Space for Everybody Else

There are people out there who don't watch rocket launches for fun. Some of them don't even know what an O'Neill cylinder is. How do we talk to those who don't live and breathe this stuff?

If you met me in real life, you wouldn’t think I devote a substantial amount of time to thinking about and talking about space colonisation. I don’t usually walk around in a SpaceX t-shirt and I tend not to use Starship flight rates as a conversation starter with strangers.

“DID YOU KNOW MASS TO ORBIT IS NOW INCREASING AS FAST AS MOORES LAW INCREASES TRANSISTOR COUNT?”

However, if colonisation is to succeed, it needs broader support than a small group of enthusiasts. The space community seems to me to spend a lot of time talking with itself, at conferences and on podcasts and on social media, and not a lot of time broadening the circle of people interested in and excited about the prospect of becoming a multi-planetary species.

A Note on Terminology.

I tend usually to talk about space colonisation. For many people, the term “space settlement” is preferred, due to the perceived negative associations of the word colonisation. I had thought this was a reasonable substitution until I saw people go after “space settlement” with reference to “settler colonialism“ and such. It became clear to me with the kind of people interested in this sort of word game that you cannot win - therefore it is best not to play at all.

Reasoning by word association is not very clever but tends to be irritatingly popular. It is fairly easy to pull the rug out from such arguments so in my view it’s best to let opponents try to make them, and then show them up to be shallow. I use the term space colonisation, and if anybody takes issue with it I simply point out there are no native peoples in space - and they tend to end up looking foolish. Mostly though, people are smart enough to understand that space colonisation is not related to the terrestrial colonialism of the past.

Also, I will always spell colonisation with an ‘s’.

Conversation Starters

Although most people don’t have much of an opinion on space matters, a significant number do have an opinion on Elon Musk, and I often find that use their opinion of him to orientate themselves on the issue. This can make it hard to make any progress with the substantial number of people who dislike or even hate him.

Survey from YouGov

Musk is not as unpopular as you might think - the quarter or so that are very unfavourable to him are quite vocal about it. I suspect if there was more granularity to the survey such as a 1-10 scale it would be apparent that the unfavourable group would be peaked at that maximum level of dislike. Some of the reaction he elicits online slides into irrationality, akin to the Two Minutes Hate from Nineteen Eighty Four. I suspect there isn’t much anybody can do about this, certainly as long as he keeps inserting himself into contentious political debates and as long as his name is a reliable click generator for the media.

Although formally a logical fallacy, it is natural and necessary for people to orientate themselves in a world too complex for a single person to comprehend in its entirety by deferring to leaders and experts they find credible. The bright light of Musks fame/infamy might tend to drown out other useful voices as a star outshines the light of an exoplanet, so likewise we should block that out in order to show people there is more to see.

Jared Isaacman is an excellent public spokesman for the movement, and has been into space twice. Despite being less abrasive than Musk, he is still a billionaire and thus people who see space colonisation through the lens of an escape hatch for rich people are still likely to dismiss him. Some might be more convinced by more technical and academic figures.

The work of Gerard O’Neill, in my view, still stands the test of time three decades after his death, and now has a wealthy patron in the form of Jeff Bezos. The High Frontier is an essential read for getting into this subject. Robert Zubrin is still writing books which are good to recommend to novices, most recently The New World on Mars, and show more in-depth thought on the subject of Mars colonisation than “throw lots of mass at it” - even though fundamentally that is what needs to be done. A less known figure these days is John Lewis, whose Mining The Sky laid out a case for asteroid mining.

Aside from pointing someone in the direction of books on the matter, there are a few core arguments I tend to use

1. The energy output of the Sun is around 2 billion times the amount that falls on the Earth, and likewise all the raw materials we need are in abundance out there. Space thus gives us scope for a vast expansion of society.

2. The form of culture of this new solar system scale society will be determined by those who show up - the nations, companies and people that make the effort to push out. Those who think it too much trouble will not have a say.

3. The revolution in launch that is in progress means this is happening sooner than most people expect, and you should act accordingly.

Most other arguments about science, exploration, etc. I find to be secondary to those, although worth making in themselves.

But these arguments and similar have been made for years, and not much progress has so far been made. In part, this was due to the lack of a launch capability and persistently high costs, but also due to determined political opposition.

Historical Opposition

All spaceflight has been opposed since it began. It started as a set of military programs, and people who don’t like the military will tend to oppose such things. Then, in the US, it moved into the civilian sphere under NASA. Then it became a government program that cost money and thus was, supposedly, taking scarce funds from more worthy causes. Such arguments are usually fairly innumerate - the costs of spaceflight are invariably far smaller than the costs of social programs raised as alternatives - but they were successful in pushing down NASA budgets, and preventing that program from leading to any expansion beyond Earth orbit.

There was, however a brief moment of public interest in space colonisation in the years immediately after Apollo. On the heels of his academic work and the publication of The High Frontier, Gerard O’Neill made a number of television appearances and his ideas appeared in print media. NASA supported a small space settlement study. Here is a TV interview he did alongside Isaac Asimov in 1975:

His ideas started to gain traction, but after a 60 minutes feature in 1977 gained nationwide attention in the US, a Senator named William Proxmire launched an attack.

