How To Build Yourself Your Very Own Interplanetary Civilization

What would it mean for us to be an interplanetary civilization? Let’s suppose that an interplanetary civilization, if we are to ever become one, means that we can maintain a self-sustaining colony on Mars. What do we need so that we’re able to do this? Instead of talking about rocket payload capacities yet, let’s take a look at the high-level social organization required for something like that.

1. The main thing that a self-sustaining colony on Mars needs is that it should have self-sufficiency, without undue dependence on Earth. This means that as much as possible, a Martian colony should be able to build, maintain and expand its own infrastructure. The problem with trying to produce a nail on Mars is that you need a machine which produces nails, which ultimately requires nails to be built, and ad infinitum. The reason that nails on Earth have not disappeared in a puff of paradox is that they have been developed slowly out of older technologies, which depend on earlier technologies, and so on. Martian nail-production, as all Martian production, would need to have smaller supply chains, without the luxury of Earth’s long supply-chains, and has to be such that production is pretty independent. Presumably after founding colonies in space has been rendered easily enough, it should be possible to “start up” from scratch the production of machines and other required goods.
2. A Martian colony, whether or not Mars itself is terraformed, would have to set up a stable biosphere, a micro-ecosystem. The biosphere includes not only humans, but also the food that has been grown, any organisms that have been brought along, and so on. This knowledge cannot be just episteme but also metis, in the matter of James C. Scott’s farmers, who could outdo Western “scientific” agriculture, but in an environment far removed from that of Earth. And even if you are not planning on terraforming Mars, similar metic know-how would be required to maintain the pressurized environments in colonies. Terraforming, or some version of it, though, would probably happen, and for that what is required is a deep understanding of planetology, ecology and planetary climatology.
3. At the very least, for the first settlers on Mars, there will be limited resources, like food and water, which would have to be divvied up. This extends to luxuries like personal effects (presumably the colonists are not going to live a bare life with the bare amount of food and oxygen to survive). The system on the International Space Station presumably works because it’s a research station, not a colony, and the astronauts are staying at most only for a few years, not the decades that a young colonist might expect to live. At some point an economy is needed, but a straightforward free market of air and water presumably will not work (given how fragile life-sustaining infrastructure is, the tragedy of the commons would end possibly with the death of everyone), but at the same time, the failures of Soviet-style economic planning can lead to the same kind of death. On the level of culture, we would expect that there is a strong communal spirit or bond, without which everyone just might die.
4. The colonization of a planet is an endeavour that takes at minimum decades, and will go on for centuries, perhaps even millenia. If the colonization effort is led by a corporation or by a government agency, they would need a guarantee that they will have such a lifespan, and bankruptcy or failure at any point would mean the failure of the colonization project. The colony itself would have to make plans on the scale of centuries. It cannot be beholden to near-term profit, unless there is some mechanism to account for profit that matures thousands of years in the future, but even that requires a financial system that can survive that long.
5. The same goes for technology. NASA hardware, like the Voyager probes, have proved to be remarkably long-lasting, past their original mission timetables. But NASA has only made a couple of probes; a colonization effort would require a large amount of hardware produced at once, and how can quality be checked. The other is that the long-life of Voyager was fortuitous. But when an oxygen pump is made for a dome on Mars, the pump may have to last for centuries, and we have to be able to guarantee it, short of running it on Earth for five centuries and seeing if it works out. “Move fast and break things” or technological “fake it till you make it” is an incredibly risky gamble. An interplanetary civilization would have enough practical know-how about how to engineer devices to last for decades and centuries, reliably (this is one of the barriers for interstellar probes, too, if we’re not satisfied with sending a dumb husk of metal to careen past Alpha Centauri).

A lot of these are on the order of knowledge, but I would argue that they depend on a particular social organization, which mediates the production of technology and infrastructure. My prediction is that even if we got rockets and inflatable domes today, or even tomorrow or ten years later, we wouldn’t be able to colonize Mars. The difference is I would say the difference between “doing X” and “being the kind of person who can do X”. Extending this from the individual to the civilization level, of course. An interplanetary civilization is the kind of civilization that would gracefully be able to colonize Mars, because points 1 through 5 would be obvious. The reason that we have to think about “being the kind of civilization which can colonize Mars” is that that’s the only way to account for the difficulty of Mars colonization and to recognise that there is a qualitative leap for us to cross.

