just go to space, but to acquire resources and refine them into finished products in space, are in place, the costs of further development fall dramatically. Space is a steep cliff to climb, but a long, flat plateau once you’re there.

What would it mean for metal to become cheaper than plastic? For space-based solar power stations to beam their gigawatt hours down to the surface? How would our social mood change, not just with access to this wealth, but with the awareness that there is endlessly more to be had … not just more than enough to go around, but more than we could even need?

Resources are always limited; every choice of how to allocate our time and energy is always accompanied by an opportunity cost – the cost of not doing what we chose not to do. Over the last 50 years, we’ve chosen to put the bulk of our resources into social justice programs: feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, welfare for single mothers, education in the inner cities, and the rest of dem programs. None of these are, or are even in principle capable of becoming, productive. As investments they are a raging inferno that burns our economic surplus to ashes. To put it in Christian terms, we have chosen to give men fish, rather than teaching them to fish ... chosen to redistribute resources, rather than expand the available resources.

There’s no question that we have plenty of problems here on Earth. By choosing to obsess about the problems to the exclusion of all else, the problems have proved themselves insoluble. If anything, they’re more pressing now than they were before. How different would the situation be if, instead, we’d poured our economic surplus into investment on the high frontier? If, at this point, we had the extensive orbital infrastructure we were so sure was just around the corner at the dawn of the space age ... if there were thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of men and women working and living in space, gathering vast quantities of wealth to enrich everyone still at home on the Earth? How different would society be if our young men, rather than aspiring to being entertainers or athletes or social media influencers or financial system parasites, looked to heroism on the dusty plains of Mars or the icy reaches of Europa?

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Recently, over drinks with an old friend, I was debating with him the necessity of crippling our economy in the name of saving the climate. Surely, he insisted, we have to scale back our use of resources – there isn’t enough stuff on the Earth to support humanity’s billions at the level at which Westerners have become accustomed. Rather than the majority of the species groaning in poverty while a few enjoy plenty, it’s better for all to subsist at the edge of discomfort ... especially when the climate may be destroyed by our continued selfish profligacy.

I simply pointed up.

Get Telegrams From Barsoom

1. Recently visited by the Japanese probe Hayabusa2, and that’s no accident