00:00:00.000Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guests
00:00:07.220are Lucian Walkowicz and Erika Nesvold. They are the co-founders of the Just Space Alliance,
00:00:14.240and both of them are astrophysicists of various stripes, as am I, I suppose. And we are going to
00:00:22.240talk this week about space colonization and why all of us hate it, and also why it's not really
00:00:29.820going to happen. Not in the way that various sci-fi franchises might have you believe and
00:00:36.520certainly not in the way that certain trillionaires might have you believe. It's a fun one. Let's get
00:00:43.280to it. Lucien, Erica, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine. Thanks for having us. Hello. Let's
00:00:54.840I met you, Lucien, back at, I think it was Dot Astronomy some disturbingly large amount of time
00:01:03.280ago, like 10 years ago or something like that. Yeah, maybe even more like 12, I think. Maybe
00:01:09.6802014. I know. The before times. I think that's true. That is terrifying. And Erica, we, well,
00:01:19.300We've never met in person, but we met online when the CBC asked us both to comment on, what was it exactly that they were asking us to comment on?
00:01:37.440You two founded the Just Space Alliance and both have backgrounds in space, as do I.
00:01:49.360And I thought it would be good to bring you on here today to talk about the idea of colonizing space, something that none of us are fans of.
00:01:57.620But the two of you have actually spent more time thinking about it than I have, I think.
00:02:02.840And I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, so that's saying something.
00:02:06.720Why don't we get started with a simple question?
00:02:10.640What's the problem with the idea, or what are the problems with the idea of space colonization?
00:02:17.540Erica, do you want to take that first?
00:02:19.060Well, do we want to start with the optimist or the pessimist?
00:02:24.460I'm less against people living in space as a blanket statement than many of my colleagues.
00:02:31.280But there are a lot of problems with the current plans and rhetoric around expanding human civilization into space.
00:02:40.220And especially the framing of space colonization, which usually comes down to repeating the methods we used for various colonization processes across the Earth and just copy pasting them into space as if that was a good thing.
00:02:56.800Erica, I see what you did there, answering the question of people living in space. I'm going to be as literal as I often blame for being and say that the problem with space colonization is the problem with colonization in general, right?
00:03:12.700That, you know, the ways that we think about people going to and living in space, whether you think that's a good idea, a bad idea, or you're in the middle somewhere, that the ways that we have of thinking and talking about that are all based in colonial models that are here on Earth.
00:03:30.840And in fact, that space, you know, a lot of, in fact, most of the activities of space happen here on Earth and also repeat those colonial patterns, you know, actively like right now in the places that are proximate to, you know, launch centers, for example.
00:03:48.340Um, so, you know, space has, even though people have had a relationship to space as something that, you know, we can enjoy through looking at the night sky, um, a lot of the processes around sending humans or human infrastructure into space are fundamentally based in coloniality.
00:04:06.080um and so if we want to do those things we have to think about you know is that actually something
00:04:12.900that people want to continue doing um i think for a lot of people but especially you know like some
00:04:18.560of the people who are shaping every way that space gets talked about right now the answer is yes
00:04:24.160actually when they say colonization they do mean colonization um but i think there are a lot of
00:04:28.840other people who are interested in the ideas of people going to living in working in space
00:04:35.640that don't necessarily want it to be space colonization.
00:04:39.880And to be clear, the problem isn't the word colonization.
00:04:43.560You know, you can't just solve this by saying,
00:04:45.200okay, we'll call it space settlement or something else.
00:04:46.960It's the processes, again, that we're repeating from history
00:04:49.920of treating space as a big pile of valuable resources
00:04:54.160that we have a duty or a destiny or a divine right
00:04:58.240to go and gobble up to use for unending expansion
00:05:01.300at the cost of labor, at the cost of environment,
00:05:04.280that's an attitude, but also an economic structure and a political structure and a philosophy about
00:05:11.640how humans should build communities together that all falls under colonization, the history
00:05:17.180of colonization, coloniality. And a social structure too. Even though I agree with everything
00:05:21.940that you just said, I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment and then I will probably
00:05:26.480jump in. Adam, don't you think the devil has plenty of advocates? That is certainly true.
00:05:34.280Okay, how about this? I'm going to give you a question that people ask me and that I'm sure they ask you too. And then all three of us can argue against that, that position.