What is interesting about the above five points is that, if we were able to colonize Mars, if we were an interplanetary civilization, we would find it quite easy to solve the problems faced on Earth itself.

1. If we were able to reorganize supply chains so that native industry can function on Mars, then on Earth we would have the ability to radically decentralize technology and production, which would help us migrate from the oil basis of civilization that is the cause of climate change.
2. If we were able to terraform Mars, or at least set up a functioning biosphere, we would be able to deal with the comparatively simpler matter to deal with the biosphere on Earth, with a combination of geoengineering and infrastructural reorganization, but also we might perhaps be able to make Earth more livable, for us and for the ecosystem.
3. Continuing from the former, if we were able to produce food with minimal resources at low cost, at a lower cost, as a Mars colony would need, it would be possible to feed the world, too.
4. If we had an active ability to look to the future, to plan on the order of centuries, a problem like climate change would have been averted in advance, or at least would be managed and prioritized, alongside existential risks and long-term problems. This sums up point 5, too, because the type of technology produced under this regime would take in view the long run.

The reason for stressing on the qualitative leap is to forestall a particular fallacy, the “Science Points” fallacy, where science and technology is the accumulation of points in a particular direction, and once we have enough points, projects like “AGI”, “Mars colonization” simply drop out from the sky, and so the main debate is whether to speed up scientific research, or to slow it down. It assumes that you can fit scientific research basically into a set of programs that you can formulate beforehand, with clearly demarcated milestones, or that it would somehow come out of necessity. It was why it was easy to presume, after the Apollo 11 landings, that the inevitable next step would be Mars landings, then lunar colonization, then Martian colonization, and so on. If there’s anything that this misses, I think it’s perhaps an understanding that the way that production and exchange is organized and incarnated in a particular civilization mediates the kinds of projects initiated. This is perhaps why there are all these sky-high science fiction projects that people have been dreaming up since the 1960s, that we’ve been researching since then, which doesn’t seem to work out, precisely because there’s a lack of understanding or recognition of social mediation, the form that structures technological development.

There’s an essay in the 125th anniversary edition of National Geographic, as part of a feature “Why We Explore”, if I recall, that discusses various modes of interstellar travel, from solar sails to Project Orion, and points out ultimately that while we may not be able to figure out how to build a starship, presumably a century or two later once we’re an interplanetary civilization, and we have colonized the solar system, then it would be possible to figure out how to build starships. Something similar is going on with “colonizing the planets”, I suppose, and if we ever hope to do so, we would have to enter the frame, a new one, where it’s actually possible.

There is an alternate kind of future that I’ve been finding myself considering these days. I don’t particularly like it, and I hope that I don’t find myself living in it, but it has a kind of realistic possibility to it, at least to me. The big “moonshot” projects of our time, like AGI, begins to wind down, and we end up entering a kind of relative winter, withdraw and work on making sure that the lights are still working, and spend decades figuring out how to repair the climate, how to restructure the economy and industrial production. Space exploration never really wholly ceases, there are the occasional manned flights to orbit, and there are probes sent to various planets in the Solar System, but there’s no Mars or Moon colonies yet. But skill and expertise accumulates over generations, and in a century or two, humanity, which is already interplanetary in attitude on Earth, finds itself colonizing the Solar System with remarkable ease, with a wealth of trial and error knowledge about ecosystems, institutions and biospheres, and with a greater level of maturity. I wouldn’t even characterize this as degrowth, I would actually think that it’s pretty techno-optimist.

More broadly, something akin to a “interplanetary civilization” can begin right on Earth; my own suspicions is that it might well as start with something like decentralized solar power or something along those lines. It’s not purely voluntaristic in the sense that anyone can go around thinking of themselves as interplanetary and perhaps use some solar power. Ultimately it has to bottom out into the actual production of technology and institutions that would in the long run be able to colonize Mars, but also a great many things in the interval.