Proxmire comes across as a cynical populist, the type who will make the appearance of being on the side of the ordinary man by forever complaining of any government spending that it should go to some suitably sympathetic cause. Such attacks are invariably dishonest, as they always underestimate the cost of addressing social issue and overestimate the cost of what they are attacking - sometimes be extremely large factors. They get away with this because if a listener compares the amounts involved in any government program to their own personal finances, the quantities seem impossibly large. Thus the project being attacked seems profligate, and the cause presented as an alternative must surely be solvable by such a huge injection of cash.

It is important to get a grip on the basic scale of your governments finances in this situation. Compare the net worth of Elon Musk to the rate at which the Pentagon or Social Security burns through money. Here in UK, “days of NHS spending” is a useful metric - the health service has almost religious status here, and is the default sink for such populist demands. It burns through around £500 million per day thought - so almost no space policy the UK could consider would make a dent in its success or failure.

Going back to Proxmire, the line that has stuck from him is “It’s the best argument yet for chopping NASA’s funding to the bone… I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy.”. His intervention was successful and NASA abandoned all of it’s funding for colonisation work.

Populists are fond of using language like “fantasy”. They wish to appear grounded and realistic, and their opponents as head-in-the-cloud dreamers. We must not let such people claim the mantle of deciding what is realistic or not though - only the laws of nature can determine that, and it is easy to show that space colonisation is not forbidden by physics. Was human action limited by the rhetoric of cynics rather than the boundaries of reality, we would have never got anywhere!

There was one last significant push to get colonisation back on the NASA agenda. As a response to George H. W. Bush in 1989 calling for a renewed space exploration beyond Earth orbit, and unhappy with the NASA proposal that was an incredibly costly jobs program doomed to go nowhere, Robert Zubrin and David Baker conceived the Mars Direct plan, which was a far more focused plan that would dispense with many unneeded elements and aim to send a crew for an 18 month stay on Mars by the turn of the millennium.

As the presentation shows, this was implicitly a plan that led to colonisation of the planet. In the later part, an evolution of the Ares launch vehicle (a similar concept to todays SLS) designed to send 24 people to Mars each launch, and to be launched 8 times each synodic cycle, to build up a population on the planet after the initial exploration and base building phase.

A Martian immigrant rocket from the 1990 Mars Direct Presentation. Shuttle Derived with a nuclear upper stage and 2 habitation modules.

The plan was popular with many people, and NASA iterated on it to create a version they could fly. But the political support for Mars Direct was never forthcoming. The NASA leadership seemed determined to stick with their existing plans, slowly building up the International Space Station, and deferring Mars into the indefinite future. The organisation seems to have change little in its attitude to these things since then.

Opponents have so far been entirely successful in blocking support for colonisation from the public sector. Now there is the possibility of funding it through the private sector, they have to change tactics. Some go through familiar rhetorical arguments against inequality - e.g. billionaires shouldn’t exist, if they are building rockets it means we aren’t taxing them enough. But in some cases they take the more roundabout route of trying to claim it is physically impossible.

Countering Misinformation

Sometimes a harder nut to crack is not people disinterested, but people who have imbibed misinformation about space from various sources. Reliably, whenever a post I make on X about colonisation gets traction, I will get replies from people informing me - typically in a snarky or patronising manner - that it will never happen because of radiation or toxic Martian soil (perchlorates) or something. They may even call me stupid for not knowing these things.

It is quite tiresome, and if they are too rude I simply block them at this point - not an ideal communications strategy, but if someone just wants to insult me there doesn’t seem much prospect of changing minds, so why waste time? Move on to someone who can be convinced.

The topics of radiation and perchlorates come up because they have been mentioned a lot in popular science articles. The impacts of gravity are also bought up. So in turn I’ll give what my typical responses are on these points to someone raising them with genuine curiosity:

1. Radiation - the radiation environment in deep space is not as different from that in LEO as you have led to believe. The Earth’s magnetic field is not a big factor in shielding from it - the atmosphere is what protects us on the surface. In deep space we can substitute solid shielding for that, and on Mars the planet itself halves the dose and the atmosphere, thin as it is, provides some shielding - especially from radiation coming from near the horizon. Piling rocks on your habitat roof will mitigate the problem.

2. Perchlorate - don’t eat Martian regolith. Take sensible precautions to stop treading it from the surface into your agricultural areas. Test the food to make sure it hasn’t got through. This is a fairly reactive chemical and there are many paths to removing it, some of which have been demonstrated in the lab on Earth already

3. Gravity - we don’t know yet all the impacts of Martian gravity, but it is entirely unscientific to suppose that they will be the same as the impacts of weightlessness. Indeed, experiments done in a small centrifuge on the ISS show that the impacts aren’t the same. This is, however, the big unknown of humans on Mars. If it turns out to be too much of a problem - we can either rotate habitats on the surface or pivot to free space habitats. There is no reason not to push forward.

One thing I have noticed is that opponents of colonisation either genuinely think, or pretend to think, that when they bring up these issues it is the very first time their interlocutor has heard them. That they haven’t been endlessly discussed for decades by smart people in the colonisation movement. O’Neills space settlement study for NASA in the 1970’s goes into great detail on health impacts. Mars Direct in 1990 designed its architecture with artificial gravity to mitigate deconditioning. Perchlorate is a more recent discovery - but since it has become apparent everybody in the Mars movement has known about it and the problem has been intensively studied and talked about.

Homework

So, reader, I am assigning homework for this post. I want everybody who has got this far to talk to two people who were not interested in space colonisation about it, and try to convince them it’s good, possible, and reasonably imminent.

I’m leaving the comments on this one open, so please report back. Also, if you have any tips yourself for spreading the word, please share them.

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