00:05:46.580sounds great because none of us agree with it um uh something that people ask me when i say things
00:05:55.640similar to the stuff that the two of you have just said is well but you know the problem with
00:06:00.700colonization here on earth is that you know there were already people in the places that
00:06:05.880people colonized there are no people already out there in space who you know will uh get
00:06:13.540genocided if we colonize Mars. There are no Martians to wipe out if we colonize the outer
00:06:21.800solar system. Same thing there. So, you know, isn't this just, you know, taking the word a0.96
00:06:27.020little bit too literally? I used to wonder that too. And then I actually went and talked to some
00:06:31.360experts in the history of colonization. And they pointed out to me that while colonization as a
00:06:37.560process is by far the hardest on colonized people, and that's continuing through today,
00:06:42.580it carries a lot of potential harms to a lot of people. So as I was saying before,
00:06:48.720the colonization approach to resources can be extremely damaging for an environment.
00:06:54.060If you end up just strip mining all of the finite resources out of a place,
00:06:58.920dumping all your waste and moving on to colonize the next place, that doesn't really matter who's
00:07:02.820living there. You're damaging an environment that's worth preserving in itself and you're
00:07:07.500not leaving resources for future generations, et cetera. So all the problems we're dealing with
00:07:11.880here on Earth with climate change and resource extraction. Colonization often also goes hand
00:07:17.160in hand with labor exploitation, whether you're exploiting the labor of the colonized people who
00:07:21.420are there or the labor of the people that you bring along or the labor of the people that you
00:07:26.000leave behind, but they built your ships for you. And so all of that mindset expands out and causes
00:07:32.760a lot of exploitation of a lot of groups of people and the environment. And so that was pointed out
00:07:40.700to me by scholars of colonization. It's also been pointed out to me by an indigenous sci-fi writer
00:07:47.360that I interviewed on my podcast named Darcy Little Badger. She hates this sort of dismissiveness
00:07:52.820towards the problems with colonization by saying, oh, well, there's no people living there because
00:07:57.320she feels like that erases the history of her people and the colonization that they experienced
00:08:01.920as part of the history on earth from the whole conversation. So to those people who ask all of
00:08:08.720us those questions, I would say, let's not just dismiss the question. Let's go ask people who
00:08:13.900actually know what the problems of colonization are on earth. Yeah, I very much agree with
00:08:20.360everything that you just said, Erica. You know, I think to bring it back to, you know,
00:08:25.760coloniality is a mindset and a philosophy and approach to how you interact, not just with
00:08:31.660people but with you know environments um natural objects like other forms of life and you know i
00:08:38.940think um a lot of times uh we as human beings will often um sort of reduce a place to whether it has
00:08:48.180human life in it or um whether it has life at all and you know like as a person who works in
00:08:55.400astrobiology and the search for life of course eventually like if people are you know going out
00:09:01.300and interacting with space like it is it is my opinion that eventually we will hopefully find
00:09:06.840life in the universe um and that there is a lot to be said looking at um colonization colonial
00:09:14.760practices here on this planet of the ways that that impacts not only other human beings but also
00:09:22.220of course like other non-human forms of life um some of which you know to to even group like
00:09:27.920the environment into being a separate thing from the web of life is also like rooted in like
00:09:33.220Western intellectual practices. Right. Um, so, you know, the fact that there doesn't happen to
00:09:39.820be humans, I mean, also the, the entire like colonial process that happened to people who
00:09:47.240are human also revolved around declaring that they were not human or that they were subhuman.
00:09:52.780Right. So, you know, they're not being humans didn't stop anybody in the past either. And that's, you know, in large part why a lot of genocides were committed, why, you know, we are in many of the situations that we're in now.
00:10:07.620Um, but yeah, I think fundamentally a colonial approach to, you know, interacting with the world around you is not the correct approach and it goes far, far beyond whether there's something else in the environment that you would recognize as a person.
00:10:24.420So this is something that I find so striking about so much of the rhetoric around space colonization from the people who advocate for it, especially like the sort of people who I wrote about in my book, More Everything Forever, that they, you know, these people who say, oh, we need to colonize not just, you know, Mars, but we need to colonize the, the, not just the solar system, we need to colonize the galaxy.
00:10:51.520We need to colonize the entire universe.
00:10:53.900And these same people very frequently have arguments that they make that there cannot possibly be any other intelligent life in the universe.
00:11:05.700And the argument tends to take the form that if there were other intelligent life in the universe, they would have colonized us already.
