Off-Earth ethics (featuring Erika Nesvold)

00:00:05
Speaker 1: The year is nineteen seventy. Mario Eskimia had been working with Donald Lovitt, otherwise known as Porky, in the Arctic for over a month, and he was pretty fed up with Porky at this point. Porky had the bad habit of getting drunk and wielding butcher cleavers while stealing his crewmate's wine, clearly behavior that would be frowned upon in just about any culture. So this had happened yet again, and Eskima got all fired up and grabbed his rifle and went to confront Porky. Porky was indeed enjoying a cocktail with the stolen wine, and he was enjoying that cocktail with the station manager, a man named Benny Lightsey. Eskimia was arguing with Lightsee about what should be done about the whole Porky situation when his rifle accidentally went.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Off, killing Lights.

00:00:57
Speaker 1: This actually ended up becoming a fairly famous case in the world of law because it provided some precedent for what happens when you're outside of the jurisdiction of other nations. So what happens when you're on a mobile piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean what court do you get tried in? And who decides what happens? Well, in this case, it was fairly straightforward because both men were United States citizens, so the case was tried in the US and Eskimia was ultimately acquitted. What happens if you have a Martian settlement and Mario Eskimia is from the United States, for example, and Benny Lightsey is from Russia for example?

00:01:36
Speaker 2: What happens on Mars?

00:01:37
Speaker 1: Who oversees the court case, who decides what the punishment should be, and what punishment is fair in a harsh environment millions of miles from the home planet. Well to answer some of these questions today, we're talking to doctor Erica Nesvold. Her book Off Earth tackles questions about law, social justice, and ethics in space.

00:01:58
Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and kelly Is Extraordinary Universe.

00:02:15
Speaker 3: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm excited for other people to go into space. And welcome to the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

00:02:25
Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm a parasitologist, and I think it would be great for other people to settle space, depending on how it gets done, I have qualifications.

00:02:37
Speaker 3: And so on today's episode, we're going to be digging into the details of what questions we have to ask before we settle space and how we handle it once we get there, including tricky questions like who gets to make space law on what happens when you break it, which makes me wonder, Kelly. Down here on Earth, people are always breaking laws, you know, jaywalking or parking illegally or whatever. So my questioning to you today is, what is the most serious law you've ever broken?

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Oh?

00:03:03
Speaker 3: Wow, on air here, not under oath, but on air.

00:03:06
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. Well, you know, I feel like those things are the same. I have to be honest. I think that the most trouble I almost got in it was Thanksgiving and my three year old had been screaming in the car on the ride home from Ohio in the slushy snow rain combo for like hours, like literally hours, and I went from a sixty five to a forty five zone and I didn't realize I had gone from a sixty five to a forty five zone. I didn't see the forty five sign because I had no brain lift at that point. And if you go over twenty then you get your license taken away.

00:03:42
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:03:43
Speaker 1: So the police officer he walked up to the car and he heard the screaming and he went.

00:03:49
Speaker 2: Oh, like, maybe he's also a parent.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: And all I know is that the ticket said I had gone nineteen over oh, which meant I got to keep my license. And I was more care about driving when my kiddo was screaming after that. So basically I am a whimp and I have not done too many dangerous, scary, illegal things in my lifetime.

00:04:09
Speaker 2: But what about you? Okay, of course it's going to be your turn now, No.

00:04:13
Speaker 3: I need to fall up on your story. Does that mean that you can commit any felony you want? But if there's a screaming baby, they'll downgrade it to a misdemeanor. They're like murder one, No, but her kid was crying, so we'll just call it manslaughter.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: You know, I haven't done the appropriate experimental like design to test that hypothesis. I mean I can imagine it going the other way. Sometimes baby screaming just make people angry. I could imagine, you know, somebody being like, no, I want to write you a ticket for an extra five miles an hour. Because I'm just not happy it's hearing this baby screaming. So I wouldn't want to risk it.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: But what do you think, Well, I've planned on that. Actually, maybe the greatest crime I've committed that I haven't been caught for is importing illegal cheeses. You know, we used to go back and forth discern all the time when our kids were young, and we would come back from friends and they'd be our favorite cheeses and we'd want to have them, and so we've packed them in our suitcase even though they're illegal to import. And our plan was always if we get searched, you know, just rely on our toddlers to cry and scream and to get us out of it. So I'm glad to hear that works sometimes. That's great what I forgot.

00:05:15
Speaker 2: I also committed dairy related crime.

00:05:18
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: I was in Norway during the butter shortage that happened a while ago. It was like some import roles and there wasn't enough butter, and so me and the folks that I was working with, we snuck across the border to Sweden and bought a bunch of butter and smuggled it back across for our dinner. I also have engaged in dairy related crimes.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: I did not realize today's podcast was going to be about international dairy smuggling, but there we go.

00:05:41
Speaker 2: There you go. It may or may not come up again, or maybe that was just.

