Socialism on One Planet

A strain of radical politics is on a crusade to prevent humans leaving Earth. Here I investigate why, and what can be done to steer reasonable people away from these ideas.

It is becoming clear to many of us, that the ideas of space colonisation have become somewhat right-wing coded in the political discourse. Modern politics in many countries is increasingly polarised and if the idea of moving humanity into space is rejected by the left wing half of the population, that can be a serious problem. This was not inevitable though, and arguably it might be a historical oddity.

After the USSR stunned the world by placing the worlds first satellite into orbit on October 4th 1957, Soviet achievements in space became a large part of their propaganda. Surpassing the west with great scientific achievements showed the superiority of their system, it was claimed, with perhaps an implicit promise that such achievements may eventually translate into a better life for the citizens.

Obviously that never happened, and the USSR stagnated and collapsed in infamy. But the idealism it publicly expressed had meaning - if it did not, the government would not have spent so much money on space long after things like space stations had been convincingly shown to have no military utility, nor emphasised it so much in propaganda.

This particular socialist vision for a future in space waned and died with the Soviet Union itself, and now is mostly relegated to nostalgia. It was tied up with Marxist-Leninist ideas of science and progress, and this ideology is itself more or less politically dead now.

In the West, NASA started to get push-back against the exploration of space around the time of the Apollo program. Peace activists lumped NASA in with the hated military-industrial complex, and anti-poverty campaigners accused the organisation of taking food from hungry children.

These were both unfair allegations, but they stuck, and surely influenced policy makers in their attitudes. Often, Richard Nixon is given the blame for ending this program prematurely, but the most drastic budget cuts and the termination of Saturn V production had already been set in stone under a Democratic Congress and President by 1968, with figures from the left of the party such as Walter Mondale being among the harshest critics of NASA.

Still, NASA and spaceflight in general managed to recover and retain popularity amongst left-leaning Americans. By the 1990s the idea of Mars colonisation was spoken favourably of in progressive media such as Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy, as well as an episode of The West Wing. But this did not last much into the 21st century, not least because of the entry of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk into the spaceflight business.

Worse than the usual progressive disdain for the rich, there is a new strain of environmental politics that has soared in popularity in the past decade or so - a dour, self-flagellating rejection of growth, progress and technology that sees humanity as little more than parasites upon the planet. This trend has been around since the 1960s - think of Paul Ehrlich - but recently has become mainstream, with the elevation of figures like Greta Thunberg, the increasing popularity of the “degrowth” movement and apocalyptic fears about AI.

This political movement has taken over part of the political left, with such previously fringe figures such as human extinction activists getting puff pieces in the New York Times for instance and naturalist figures such as Jane Goodall being given a platform at the World Economic Forum to talk about how wonderful it would be if the human population were the size it was 500 years ago.

This movement is almost universally opposed to space colonisation - sometimes they say its because humans are such a terrible species they should not be inflicted on any other part of the cosmos, and others they more or less openly argue that letting humans escape Earth would break the zero sum game they see us playing, and said game is necessary to force the political reckoning they desire.

So, I am going to take a look at an example of this ideology in an attack on space, analyse it and see what can be done about it.

Rejecting Progress

In a piece entitled “What if we never live on Mars?”, long time critic of technology Paris Marx tries to dissuade readers from even thinking about space colonisation. It spends a lot of time personally going after Musk and Bezos, and mentions science fiction over and over again - presumably a tactic to get the reader to believe plans of actual space companies are nothing more than fantasy. I wanted to address some of the substance of the article though:

Even as Musk was found to be cutting off Ukraine’s access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service because he was taking calls from Russian officials, the US military was unable to do much about it because they’ve become so dependent on SpaceX’s rocket launch capabilities. Instead of being punished for any of that, the military negotiated a contract to pay SpaceX more money for the Starlink service it was providing in Ukraine and a US intelligence agency gave it a contract to build a spy satellite network. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The deceptive story Musk told was key to getting his companies past initial hurdles and himself to the position he’s in today. With SpaceX specifically, it was the idea that the thrust of the business was to achieve the sci-fi vision of setting the foundation for Mars colonization in the short term as a stepping stone to turning humanity into a multiplanetary civilization in the long term. In reality, the company’s real business model was to use that story (paired with some key lawsuits) to get the US government and NASA to provide it with public contracts that would eventually allow it to dominate US rocket launch capabilities and crowd other companies out of low-earth orbit with its Starlink satellites — the space activities that can actually turn a profit.

Going point by point

• Musk did not cut off Ukraine’s access to Starlink, he merely decline to activate it in part of the conflict zone. There is no evidence that this is “because he was taking calls from Russian officials” and this statement would probably be actionable in a less permissive free speech environment than the US

• SpaceX initially offered Starlink at a substantial discount for humanitarian reasons, and then found it economically untenable, so asked the US government to help. This is misrepresented as a cynical shakedown.

