Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  There is another body of literature that can further inform our thinking about how to explore space and how to pay for it: science fiction. The future of space exploration, and especially the exploration of Mars in the twenty-first century, can be informed, if not inspired, by a study of both the history of exploration and the science fiction of exploration.[12] We find public-private funding models for exploring space in many novels. Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953) is a key example and offers the classic, genre-defining account of the commercialization of space exploration and colonization. Its singeing critique of Libertarian ideology, advertising-driven consumerism, and the exploitation of labor and the environment was remarkably prescient. The idea of space colonization being dominated by corporations persists also in visions of our future on Mars. Terry Bisson’s Voyage to the Red Planet (1990) is an overt science fictional satire of a privatized journey to Mars where NASA has become a subsidiary of Disney.[13] Ben Bova’s Mars (1992) and Return to Mars (1999) see the protagonist travel to the Red Planet first on an international mission and then on a privately funded expedition. In Jeff Garrity’s novel Mars Girl (2008), the first landing on Mars is satirized as an extreme media event where television ratings and product placement matter as much as the explorers’ survival and discoveries. Karl Schroeder’s short story in this volume follows the same path: imagining how the exploration and exploitation of Mars could be funded by private money.

  If exploration is about people and money, then it must include a concern with people’s bodies, keeping explorers safe. John F. Kennedy spoke to the U.S. Congress in May 1961 of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” This same goal applies now, in fact and fiction, to any crewed mission to Mars, as the surprise popularity of Andy Weir’s rescue novel The Martian (2011) and its film adaptation (2015) demonstrate. The main challenge to keeping the astronauts safe is the problem of coping with extreme, if not lethal, environments; humans are built to live on Earth and nowhere else. Even on Earth, the shared challenge of the explorers of the past was how to make their bodies survive the trip. At times, everything was against them as they pushed the extreme environments of the Earth: heat, cold, altitude, depth, and the lack of food and water. One might wonder, “Is the human body really is the best tool to explore other worlds?” Frederik Pohl explored this in Man Plus (1976), where the exploration of Mars is undertaken by human cyborgs specifically built to survive the Martian environment—no need for building habitats and spacesuits to keep the explorers in little Earth-like bubbles. But as Pohl illustrates, we cannot ignore the consequences for the altered human who has become “of Mars” and no longer “of Earth.” More recent works such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars (1996), James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes (2011), and Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon (2015) also examine the idea that settling other worlds is, physiologically, a one-way trip. Of all the people involved in exploration, it’s the explorers who embody the risk, who feel the new environments around them. The diaries of explorers such as Humboldt, Livingstone, and Darwin detail the effects the journey is having on their bodies and minds. They want to return safely, but they will not return the same.

  In Karl Schroeder’s story, “The Baker of Mars,” the problem of human physiology has been solved by telepresence. Mars is being developed slowly by technicians, prospectors who operate robots remotely from Earth so that the infrastructure to support human life is ready whenever the colonists get there. The prospectors’ concessions are areas of the Martian surface leased to them, with everyone hoping for a future payoff. In “The Baker of Mars,” what is for sale are the rights to exclusively exploit parts of Mars, rights supposedly underwritten by government support through enforceable contracts. The problem posed is that it becomes unclear how anyone’s investment in an “unowned” space can pay off without simply claiming it. But in this story, and in real life, any attempt to claim parts of Mars is forbidden by the long-standing 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The tension of the story is apparent almost immediately: how to coordinate all this activity and protect investment when no one owns anything and when the potential return on investment lies far into the future. The answer provided in the story is that Mars owns itself, and through the mysterious creation of self-governing common-pool resources that are represented by an advanced, near-AI, interactive avatar, Mars can be developed without resorting to ancient techniques such as the extension of sovereignty through a colonial system, the creation of new sovereign states on Mars, chartered companies, or various forms of public-private partnerships.[14]