00:05:45
Speaker 3: Us And maybe in the future of folks in space settlements are going to be smuggling cheeses and butters from one habitat to another.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: Those are going to be some stinky cheeses if you're taking them from Earth and they've got a six month transit though, but some people are into that. But these are some sort of complicated situations. If somebody is committing crimes on Mars, what's the right court for that to be tried in? And what happens if you have people from different countries even now, like it's complicated when you have people committing crimes against one another and they're from different countries, especially if they're in a place like Antarctica that's supposed to, you know, belong to no nation. But that's just the tip of the ethical iceberg for stuff that needs to get dealt with. And so today we've got this amazing guest who can talk about loads of different ethical problems associated with why we go to space, how many people we send to space.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: There's just a lot to think about.

00:06:31
Speaker 3: That's right, and so these are really fun questions that we do need to think about before we build out humanity's future into space. But before we hear from an expert who's thought a lot about this and written an excellent book on the topic. We were curious what tricky topics the person on the street anticipated we might run into when we decide to settle space.

00:06:50
Speaker 4: I think the ethical problems of all the bodies were going to harm exposing to space environments. I think probably the ethics of international law are going to be really bad. They're already bad on the oceans. So space is just space ocean, but worse. I mean, there's just the ongoing problem which is not new to space, but space worse where we take actions that have huge implications for like way later human generations, you know, and we're not always doing right by people to generations down the road, much less one hundred.

00:07:24
Speaker 2: Generations down the road.

00:07:25
Speaker 4: And so I would really hope that we're thinking at least one hundred gen down the road when we do space stuff.

00:07:30
Speaker 3: The allocation of resources, who do.

00:07:34
Speaker 5: You say first, if there's a disaster, be it like during Space Traveler, once you actually land on the planet they're aiming for, Like, do you prioritize your engineers and scientists to people who can actually pet things running?

00:07:47
Speaker 6: Do you protire to your children the women who you plan to have children with, you know? Do you just draw straws and help for the best? Another one, what do you do if you run into any indigenous people you get there? And also when do people become what we consider indigenous?

00:08:05
Speaker 5: You know, like if somebody landed on the planet fifty or one hundred years before, did they have a bare claim despite whatever government have decleared on the way there?

00:08:15
Speaker 7: The value of.

00:08:16
Speaker 6: Human lives and the cost benefits out of exploring space.

00:08:24
Speaker 7: One I think has to do with economic class, and I think the disparity between poor and rich, for example, would be even greater than it is based on decisions of who gets to settle in these new colonies. Would it be considered a consequence in sending the poor out there or would it be considered a benefit and the rich would go out there? Either way, I think would disparity would be great and huge. I also think it would cause political tensions as well between countries over who gets to colonize these new areas in space.

00:09:07
Speaker 3: So, Kelly, who did you ask these questions of?

00:09:10
Speaker 1: I asked these questions of friends of mine on Facebook? I asked who wants to answer some anonymous questions for me? And then I texted them the question and they left me a voicemail with the answer.

00:09:19
Speaker 3: Definitely a scientific sample for sure.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, these are all Kelly's social network answers. None of them cited my book though, so they can't be that quote. But no, no, no, I thought these were all great and interesting answers.

00:09:33
Speaker 2: What did you think?

00:09:34
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think these are pretty well informed. They would be better informed if they'd read your excellent book, of course, but they give us a good preview for what kind of things people are thinking about, what kind of tricky questions there are when humanity decides to move into the stars.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: And if you would like us to expand out past Kelly's social network, please feel free to get in touch with us at questions at danielant Kelly dot org.

00:09:56
Speaker 3: We'll send you the questions for future episodes, and you can hear your voice on the We.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: Would love to have your voice featured on the show. All right, so, without further ado, show, we invite Erica onto the show.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: Let's do it all right, here we go.

00:10:12
Speaker 1: On today's show, we have doctor Erica Nesvold. She is an astrophysicist and a developer for Universe Sandbox, which she calls astronomy educational software masquerading as a video game I'm in.

00:10:25
Speaker 5: She made a.

00:10:25
Speaker 1: Podcast called Making New Worlds where she interviewed a bunch of experts from a variety of different backgrounds about questions related to ethics and justice in space, and expanded those conversations into a book called Off Earth Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space. She also, because apparently she can do everything, co founded a nonprofit called the Just Space Alliance, which advocates for a more inclusive and ethical future in space while also striving to make the world more just and equitable back here on Earth today.

00:10:56
Speaker 2: Thanks for being on.

00:10:57
Speaker 8: The show, Erica, Thank you for having me.

00:11:00
Speaker 1: It's good to be chatting with you again. We've met irl once, which was super fun. It was fun, Yes, talking about how people should maybe take birth in space a little bit more seriously, or that was the part that I remembered most strongly.

00:11:12
Speaker 8: That's right.

00:11:13
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start with ethics around going to space at all. So when I was getting involved in this literature, I found a lot of arguments that weren't super convincing. So let's start with some of the arguments that you think are least convincing, and then work our way up to the argument that you think is the most convincing for why we should be settling space.