00:11:13.860And so because we don't see that and because this sort of colonialist logic must be universal, therefore the entire universe is just ours for the taking.
00:11:27.160And these assumptions of like the universality of the desirability of these various schemes for universal dominion are just so, so striking to me.
00:11:41.200Uh, I think it's, it's so weird, uh, that, that they believe that these things are universal in one, in one sense, but in another sense, it's not weird at all because it's just like re-inscribing this same colonialist logic that, you know, that it's just this sort of objective universal thing rather than something that's rooted in a particular culture of a particular time and place.
00:12:07.860it's it's not even universal across human yeah exactly right and uh right but but this that's
00:12:13.880that's the how they narrativize history they're they're the that colonialist mindset looking at
00:12:20.340the history of humans as as we moved across the surface of this planet if you see it through the
00:12:25.480lens of colonization is how you win um then then they think that i'll see your your book drop and
00:12:32.980I'll mention my book, which is called Off Earth. I have a whole chapter writing on what are all
00:12:38.920the arguments people have for space colonization. And a big one is this argument that it's not just
00:12:44.580good for us and we'll make a lot of money, but that it is our destiny. And that's very much tied
00:12:49.560to the idea that it's our genetic destiny almost, that we have just a natural tendency. They can
00:12:55.760point to genes that they think cause it. That means that we have to, we have this biological
00:13:00.560compunction to expand as much as possible. And they point to the fact that we've expanded across
00:13:05.440the surface of the earth. But not every human that is born picks up and moves to a new place
00:13:11.980and starts extracting resources from that new place. That's very much certain cultures did that
00:13:16.420and other cultures did not, or they migrated in different ways. And so to me, rather than being
00:13:21.840a universal view, it's a very narrow reading of our own history. Yeah. And I absolutely hate it
00:13:29.020When I hear people make these arguments because it, you know, it just strikes me as a real like intellectual impoverishment of, you know, it's like, wow, I'm sorry your imagination is so broke that this is the only thing you can you can come up with.
00:13:47.280And rather than, you know, one of the things that I think makes like the earth very beautiful is that, you know, like not only are there lots of different kinds of human beings doing lots of different kinds of things throughout human history, there's also lots of different life forms that live in different ways that we could learn lessons from as well.
00:14:06.520And, you know, I think one of the things that I spend a lot of time sort of just, I guess, marinating on is that I think this is in part an outgrowth of the extreme inequities in access to science and engineering, like education and jobs.
00:14:28.620You know, because the people making these arguments are almost universally the beneficiaries of the colonial process. Right. I've literally heard people say, oh, well, if, you know, colonization didn't happen, then we wouldn't have the Internet, which is one of the stupider things that I've ever heard someone say. And there are many, many competitors for that award.
00:14:53.200This is not a video podcast, so listeners cannot see the face that I made when you said that.
00:15:02.820You know, actually, and I'll say it's a paraphrase, but you know who said that is Bob Zuberin, who wrote The Case for Mars, a wildly popular book.
00:15:12.300Amongst a lot of the folks that, you know, see this as our destiny.
00:15:16.980You know, I'm making little bunny quotes with my hands.
00:15:19.940But I really think it's important that people realize that all of these, what we're describing, right, is an ideology. It is a bundle of ideologies called TESCREAL. We as astronomers know a tortured acronym when we see one.
00:15:37.960Um, it's not even an acronym, but you know, those, those alphabet soup letters stand for
00:15:44.840transhumanism, effective altruism, cosmism, long-termism. Um, you know, these are
00:15:50.920an actual worldview that in all of these different ways that we see them playing out,
00:17:25.080ties into or i think for a lot of these people comes from science fiction that was itself like
00:17:32.820very enamored of ideas like colonialism and manifest destiny and and very you know uh various
00:17:40.280kinds of racism uh as well or a misreading of science fiction that very much does not support
00:17:45.880that's also true yes there's plenty of that yeah
00:17:48.820No, absolutely. But I want to go back to something that you said earlier, Lucien. You pointed out that the space industry is already sort of recapitulating some of the colonial practices here on Earth, like in the places where the industry is centered. Can you say a little more about that?
00:18:16.200It's important that people realize that, you know, in the Rio Grande Valley, so not just Boca Chica, Texas, but also the nearby city of Brownsville, that there has been a longstanding grassroots campaign against what is happening there.
