In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren’t going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:
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But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.
Space law doesn’t exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to - and shares history with - laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean’s surface, and the ocean’s floor.
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These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than “money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid.”
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The Weinersmiths have such an account in defense of space law: namely, that space law, and its terrestrial analogs, constitute a durable means of resolving conflicts that would otherwise give to outcomes that are far worse for science, entrepreneurship, human thriving or nation-building than the impediments these laws represent.
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What’s more, space law is enforceable. Not only would any space settlement be terribly, urgently dependent on support from Earth for the long-foreseeable future, but every asteroid miner, Lunar He3 exporter and Martian potato-farmer hoping to monetize their products would have an enforcement nexus with a terrestrial nation and thus the courts of that nation.
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But the Weinersmiths aren’t anti-space. They aren’t even anti-space-settlement. Rather, they argue that the path to space-based scientific breakthroughs, exploration of our solar system, and a deeper understanding of our moral standing in a vast universe cannot start with space settlements.
Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt - a very, very expensive stunt.
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These boondoggles aren’t just terribly risky (though they are - people who attempt space settlement are *very* likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put *multiple* robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.
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For the cost of a tiny, fraught, lethal Moon-base, we could create *hundreds* of experiments in creating efficient, long-term, closed biospheres for human life.
That’s the crux of the Weinersmiths’ argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics.
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If you want to create stable space-settlements, you’ll need to create robust governance systems - space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space - a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan - then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.
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