• The Starshield contract alluded to solves precisely the problem of Musk being forced to decide where to activate Starlink - Lockheed Martin’s CEO doesn’t have to personally sign off on every strike by an F35 and if asked to he probably would be no more keen to do it than Musk is.

• The notion that Musk is lying about his intentions for Mars is a whole cloth invention of the author of this piece. Its pure innuendo relying on the audience sharing the authors paranoia about rich people.

• Even more ridiculous is the notion that the vision of Mars colonisation is what got SpaceX contracts, rather than the fact that SpaceX could provide a service NASA requires such as cargo delivery to the ISS. The idea that serious officials at NASA can be talked out of billions of dollars of public money, which they have to account for, by someone wowing them with an unrelated long term vision, is absurd on the face of it. Again, no evidence is presented to back up this outrageous libel of senior NASA figures.

• Starlink is not “crowding other companies” out of LEO. Anybody writing that sentence simply lacks a basic grasp of the scale of space. The movie Gravity was not a documentary. What the author also does not grapple with is the fact that SpaceX is the leading launcher of commercial satellites in the world right now - so they would supposedly be “crowding out” their own customers. It doesn’t make make the slightest bit of sense, and again no evidence is given to support the assertion.

This rate of errors, half truths and poor arguments is consistent throughout, and ironically the author uses these to paint Musk as being deceptive. Would you want to read me dissecting every single sentence of this article though? I’ve done similar for other attacks on the enterprise of space colonisation, but not for ones this dense, and it seems like it would be tiresome both to write and to read.

Dishonest actors have always had this asymmetric advantage - nicknamed the “Gish gallop” after a particularly egregious user in the young Earth creationist community. Really, the only way around it is to show enough poor argumentation and dishonesty in an individual that readers won’t give any credence to anything else they say - you’re not supposed to do this in a debate, formally speaking, but a Gish galloper does not leave many options. You just have to discredit the pathologically dishonest.

I’ll also note that the book A City on Mars is wielded here as something of a blunt club to further the authors argument:

Mars is no backup planet. It’s a hostile world where humans can’t breathe without technological assistance, can’t walk freely on the surface without a space suit, and would have to live far underground to avoid developing cancer from the radiation on the surface since the world has no magnetosphere. As Zach and Kelly Weinersmith explain in A City on Mars, the soil on Mars is toxic and not as easy to clean as boosters of space settlement like to suggest. There’s also very little research on the social and biological considerations of long-term habitation in space, particularly reproduction and child rearing in a hostile environment that lacks the gravity we’ve evolved to live with. And that’s before considering the legal questions that people like Musk pretend don’t exist.

This condenses many of the problems with the book, and if anything makes them worse. Lets pick it apart

• We know there is no breathable atmosphere on Mars, and every colonisation plan accounts for this. Bringing it up is purely done for the purpose of being dramatic - and ignores that oxygen is actually the one thing we have already manufactured on Mars through the MOXIE experiment. Turns out, one of the simplest molecules in the universe is not hard to make. You can do it at home in your kitchen.

• Saying we would have to live “far underground to avoid developing cancer” is not true, unless you very much stretch the definitions of “far” and “underground”. In reality its a case of putting a couple of metres of regolith on your roof (which the air pressure in your habitat will be more than enough to support). Also, the lack of a magnetosphere is no the problem, the lack of atmospheric density is - another place where the Weinersmiths have misinformed their audience.

• The toxicity of perchlorate, despite its lurid description both here and in the source material, is not really such a hard problem at all. And it isn’t just “boosters” who say that, its engineers and chemists. Perchlorate is a reactive chemical which can be removed by chemical catalysts and biological processes. There are already mitigation procedures for washing it off. Over-emphasising the problem whilst being unaware the solutions (or intentionally overlooking them) is poor science communication at best, and dishonest at worst.

• The supposed issues with childbirth in low gravity aren’t even known to exist at all - its purely speculative - but Marx ignores the prospect of artificial gravity entirely. Once again, trying to make the problems sound as bad as possible whilst ignoring the solutions

• The legal aspects are nonsensical as there is presently no enforcement on Mars. This was pointed out to the Weinersmiths but they brushed it off with some snark, despite it clearly undermining huge parts of their book.

Some have suggested it was not a worthwhile exercise me debunking A City on Mars at length - but this article shows why it may have been. The authors, after a frosty reception from experts and supporters of space colonisation, have decided to bypass them and essentially badmouth the community to a mainstream audience. Expect to see bad arguments from that book thrown at us constantly in the future. Given how warmly received their essentially anti-space message was received in the media, this misinformation may even flow into decision making centres, and influence those in charge of distributing public and private funds.