00:18:33.740And that campaign has taken on, you know, colonial destruction on multiple fronts. So number one, and the thing that I think has received the most media attention is the way that the launches impact the immediate surrounding environments, and particularly the coastline, which is, you know, home to a number of like fragile or endangered species.
00:18:58.140And then also what has received, I think, relatively less attention is that there has literally been a physical takeover of the town of Boca Chica where, you know, this is now several years ago, but SpaceX's launches are, you know, Audible doesn't really like capture what is happening if you live in a town where suddenly there are these like incredibly loud launches that, you know,
00:19:27.180because they do a lot of launches and they're relatively like not so regulated.
00:19:31.920There's a lot of stuff flying various places in addition to the sonic noise, the sonic pollution.
00:19:39.740So you have residents that, you know, have either been bought out of their homes
00:19:46.220and forced to leave in that sense or forced to leave in other ways.
00:19:50.920And then you also have gentrification to the surrounding area.
00:19:55.020So that longtime residents in Brownsville, for example, can really no longer afford to live in the communities that they have been from for, you know, even many generations.
00:20:05.320On top of that, I recently learned from some of the organizers there that, you know, the Rio Grande, which is a border as far as like the United States considers it, is not a border that divides anything from the indigenous point of view.
00:20:22.600And so the efforts to police near the border there that are happening, obviously, on multiple fronts and the presence of Starbase are also, you know, dividing up land.
00:20:35.940There is obviously now increased focus on the border, increased, you know, like efforts to create physical barriers, et cetera.
00:20:44.420And SpaceX is all part of these multiple colonial processes.
00:21:14.920So those launch sites are particularly desirable.
00:21:17.760And, you know, in Brazil, like a lot of the community that is near where the Alcantara Launch Center is currently were quilombola families, which are folks who were either escaped formerly enslaved Africans or indigenous people or melding of families of the two.
00:21:38.940A lot of the people there used fishing as part of the mainstays of their existence and in a process as old as time, they were told that they were going to be given arable land and housing and then moved away from their historic lands, away from their access to the coast.
00:21:58.000again, very much with a parallel to the processes in Boca Chica at Starbase. And, you know, then
00:22:05.840were put in places that they couldn't live, essentially, and forced not only physically out
00:22:11.500of their homes, but also out of their traditional life ways, out of their ability to meet their own
00:22:18.620needs with no recourse to go back again. So these are very literal, like these are colonial
00:22:26.160colonization in action because of space here on Earth. Like, we don't even have to wait
00:22:32.360for, you know, some apartheid profiteer to send us all to Mars.
00:22:37.960Sorry, I'm not laughing at how horrible all of that is. I'm just laughing at calling
00:22:43.400Musk an apartheid profiteer because that's exactly what he is. But we don't say that enough.0.90
00:22:50.000um yeah well speaking of musk let's talk a little bit about mars the two of you ran
00:23:00.860a workshop a while back called decolonizing mars yes i just attended that was all okay
00:23:07.200nonetheless i want to talk about both mars like the role that mars plays in the imagination of
00:23:13.760these people and i also want to talk about what mars is actually like um let's start with the
00:23:19.480first one why why mars why are they so obsessed with mars in particular because the moon was
00:23:25.400boring when we got there i think is part of the answer and no offense to my lunar scientist
00:23:31.140colleagues the moon is very interesting for a number of reasons but for the people who are
00:23:34.420imagining this again from science fiction and from the science fiction art of the 50s 60s and 70s
00:23:40.280they are imagining these big glittering domes uh that we could put cities of the future inside
00:23:47.240and the moon is small and kind of still close to earth and not that rich in resources at the time
00:23:54.160we thought like water that we could uh we could really make use of for said glittering cities
00:23:58.760mars is still far away a human hasn't landed on it and so we can still imagine uh these these
00:24:05.140glittering cities especially since mars is bigger the uh gravity is a little more like earth's so
00:24:11.920maybe there won't be as many health effects. We, we think some people think from, uh, from the,
00:24:17.000the lower gravity compared to the moon. Um, and so the, the hopes have been sort of moved out from
00:24:24.180the moon towards, towards Mars. That's, that's my, my semi-informed theory on, on why the
00:24:30.360imagination has really moved from the moon and from, uh, free, free floating space stations to,
00:24:37.700to mars itself yeah i um i'm gonna answer you with sort of two through two lenses i'll give
00:24:45.000you the the punchline first which is that i don't actually think elon musk cares about mars
00:24:49.720but first you know let's think about like what we also have you know i i agree with erica that
00:24:56.000you know the moon is sort of like oh we already we already went there and i i do think that there
00:25:01.980are reasons, like political, philosophical, world-shaping reasons why the moon is back in
00:25:08.280focus now. But when you think about Mars, so no human has landed there, but we have landed a
00:25:14.780substantial number of things on the surface at this point. And when you look at landscapes of
00:25:22.320Mars, it is the only other world where we really have a large amount of very crisp, beautiful,
00:25:31.980evocative landscape photography. You know, I guess I see this a little bit through sort of
00:25:38.060like the lens with my like arts hat on, which is that it invites people to imagine themselves
00:25:45.440standing on the surface in a way that the moon does not, because the moon does not have an
00:25:51.440atmosphere. It doesn't have things like sunrises and sunsets, or it does, but they just look
00:25:56.980very, very different than Earth. And if you look at the history of space exploration, one of the
00:26:02.600things that was really powerful in building popular support for the Apollo program was
00:26:08.440space painting, paintings of people living and working on the surface of the moon.
