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

by Ed Finn

  And it gets even more complicated as the complexity of the communications task grows. How are Schroeder’s homesteaders in “The Baker of Mars” able to do what they do, sending high-quality visualizations and commands back and forth from Earth to Mars to sustain not just one data link but seemingly thousands? NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimates that we’ll need to grow data rates for planetary missions by a factor of 10 for each of the next several decades.[1] But they don’t imagine anything like the immersive, virtual realities that enable the crowdsourced making of Martian infrastructure that Schroeder envisions, which, even time-delayed, would be extremely bandwidth-intensive.

  Then, too, there’s the point that Naam makes in “The Use of Things.” Sure, we can potentially make money in space using robots and AI. But to what end, if there are no people there? If we want to travel into space, to settle it, then we need to put people up there. However it starts, the long-term objective of building a space economy is to support a future for people in space. Building a small commercial space industry and economy built on robots may be a stepping stone. But if it’s a stepping stone, then let’s think hard about the design of the space economy from day one, so that the world we create for people to step into in the future is one that people actually want to inhabit and, just as importantly, that people can thrive in. This adds an important complexity to the future space economy because it entails taxing that economy to create a plausible and thriving future for humanity in space, which will inevitably further slow and complicate the business of actually trying to run early, small-scale space businesses.

  We might discover some micronutrient or extremely rare material that turns out to be critical to the future of life on Earth. And we might discover that the only place we can get more of it is in space. Or we might discover something in space so attractive—like the tulips of the Dutch Gilded Age—that Earthlings are willing to mortgage fortunes to obtain it. And so we might mount extremely profitable expeditions to go get some of it and bring it back to Earth. All that is possible. But it would hardly count as a space economy. It would merely be a mining expedition.

  And I suppose it’s possible that we might ultimately build an economy for intelligent robots in space—or by then it might be more accurate to say that they’d build an economy in space for themselves—but what would be the point, exactly, in human terms?

  Markets have become quite unhinged in recent years from consideration of their purpose. Like technology, we’ve largely come to treat them in technical terms, as instruments for achieving various goals, such as efficiently allocating capital. Markets, or so economists tell us, allow people to trade something that they have in surplus (time, labor, apples, etc.) in exchange for something that someone else has in surplus (money, rocks, good ideas, etc.). In their simplest form, this allows people with too many blueberries to trade with people with too many strawberries so that everyone can enjoy both. Pretty soon, along comes a middleman, a trader, who trades with both so they don’t have to always find each other to do their exchange. Over long periods of time, trade allows the creation of sophisticated markets and industries that allow people to buy services, like travel to space, that would have been impossible without sophisticated markets.

  But it’s always worth remembering that the reason for markets—and for money—is to allow people to trade for things that they can’t make or achieve for themselves, so that they can make their lives better. The purpose of markets is to create opportunities for enhanced human thriving. Money is not an end, it’s a means.

  So why should people go into space? I can imagine four reasons.

  The first is to make money or to gain power. If we can build tourist or mining industries in space, it might make someone filthy rich. Or maybe they’ll get powerful: a trillionaire who controls nuclear weapons in space and can threaten governments to get his way, like Scholz offers up in “Vanguard 2.0.” Great. End of story. Does anyone else besides the trillionaire care? That’s a reason for the rest of us not to want people to go into space.

  The second reason for people to go to space is that it might provide some security to the human species. A local catastrophe here on Earth would be a deep problem for humanity. This is the theory underlying Elon Musk’s vision for settling Mars. The wrong asteroid in the wrong place, a failure to control our carbon emissions … a thriving humanity in space would provide a safety net for the species to continue, no matter what happened on Earth.

  Related to this, we might just become a little too crowded here on our home planet. Quite possibly, we’re already there. Too many people, too little space, too few resources, too much waste. Relieving the pressure might be a good idea. Allowing people to spread out a little, get a bit further away from their neighbors, live a little more like they want to live without the constant pressure of the civilizing gaze of their fellow inhabitants of Earth—frontiers have always been good for that.

  Finally, and to my mind the most compelling, we may wish to journey into space to continue to diversify the human experience. Saturn is out there. Let’s go find out what it’s like to live amidst its rings. As Chirag says in Vandana Singh’s “Shikasta”: “We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling.”

  What kinds of experiences will people have in space? It’s no picnic to build a city on Mars via virtual-reality immersion. But what would it actually be like to grow up on the Red Planet? Indeed, what would it be like to grow up even in a habitat in Low Earth Orbit? How would space change us, as we change space? If we’re going to go to the trouble of creating a space economy, the goal should be to make it possible for humans to grow and change and thrive in space as they have on Earth. To make space into a place where people can build a life, a community, a future. Where they can experience new realities, write new stories, invent new literatures and genres of art, create new human possibilities. To that end, the commercialization of space may be necessary, in that the creation of a functioning space economy finances the other structures of human society as they take root, grow, and evolve in diverse new ways.