  At the beginning of the era of European expansion on Earth, this problem of protecting long-term investments in newly explored areas was acute. In response, financial institutions innovated and European states sponsored chartered companies, giving them special, often exclusive, rights over specific types of trade in certain parts of the world.[15] Good examples are the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the British South Africa Company. Chartered companies such as these exerted state-like powers in places such as Canada, India, Java, Mozambique, and Rhodesia. They effectively controlled all the resources, and people, in the areas they possessed. Their investments were secure for only as long as the local population collaborated, or was subjugated, and profits could be found. They could protect their exclusive rights and profits by force, if necessary. Science fiction has often resurrected the chartered company idea in its stories—hegemonic companies operating off-world loom large in films such as Alien (1979), Outland (1981), Blade Runner (1982), and in James S. A. Corey’s ongoing novel series The Expanse (from 2011).[16] In his novel Red Mars (1993), Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the early settlement of Mars as overseen by an authoritarian United Nations Organization Mars Authority (UNOMA) while Earth falls under the control of transnational corporations with state-like powers. Schroeder’s technological vision for the exploitation of Martian resources veers from these traditional models, but fact is catching up with fiction when it comes to the commercialization of space and the problem of property.

  On 25 November 2015, the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act was signed by President Obama in order to encourage the private sector to develop outer space resources with the guarantee that their investments would be protected under U.S. law. With the passing of this law, the United States has declared that its citizens are legally entitled to own anything they extract from celestial objects, such as the Moon, asteroids, or Mars, but they cannot claim sovereignty over or ownership of the celestial object itself. Part of the rationale for the new law was to rectify a problem in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states clearly that celestial bodies are not appropriable, but also acknowledges that private entities can perform space activities.[17]

  When such private entrepreneurs become involved in the exploration and exploitation of Mars, the issue of private property arises almost immediately.[18] The proceeds and profits of private investment must benefit the investors. Here we see that Schroeder’s fiction is not so far from fact. How the eventual resources of space might be exploited commercially, and legally, is a very real concern. With the new law, the U.S. is asserting private property rights for its citizens in space. This raises interesting questions about sovereignty in space and some worry the legislation will destabilize the “fragile equilibrium” that has existed since 1967.[19] The act of appropriating land on celestial bodies seems to require that a sovereign authority is endorsing it, or that a “new sovereignty” has been created.[20] We can therefore see why the U.S. was so careful to state that they are only endorsing the rights of U.S. citizens to claim extracted resources, not celestial bodies. Nonetheless, without some sort of guarantee to property in space and on celestial bodies, the private investment that appears necessary for humanity’s next move into space will not occur.[21]

  In offering a solution to allow secure investment off-world, the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 must be understoo
d as only the first part of a much bigger story. The very geography of economic activity looks set to change, especially when we accept that most space resources will only be useful in space—for example, using lunar water resources to supply Martian exploration. Bringing them back to Earth, or any other steep gravity well, would be a cost-prohibitive process of questionable utility, so we are talking about property rights in material value chains that may never include Earth.[22] Moreover, given the rapid advances in robotics and virtual reality, Schroeder’s story is not far-fetched at all. Outer space and its “astropolitics” are now part of everyone’s daily lives, as Fraser MacDonald argues.[23] If pilots can fly drones to wage war over the Middle East from an air-conditioned base in Nevada, and remote-control rovers have been exploring Mars for 20 years, how much more difficult can it be to control construction robots on Mars, once they are there? Schroeder’s story of conflict over Martian resources before any humans ever step foot on Mars may be just around the corner.

  It now becomes clear why, in “The Baker of Mars,” that the story must end up in New York, at the United Nations. A meeting is held to discuss who owns Mars, and in attendance are government officials, various corporate representatives, and the “homesteaders.” The exploration and early exploitation of Mars has required human effort and financial capital on a global scale, and everyone wants to know what will happen to the investments. We can compare Schroeder’s fictional meeting to the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884–85, when the European powers sat down and decided that they all had interests in the last great terra nullius (for them), Africa. In Berlin, they agreed how they would partition and exploit the continent without stepping on one another’s toes and starting a war.[24] The Africans themselves had very little say in the matter, but trading companies, explorers, miners, missionaries, and other European special interests certainly did; the goal in Berlin was the same as at Schroeder’s meeting: to avoid expensive conflicts and secure investments. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, was similarly devised to forestall Cold War conflicts over what remains the last “unowned” land on Earth today.[25] In fiction, Robinson’s Blue Mars (1996) details a constitutional congress that sets up a government for dealing with conflicts over scant Martian resources. The lessons of history and fiction show us that an agreement concerning the fate of Mars is inevitable. Once we can live on Mars we will need to deal with the consequences. Steam engines and quinine dramatically changed the terms upon which Europeans approached Africa in the late nineteenth century; they partitioned Africa because these innovations allowed them to travel there and not die of malaria. Schroeder argues that telepresence and blockchain technology will similarly alter and enable our approach to Mars—offering new solutions to the age-old problems of people and money but also creating new social, political, and diplomatic challenges.