00:26:14.440And so, you know, I guess I see these things as being kind of sequential in that people first,
00:26:19.800in order to support the idea that you could go to this place and that human beings could be on its
00:26:24.240surface, you had to give them a way to picture themselves there. And the way of doing that in
00:26:28.980the 50s and 60s was paintings and illustration. Once people had actually been on the surface of
00:26:36.620the moon, you had those images already. But the next thing that came along in the form of, you
00:26:42.620know, photographs from landers and rovers on the surface of Mars were these robotic avatars that
00:26:49.320we're essentially allowing us to see the surface like we would if we were standing there ourselves.
00:26:55.620And because it so strongly resembles things like, you know, the American Southwest,
00:27:01.500it is reminiscent of many places that we are familiar with, even though by comparison,
00:27:08.620it is way worse than all of those places. But fundamentally, I don't think Elon Musk actually
00:27:17.200cares about Mars. I think what we, you know, like, first of all, I kind of don't think that
00:27:23.500Elon Musk has a core philosophy that is beyond Elon Musk. And he sort of is a, an agglomerator
00:27:31.220of, of things that will work for him, which is why it was so easy for him to make like the far
00:27:36.580right pivot. Um, because it wasn't, you know, everything's a pivot if you're just sort of
00:27:41.780standing in the middle of nowhere. But I think the way that Mars has functioned in sort of his
00:27:47.240narrative shaping and worldview is as this place that seems just far flung enough that we're never
00:27:55.520really going to have to go there because it's so difficult to get to there, that it can be far
00:28:02.200enough ever, ever further pushed into the future, and also serves as a justification for the
00:28:08.660development of many of the things that he wants to do in the meantime, while being cloaked in all0.78
00:28:16.000of this bullshit about how it is going to save humanity. Because you can't say like, oh, we're0.73
00:28:22.280going to go to the moon to save humanity because the moon is, you know, has so much less compared
00:28:28.520to Mars and the Earth, and then also is essentially in the Earth's backyard. So he, you know, early on
00:28:34.460in SpaceX history, he was invoking all of these things like, oh, the sun is going to expand in a
00:28:40.180billion years. Well, the sun is going to expand in a billion years and take the moon too. So you
00:28:43.640can't say the moon. So, you know, I think this like vision of Mars is fundamentally a tool of
00:28:50.620propaganda and not something that he actually cares all that much about. Yeah. Huh. I'm not
00:28:58.600sure that i agree also in in the same nitpicking spirit of of texas versus florida sun's gonna
00:29:05.560expand in in more like five billion years i believe um but but it's not important he definitely said
00:29:12.160this stuff and and yeah the sun's lifetime will be over in five billion years really but their
00:29:18.740earth gets engulfed earlier in the process as the sun expands yeah there's different estimates in
00:29:23.820different papers yeah i didn't think that the earth gets also we should be so lucky but yeah
00:29:27.720exactly that's the point it doesn't matter it doesn't billion years yeah exactly i mean there
00:29:33.180like half a billion years ago was the beginning of complex you know multicellular life on earth
00:29:38.580there's not i mean and another half billion years from now there's gonna be you know the oceans are
00:29:43.720gonna boil off but um but but yeah uh that that doesn't matter and we'll probably just cut it um
00:29:51.040but the point is i don't know that i agree that musk doesn't care about mars i do agree that he's
00:29:56.920sort of sits in the middle of nowhere in terms of his ideology.