  Why do people go to space, now, in the dawn of the twenty-first century?

  Because we send them—we, collectively. Today’s space missions are public endeavors. They have public purpose, public value, and public meaning, and occur at the public expense. They’re led by commanders and staffed by employees of the world’s biggest governments. They’re not boring, exactly. But they’re not exactly exciting, either, in the sort of deep-down passionate version of excitement that drives Meek in “Mozart on the Kalahari.” Why were we all so excited when Christa McAuliffe went into space? Because she wasn’t an astronaut. She was an ordinary person headed for a place that ordinary people didn’t go.

  Star Trek and its successors, Next Generation and Voyager, all have their great moments, their drama, their amazing stories about people in extraordinary settings. But the focus is on the journey, on ever-forward movement to new frontiers. All the ordinary people live on planets, and all the markets (the few we ever see) are on planets, too.

  Deep Space Nine is different. People live in space. Ordinary people. They are born, laugh, play, cry, work, get sick, and die in space. They thrive, in their good and bad moments. And there are markets in Deep Space Nine: shops and merchants and weapons dealers. And there is a bar, a place for people to gather in community, to celebrate, and to fight. There is a bar in the first Star Wars movie, too. Despite its well-deserved reputation as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” the bar in Mos Eisley is a dynamic, engaging place where music plays and people and aliens gather, eat meals, make deals, and resolve disputes, face to face. Is that an accident? All of the versions of the Enterprise have bars in them. So does Voyager. Some of the few people who aren’t Starfleet personnel run them. The most exciting and dramatic stuff doesn’t always happen there. But some of the most meaningful and most fun does. We’re supposed to think it’s because of the drink.


  This is all a bit stereotyped, of course. It’s Hollywood after all. But there’s also some truth to it. We go to the bar after work because it’s not work. It’s a chance to let our hair down, to spend time meeting new people, hanging out with our friends. It’s a commercial establishment, part of our economy of exchange, but also an emotional touchstone, a hub at the center of the web of human relationships. Myrna’s diner in “The Baker of Mars” is an example of how, even in the far future, a countertop becomes a gathering place. Find people, and you will almost always find somewhere like Myrna’s, where those who are too lazy or too busy or too lonely to make their own food come to eat. And you will find people like Myrna, or Quark from Deep Space Nine, entrepreneurs who are all too happy to provide the material and financial glue that holds human communities together through their willingness to make markets.

  But the making of money is only a tiny part of what’s happening. People go to the bar because it creates social value, for each of them, individually. Not social value in the sense of “it’s good for us.” We’re not more ethical or more just or less poor when we’ve been to the bar. But social value nonetheless. The patrons of Cheers aren’t always happy. But they share their lives and connect their stories. And that makes them part of a community. We plug into our humanity in bars. We do elsewhere, too. Often in other kinds of commercial establishments.

  Why should we commercialize space? Because if space has commercial establishments, then it will mean that people are doing more in space than just going on missions. They’ll be living, working, making money, spending money, taking their kids to the park (wherever that park is, whatever it looks like, and whatever kids do at that park to have fun), and buying coffee from Myrna.

  Too few of our realistic space stories—the ones that motivate our space agencies and our space companies—imagine the human future in space in more than mission-centric terms. The people in these stories remain instruments of attempts to further the exploration of space and the exploitation of its resources. They’re not really there on their own terms. Space remains too vast, too alien, too far in time and distance to support thriving human communities, even in Low Earth Orbit.

  The stories in this book reflect this tension. Space is a hard and lonely place when you’re just there to do a job. Naam’s story, with its proclamation that humans are the point of space travel, epitomizes this. It ends with an astronaut, alone, on a solo mission, having a near-death experience, rescued by robots because they’ve been programmed to think that his is the only valuable life, deliberating with himself about whether he’s an expense that space missions can afford. He is the reason for creating a space economy, yet he’s a massive drain on resources that could be used much more efficiently to accomplish the instrumental goals of the task at hand.

  Sergei’s girlfriend on Earth, in “Vanguard 2.0”, asks him, “Who will take care of your heart and soul [when you go into space]?” It’s a tough question. Sergei shrugs. Then he goes off to work, cleaning up space. And then his work turns into a stupid request from a trillionaire who has way too much money to go and find an artifact out of history—which turns out to be a ruse to get Sergei out of the way so that the trillionaire could deploy the space nukes and prepare to take over the world. The soul isn’t in space for Sergei or Pace or any of the others in the story. Indeed, it’s not clear that Pace has a soul. For Sergei, his soul is with Izumi. He hopes. In the end, he goes home to find her and himself, abandoning the freeing isolation of space for the messiness of Earth and all its tangled humanity.