How should this be combated? Well for anybody who needs reference I will be keeping my review of the book free. I’m not really convinced of the merit of public debate as its more of a parlour trick than a method of getting to the truth. Education is probably the best defence - getting to people first and equipping them to receive the standard talking points about radiation, perchlorates, and such with the correct level of skepticism. Hopefully, my work here is part of that, and I will discuss some other solutions at the end of the article.

What we should focus on

The recurring theme in criticism of this kind is something like “we should focus on Earth’s problems” or “we should focus on the poor”. It’s a common rhetorical device. But it betrays a mistaken and in some cases even dangerous worldview.

In my country, the UK, the total size of the workforce is around 30 million people. What should they be focused on? Should we all have a debate, and the ultimate winner of this debate be allowed to assign all 30 million to a task as he sees fit? All the bakers, plasterers, undertakers, bankers and software engineers must down tools immediately to work on the great Focus of society, until it is completed, and then they all move on to the next thing? The closest I can think of to someone attempting to really do this would be the disastrous Great Leap Forward under Mao. People using the phrase are generally not advocating to do anything of the sort, in most cases they just haven’t thought through what their rhetorical tropes actually mean.

But some I think sincerely do dream of society-wide control. From Paris Marx’s article is a good example of the format used in this way:

As Elon Musk sells us the idea that our future is in space and gets the government to believe it so his company can get billion-dollar contracts, the dream distracts us from the conversation we really should be having: what it would mean to address the serious problems we face in the here and now, and to set the foundations of a better society on Earth regardless of what happens beyond our atmosphere.

When a writer of this sort talks about “the conversation” they aren’t really meaning any kind of open ended discussion. They have in mind the final rhetorical defeat of their opponents, followed by them getting what they want. They permit some freedom for people to add to the plan or amend non-essential parts of it, but really they aren’t interested in real conversation at all. Its taken for granted what the “serious problems” are and what a “better society” is - these aren’t up for being truly questioned in the conversation.

You can tell this from the fact that “conversation” is singular, and anything outside of it is deemed a “distraction”. In Britain, there are about 60 million adults, and if we follow the concept of the Dunbar Number each knows about 150 people that would mean 4.5 billion potential conversation pairs. Must all of this conversation be about one thing? Why cannot different people have different conversations?

Bringing the left back

An actual conversation needs to include a wide variety of voices, and its to the detriment of the space colonisation movement that it appears to be losing some. So the question is, how do we bring them back? Unlike the above, the intention here is to invite rather than compel. If people don’t want to have our conversation fine - but we would like to open the conversation to as many as possible. Declining such invitation is not “distraction” nor is having a different or even diametrically opposed conversation elsewhere.

I asked about this on X/Twitter and received a few suggests:

1. Switch terminology from “colonisation”. I personally don’t like playing the euphemism treadmill - I noticed that when people tried to use the term “settlement” it was immediately linked to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the concept of “settler colonialism”. This convinced me that its not possible to appease people making such attacks. Perhaps I’ll have to at some stage, but I’m not sure letting dishonest critics force you to constantly update your terms is going to help.

2. Just build stuff. The idea that if companies like SpaceX and others just keep scoring material successes, people will come around automatically. Even if that were true - and envy might make things work in the other direction - real progress in space is still somewhat dependent on government assistance and at the very least regulatory cooperation. If public opinion really turned against it, the capacity to build things could be snuffed out, so the debate cannot be ignored.

3. Emphasising shared benefits, such as space based solar providing clean power worldwide or close loop life support technology permitting less damaging lifestyles on Earth. This would work fine, but it does hinge on these things bearing fruit - and it also doesn’t technically argue for colonisation.

4. Wait. One user argued that support for space colonisation comes in waves and it will be broadly more popular a few years from now. To the extent this is true, I don’t think any social trend just happens - people have to make them happen.

5. Just leave them behind. A very popular suggestion among right-leaning users was to simply not bother and to forge on and create space colonies purely from their own political ingroup.

This latter suggestion is a counsel of despair and I think probably a dangerous idea. Aside from retreating further inside an ideological bubble, this risks significantly diminishing the pool of people who want to go, and who are willing to provide necessary political support to the project.

A left wing perspective can also be practically useful to free us from limited “business case” thinking. That is all well and good when pitching an idea to an investor, but doesn’t apply universally across society nor would a Mars colony expect to have a single business plan. Viewing all of society as if it is, or should be, run like a business is essentially a neoliberal position, and one I have criticised at length here.

So lets not retreat into political bunkers. Lets come together and have the conversations the degrowthers don’t want us to have.

---

Although I offer some content for free, I have instituted a paywall around some of my articles, and my monthly data-driven articles on the space colonisation effort.

This was a contentious article and I may have annoyed readers from one side of the political spectrum or the other who now may be less inclined to support me, but consider this: If you came from a socialist perspective - a worker should receive the product of his labour! If you came from a capitalist perspective - surely a self reliant individualist such as yourself doesn’t need to sponge off my free content?