00:30:00.860Like, he doesn't have core beliefs beyond his own self-interest.
00:30:06.820But I do think that because Mars provides such a convenient excuse,
00:30:13.040it makes it easier for him to genuinely think that Mars is, like, a good goal.
00:30:20.700But I suppose on some level, it doesn't really matter whether he genuinely believes in it or not,
00:30:25.980Because the point is that people believe him when he says this stuff.
00:37:19.600Some very smart thinker that I keep failing to look up what his name was because I'm constantly quoting him said that the earth is the only place that we know of in the universe, especially in the solar system, that a man can stand naked in the light of our sun, which is true.
00:37:36.180I don't advise that people take full advantage of that in public, but it's something we don't.
00:37:40.800Even when the weather is really beautiful, I've been stuck inside or the weather's been awful, the wildfire smoke, whatever, you step out on a beautiful day and you can feel your whole body just inhale and appreciate the weather.
00:37:51.760We still don't fully appreciate that our lungs aren't imploding in that moment, that we don't need a pressure suit constantly separating us from a poisonous chemical environment.
00:38:02.240I mean, yeah, okay, we need sunscreen, but we don't need massive radiation shielding at all times.
00:38:09.340We don't need to worry about the effects of lower or higher gravity on our physiology and, you know, development of our children.
00:38:19.140It's so bizarre when you look at what it's actually like out there that someone would want to leave Earth given how inhospitable Mars and the rest of the solar system is.
00:38:34.480But I think that this narrative of, you know, this inevitable future of, you know, glorious expansion is something that's burrowed pretty deep into at least certain parts of the American psyche.
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00:41:49.580And I suppose that brings me to another question, which is, again, sort of me asking the two
00:41:56.460of you how you would deal with questions that people ask me all the time.
00:42:01.320I sometimes get the question like, okay, but, you know, Adam, you're being a real bummer.
00:42:06.440Like, this sounded like a cool future and you were making it seem like it's not.
00:42:12.860And if you're going to take away my cool sci-fi future that I believed in, you have to give me something in return because otherwise you're just standing up there, you know, shooting down dream after dream that I've had.
00:42:27.080And like my usual response to that is, yeah, but, you know, there's a difference between a dream and a delusion.
00:42:31.620But I do think that it would be easier for us to get this across to people if we could find a way of proposing an alternative, which I suppose is a good chunk of what this podcast is about, right?
00:42:52.860I remember going on a podcast where somebody asked me, you know, like, how could you possibly like say that we're not going to do this? And that, you know, like, isn't it still important for us to go to Mars? Because someday, you know, we're going to find with some telescope, some blue green likely looking world orbiting a distant star in a distant galaxy, and we'll be able to go there. And I was like, distant galaxy? No.
00:43:22.860But the point that that guy was trying to make to me was, you know, he, I remember he said, like, he went out and interviewed people on the steps of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and asked them if they'd like to go to Mars.
00:43:51.120One thing that I have learned a lot in my, especially in the early days as I was starting to talk to the public about this stuff,
00:43:56.540is I learned a lot from climate change activists and the people who study how the public responds to the doom and gloom of climate change science.
00:44:07.640And what they have found is that being a bummer can be informative, and it certainly gets clicks, right?
00:44:16.100If you see that in politics a lot, I'm not accusing you of doing it for the clicks.
00:44:19.420But especially when you start thinking about these things and thinking of all the cautionary tales from history and the possible dystopian futures, you want to warn people about it.
00:44:29.620What the climate change activists and psychologists have found is that that does not motivate people to action.
00:45:06.080There are already people all over the planet with really beautiful visions of the future that both set here on Earth and potentially involving humans being in space that are about using technology equitably and in a deliberate, thoughtful way to make life better for humans and for the non-human animals we live with.
00:45:26.680And it's just we have to find those and amplify those and point to what the difference is between those visions of the future and this ideology that we fear would take us down a very bad path.
00:45:39.760I think anybody that calls you a bummer for saying that we're not, you know, going to Mars under the, you know, or space under the visions of folks like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or any of these, like, very, you know, outspoken tech billionaires needs their bummer meter recalibrated.