  By grounding his fictional account in the near future, Schroeder has provided food for thought about how the exploration, exploitation, and eventual colonization of Mars may begin. There is no doubt that getting humans to Mars will be complicated for all kinds of technical and political reasons.[26] Studying the history of exploration and reading science fiction can help us predict the problems of getting there and the consequences of new discoveries. Reading the fact and fiction of journeys to new lands also reveals that exploration is not a single “project” but rather a nexus, where a wide variety of individuals and institutions come together to think about the future, define goals, make plans, raise money, develop technologies, and attempt to find out things no one has known before. Science fiction authors have been influenced by true stories of exploration and the visions of science fiction have inspired people to explore yet further. Taken together these literatures are a strong foundation for planning our future on Mars.

  Acknowledgments: My sincere thanks to the organizers and funders of this project; it has been an exhilarating experience from start to finish. I also want to thank Debby Scott, Joan Haig, and the editing team at Arizona State University for their insightful and incisive comments on my essay.

  [1] Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (London: Allen Lane, 2003). [back]

  [2] Edward L. Dryer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming, 1405–1433 (London: Pearson Longman, 2007). [back]

  [3] Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). [back]

  [4] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Francisco Bethencourt, F. and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [back]

  [5] The careers of explorer-naturalists Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) are important exceptions to this. See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Vintage, 2015) and Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). [back]

  [6] Lawrence Dritsas, Zambesi: David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London: IB Tauris, 2010). [back]

  [7] Thor Hogan, Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2007). [back]

  [8] Eric Berger, “Make Mars Great Again: Can the 2016 U.S. Election Save NASA’s Journey to Mars?” Ars Technica, April 12, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/make-mars-great-again-can-the-2016-election-save-nasas-journey-to-mars; “NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration,” NASA, October 8, 2015, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/journey-to-mars-next-steps-20151008_508.pdf [back]

  [9] Alexander MacDonald, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). [back]

  [10] “An Expensive Venture,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, Scott’s Last Expedition, http://www.scottslastexpedition.org/expedition/preparing-for-terra-nova/#chapter2. [back]

  [11] See The Scott Expedition (2014) at http://scottexpedition.com. [back]

  [12] For pioneering work in this area, see Alexander Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Readers keen to explore the history of science fiction should consult one of the standard histories such as: Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, The Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 2001); Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2011). [back]

  [13] See Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Oxford: Opus, 1994), 205. [back]

  [14] Roger D. Launius, Historical Analogs for the Stimulation of Space Commerce (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2014). [back]

  [15] Hubert Bonin and Nuno Valério, eds., Colonial and Imperial Banking History (New York: Routledge, 2016); Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). [back]

  [16] James S. A. Corey is the collective pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Thus far, The Expanse comprises six novels and five shorter works. It has been adapted for television by the Syfy Network. [back]

  [17] Hanneke van Traa-Engelman, “The Commercial Exploitation of Outer Space: Issues of Intellectual Property Rights and Liability,” Leiden Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (1991). [back]

  [18] It could happen very soon on the Moon—see Martin Elvis, Tony Milligan, and Alanna Krolikowski, “The Peaks of Eternal Light: A Near-Term Property Issue on the Moon,” Space Policy 38 (2016). [back]

  [19] Fabio Tronchetti, “The Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act: A Move Forward or a Step Back?” Space Policy 34 (2015). [back]

  [20] Virgiliu Pop, “Appropriation in Outer Space: The Relationship between Land Ownership and Sovereignty on the Celestial Bodies,” Space P
olicy 16, no. 4 (2000). [back]

  [21] Andrew R. Brehm, “Private Property in Outer Space: Establishing a Foundation for Future Exploration,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2015). [back]

  [22] Ian A. Crawford, “Lunar Resources: A Review,” Progress in Physical Geography 39, no. 2 (2015). [back]

  [23] Fraser MacDonald, “Anti-Astropolitik: Outer Space and the Orbit of Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 5 (2007). [back]

  [24] Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds. Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for The German Historical Institute London, 1988). The issues surrounding the militarization of outer space are hotly debated—see Natalie Bormann and Michael Sheehan, eds., Securing Outer Space (New York: Routledge, 2009). [back]