  And the further one goes, the more challenging it seems to become to envision human thriving. In Madeline Ashby’s story, a small band of astronauts are on a mission to prepare Mars for colonization. Risk is everywhere. Lots can go wrong. Stress is endemic. No one has much privacy, either from each other or from their overseers back home. They are hardened professionals, carefully selected and groomed for their positions, yet nevertheless hard-pressed at every turn.

  To survive, to complete the mission, and to provide data for future voyages, the crew are tied into active and passive monitoring networks. Every aspect of their days and nights is subject to careful analysis to test whether humans can survive in small groups for years or decades, packed into tiny spacecraft. Their monitors are shrinks, focused on keeping them healthy, attuned to the tasks at hand, adequately coping with the isolation of the voyage and the irritations of their neighbors. And the Mars colonists who will follow them are enhanced. “Lifehacks,” Ashby calls them. “All the members of the Ganesha crew had augmentations to make their life on Mars more productive and less painful.” So, too, the eventual spacefarers of “Mozart on the Kalahari”: human-plant symbiants designed to survive long-haul missions, far beyond the comforts of Earth. Lifehacks, augmentation, symbiosis: euphemisms for bodily genetic modifications, multispecies chimera, and neuro-cognitive upgrades given to crews of space missions to adapt their bodies to the unforgiving environments and experiences of space. The basic message: to tackle space is to be transformed. To be made an instrument capable of surviving there.

  Yet the stories in this book all retain a human spirit that resists the transformation of people into mere cogs in the machinery of space exploration and exploitation. It’s one of the great strengths of science fiction. It reminds us that all kinds of people inhabit the future, not just those with a job to do. And that the futures we create for people must inevitably encompass the full richness of their lives as humans, far more than their ability to do that job. With typical human resilience, the people in these stories build community. They make meaning together.

  The characters in these stories have lives and livelihoods, wants and desires, loves and hates. They fight with each other, and they fight with others. Technology doesn’t do unto them. They do unto each other using technologies. They innovate. They make. They make lives—and worlds—out of the stuff that scientists and engineers invent, the stuff they have lying around, and the stuff they can think up.

  In science fiction, we can see into the worlds they’re making and ask what those worlds mean for real people. Is that a world worth living in? Is that a world that we should bring into being? We’re not being sold an advertisement. This is not an iPhone or an Apple Watch, magically transporting us into some awesome new lifestyle where everyone is fit, happy, and sublime. We’ve become too wary of the seductive power of narrative to believe in an uncomplicated utopia. Good science fiction tells it like it really is.

  People who worry about the macroeconomics of space are right. All the numbers will ultimately have to add up. And that’s what makes the public sector so important. More than any other entity, the public sector can pour money into space exploration and colonization until it’s up and running on its own account. To match NASA’s $20 billion annual budget, one time, with an equivalent amount of private-sector investment, given typical bank loan expectations, you’d have to be able to generate an annual revenue stream of close to $4 billion per year. What exactly are you selling? Who’s buying? Where’s the value? And NASA gets to spend that $20 billion year after year after year. It’s a pittance in the scope of the U.S. federal budget.

  Schroeder doesn’t say in “The Baker of Mars” how the giant colony ships that will carry people from Earth to Mars are being financed—or by whom. Nor does Elon Musk in his 2017 article in New Space, “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species,” describing his proposed effort to build a civilization on the Red Planet.[2] Nominally, in Schroeder’s story, Myrna’s friends are going to get paid off by the people who buy Martian real estate. But who would want to buy such real estate, even if we could agree on a theory and practice of ownership? And why? Musk has the same problem. He envisions a $200 billion corporate project to create a city of a million people, if he can reduce the costs to get people there by a factor of 5 million from the cost of sending people to the Moon via the Apollo missions. Even at that price, however, where will the return on investment come from? There’s just something th
at doesn’t quite add up yet about the macroeconomy of settling Mars.

  But the titular baker herself, Myrna, makes an enormous amount of sense. She creates value. She has a niche. She feeds Martian homesteaders who are drugged out on virtual reality interfaces, learning their rhythms and the Martian day-night cycle so as to have hot food ready, despite the differences in rotation speed between Earth and Mars, at just the right time. When her friends and customers forget to come eat, she delivers, selling other sundries, too. She carries messages for them, hosts their meetings, and solves their problems. She makes markets, wherever markets need making.

  If the Mars colonization effort is a public project, then Myrna is its private partner.

  Public-private partnerships and the commercialization of space are often seen as opportunities to carry out public projects using the efficiency and capability of the private sector. When the United States decided to build the atomic bomb, it quickly hired some of the biggest companies in the country to manage the actual sites of production. DuPont built the X-10 pile. Stone and Webster built the Y-12 uranium separation plant. Soon after the war, K-25 became the largest industrial plant on the planet.

  But if you visit the museums of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and walk its streets, you’ll quickly learn that there were other private partners. The atomic campus of Oak Ridge wasn’t just a project. It was a town. And that town had commercial establishments. It had groceries, barbershops, restaurants, and movie theaters. It had Myrnas making the human world turn.