00:46:01.380like you you know what's a bummer um the planet is being destroyed by emissions from amazon
00:46:12.820and none of these guys pay hardly anything in taxes like you know what's a bummer not being0.98
00:46:21.220able to eat a fucking salad all summer because we're all getting diarrhea lettuce i'm so angry0.98
00:46:27.700about that one. I'm so angry. Yeah. We can't go outside because there are wildfires across the0.99
00:46:35.060continent that are creating the hazardous for everyone's conditions here in Chicago and all
00:46:42.420across the Midwest and East coast. Um, so, you know, what if I told you that there was a future
00:46:49.780In which people didn't hoard resources where you could go and buy lettuce that didn't make you sick because the oversight on our food systems hadn't been completely gutted by, in some cases, literally the same tech billionaire who acquired a lot of his power to do what he did in the governance of the United States.
00:47:15.020which this is, you know, this is a crazy making time because I don't usually have nice things to
00:47:21.000say about the governance of the United States under the best of circumstances. But there were
00:47:26.820things that were working better before. And a lot of the social capital and literal capital that
00:47:34.220Elon Musk has gotten because of all of these bullshit yarns about Mars are what opened the
00:47:41.680door for him to actually start knocking out foundational pillars so you want to think0.62
00:47:48.780somebody's a bummer please like refocus first of all i need everybody to dial down the aperture
00:47:58.260until your rage is focused and then go point it in the right direction this is another example of us
00:48:06.260being fish in a fish tank and not realizing the water exists which is that here's my optimism
00:48:11.240and coming out again. We live in a great time in human history, both in terms of technology,
00:48:16.040but also the technology of social structures and governance and things like that compared to a lot
00:48:19.980of other times in human history. But we don't appreciate it. And so when someone comes along
00:48:24.920and says, don't you hate taxes? What if we made a city on Mars where there's no laws about labor
00:48:32.280exploitation? That'd be great, right? And we go, yeah, sure, that sounds nice because we don't
00:48:36.580appreciate the hard work of labor unions' generations before us who have put protections
00:48:41.000into place that we take advantage of and you can just extrapolate that to food protections and lots
00:48:45.640of things that you you don't appreciate the work of previous generations to put these things into
00:48:50.400place and you get lured by the promise of freedom and uh and infinite wealth in space um and then
00:49:01.540adam comes along and says yeah but you can't breathe there and you're like what a bummer
00:49:04.940yeah people died to give you the weekend yeah like there is an emotional piece of this too
00:49:15.180that you know the the ways that i first started thinking about these topics i you know was just
00:49:21.240like a regular old astronomer for most of my career and the more outreach and like informal
00:49:27.740communication like particularly like dialogue based communication um that i did about science
00:49:33.500the more I started to hear these ideas about my research, which, you know, like at the time I
00:49:39.380worked on the Kepler mission, which found planets around other stars and a lot of the PR coming out
00:49:45.120of Kepler because it was designed to find planets that were sort of similar to Earth and figure out
00:49:51.900how common they were in the universe. You know, a lot of the PR that we released about our
00:49:56.760discoveries, focused on comparing various planets to Earth, you know, like, oh, this is Earth size,
00:50:03.480or it might be Earth-like, or it's a, you know, a super Earth. And this comparison was sort of
00:50:09.680naturally built into that communication as a way of trying to convey to people what we were doing.
00:50:17.100And then at the same time, that was right around when SpaceX started really pumping out a lot of
00:50:22.560stuff about going to mars and it was not just you know elon musk giving talks it was also like
00:50:27.860actual like marketing videos and and like propaganda coming out of spacex itself and i
00:50:34.240encountered all of these people who were like oh we're going to be able to move to that planet
00:50:40.440that kepler just found um and oh it's it's like it's a super earth so that means it's like the
00:50:47.360Earth, but better, which is not what it means.
00:50:49.640Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, time out.
00:51:17.360Um, so, you know, people hear these things and like, you know, for, for your average person who isn't thinking about this stuff on a day-to-day basis, like all of these different like threads in the news and the zeitgeist in, you know, like what is happening, um, around them kind of weave together in ways that, you know, scientists often don't anticipate.
00:51:38.660um and so you know i started to run into more and more people who thought that the goal of finding
00:51:45.560these small you know potentially earth-like planets was actually for us to leave yeah and
00:51:50.900i think that there's something you know at its emotional core that i can really understand which
00:51:55.880is that like it is really upsetting like if you do you know erica you've made all these points
00:52:00.780about like we don't appreciate we don't appreciate i think at some level people do appreciate it and
00:52:06.580And facing the fact that we are damaging the place that we live that is so beautiful, I agree with you that most of the time we don't appreciate, but also sometimes it's equally as painful to have to grapple with the fact that it is a beautiful planet that supports such an abundance of life and supports us so well.
00:52:29.180And when we look at the reasons that people's needs are not met or the reasons why our environment might not meet our needs into the future, those reasons are other people, right?
00:52:41.400Like the distribution of resources is why people's needs are not met, not a lack of abundance of those resources in most cases.
00:52:48.720And when those resources do lack in abundance, it's because of things like overfishing, for example, or, you know, impacts to the climate or just the local environment that come out of the exploitation of this planet.
00:53:02.620and realizing that, A, we have, you know, that we have to deal with other people if we want to
00:53:09.380do anything about those things. And then in many cases, those, the people that are in question
00:53:15.200have a lot of power, have a much larger voice than they should have. It is enough to make anyone feel
00:53:22.120like they can't do it or like they, you know, couldn't possibly make a change. And in fact,
00:53:29.580like no, no giant change in any society for better or worse has ever happened from whoever
00:53:37.640is like in power and doing the wrong thing. Like being like, you know what? I think I'm done.
00:53:45.240Right. It's always been collections of people who didn't think that they could do it and were
00:53:49.760correct. They could not have done it by themselves. And that's the other thing too.
00:53:54.300And so I think it's really easy to give in to despair. And then for the outlet of that despair,
00:53:59.260to be well maybe we just could get a do-over maybe we could get a do-over maybe like maybe0.56
00:54:05.620i don't have to challenge this apartheid profiteer if i could get a seat on the spaceship that takes
00:54:11.260me to the do-over it's a fantasy but like fantasies are powerful and people are seeking
00:54:16.800comfort around these very difficult truths by the way worst case scenario of climate change the one
00:54:22.800where humans all die off from starvation and war and such still a more habitable earth the earth
00:54:28.480would still be a more habitable planet in that scenario
00:55:13.360Yeah, now I'm just thinking about whether chickens count as naked.
00:55:21.140But go ahead, ask your more questions.
00:55:23.080I mean, go on, Adam, whatever you want to close with, I guess.
00:55:26.780Yeah, we're going to do a Patreon extra, our chickens naked.
00:55:32.040Anyway, no, I want to close with a question sort of in the spirit of what you were saying
00:55:38.780about, you know, the dreams that we have about the future being important.
00:55:42.660What's a piece of science fiction in whatever medium you want that the two of you have been
00:55:50.440enjoying lately or like to think about a lot?
00:55:52.800Well, I'm a Hugo voter this year, and I've just finished reading the entire Hugo ballot, and I can't. It's too many. I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
00:56:02.780Gosh, what's a piece of science fiction? I'm not a very big sci-fi person. I know that is surprising for my chosen career. I'm a big horror person.
00:56:16.480Well, I mean, I think the sci-fi property that I return to most frequently is Arrival, just because it, you know, it intersects. So, you know, I don't have a book to plug, but I'll say that I am co-directing something called the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute with my colleague, philosopher Chelsea Haramia.
00:56:41.360and the whole thing is a research initiative to respond to like what happens if we find life
00:56:48.840beyond earth you know how will people understand it how should scientists communicate it what are
00:56:53.280its implications etc so i think a lot about arrival just because i think arrival does such
00:56:58.860a great job of um depicting a very clear discovery of alien life that also has a great deal of
00:57:09.380complexity like i think the the way it deals with linguistics um the way it shows the wide variety
00:57:16.080in how people would react i think is really quite beautiful um and it's just it's one of my favorite
00:57:22.800of like sort of the the aliens come to earth genre of sci-fi um so yeah i i think that's always a
00:57:30.020favorite for me i've just mentally reviewed the hugo ballot and i'm remembering that
00:57:45.260I don't think it's – it doesn't come up in these conversations a lot because Star Wars is such an advanced past the point of every planet you can walk around and breathe on if you want.
00:57:54.440It's not like The Expanse, for example, that really digs into the questions of colonization with the technology we have today.
00:57:59.740Um, but Andor is excellent science fiction and also just excellent fiction about oppression and rebellion. So highly recommend it.
00:58:08.480I love Andor. I also love Arrival, um, and the short story that Arrival was based on. Um, so I think these are both excellent answers. Um, and I am sad that Andor has so much resonance for our current political situation, but it is good to have art like that in these times.
00:58:28.500So I think with that, we're going to close it out.
00:58:32.320And thank you both for making the time to be here today.