00:11:30
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean this is sort of where I got into these questions in the first place. I always been a big fan of space and even a big fan of human space expiation and settlement, and so I've been sort of steeped in these space settlement advocacy rhetoric since I was a kid. And then I started really digging into it and thinking about whether I agree with all of these arguments, and I started off my book really digging into them because they come in a few different flavors. There's the people who say that we need to go to space so that we don't have all of our eggs in one back. We need to become a multiplanetary species because our planet where we all live is potentially a weak point. It's fragile. We've seen species get wiped out here before through the dinosaurs and various different climate changes, and we're more and more aware all the time of all of the different things that could kill off all the humans, most of which rely on the humans being all in the same place. So if we go to different planets and spread out, then we've got to backup if Earth's biosphere collapses. And to me, I find that one to be the most convincing argument. Unfortunately, it's also a very powerful emotional argument, because then if you have any sort of pushback against either space settlement as a whole or specific parts of space settlement, or if you just say, for example, maybe we should slow down space settlement and think about what we're doing here, the opposition to that tends to be, oh, do you want all humans to die?

00:12:50
Speaker 5: Then?

00:12:51
Speaker 8: So that sort of false dichotomy where your criticisms are on one side and on the other side is the extinction of the human race. It makes it hard to have reasonable conversations. But then beyond that, there's some more interesting and also very emotional arguments. People who argue that we have to expand always and continuously without stopping, because otherwise our culture or our scientific knowledge. If we stop growing, that collapses, We stagnate, we stop knowing how to invent new things, we stop knowing how to do art. And that's the problem with pop music these days, is not enough expansion. And not only is this just a very common and often recycled argument you hear between generations a lot about what's wrong with the kids these days, but this is also the kind of argument that you've seen throughout history, especially in the US. There's an argument that once the frontier of European settlement reached the west coast of the US and the frontier in a way, that America somehow became less of itself because our culture had been built on having a frontier, and so we have to find this new frontier out in space. I don't find that one particularly convincing for a number of reasons. I also think that the idea that we need to always expand continuously or something bad will happen leads us to making bad decisions, trying to grow too fast, trying to consume too fast, and that we should in fact be learning how to balance how to live sustainably with our environment. And there's plenty of cultures who are more focused on that, So maybe we should amplify their voices.

00:14:17
Speaker 3: You don't think we need space cowboys to stay who we are.

00:14:21
Speaker 8: I mean, I don't have a problem with the esthetic.

00:14:23
Speaker 3: Space cowboy rhinestones on the spaceship kind of thing.

00:14:27
Speaker 8: Listen, you're just selling on it. The more you talk about What.

00:14:30
Speaker 1: I love about those arguments, though, is that the people who are making those stagnation arguments, and I'll just go ahead and say that I do have Rubbert Zubert in mind right now, are also the ones who are like, well, now is the time because SpaceX is dropping the cost of launching the space and it's like all of this amazing technological growth, and like how AI is helping us? Is what's getting us there? And so where is the stagnation that they're talking about anyway?

00:14:53
Speaker 8: Okay, no, no, that's fair. I mean the problem here, and the problem with a lot of these arguments is even if you have people off living on the space frontier somewhere, there's still more some of us are going to be living on Earth needing to learn how to live sustainably with the Earth. So we have to figure out that part anyway. So then another big one that you see a lot, especially and really strong space settlement advocates is the idea that it's our destiny, that it's not just fulfilling our biological or psychological or whatever drive to go out and explore and expand, but it's somehow inevitable, and if we try to stop ourselves, we're working against nature. This is a to me, a much less strong argument. Tends to go with very poetic language, so it's appealing, you know, emotionally in that sense, and you hear this the most and the more flowery marketing talk. But I don't think it's a good rational argument. And often when I'm talking to space settlement advocates, I try to point that out to them. I'm like, listen, you've got a great little, you know, video that you've put together with stirring music and images of space vistas and talk about how it's humanity's destiny. But that's actually not the best way to sell it to people who aren't sure. You need to explain how space settlement's going to benefit everyone, including the people back on Earth, and you can't use this sort of argument from nature, because even if it were true that we have some sort of innate drive to expand and explore, which, as far as I understand, the science is still out on that. We don't just do things because our genetics tell us to like you and so have evolved past that and we have to think about our decisions instead of just saying, oh, well, you know, it's our innate drive, so we don't need to examine this plane at all.

00:16:24
Speaker 3: Well, can I jump in and speak up for that irrational motivation because that's the one that resonates the most with me, and rational or not, Like, I want to know what's out there in the universe. I want us to explore the edges of the galaxy. I want us to figure out how to go from galaxy to galaxy. And it seems to me like step one of that dream is to go from planet to planet, right, And so my desire doesn't come from like a genetic disposition to conquer every square inch of land on every surface, but just to know how the universe works, Like I feel like it would be a shame for us to be trapped on this rock for ever, and I don't know how it's going to happen, but eventually has to happen if we're going to figure stuff out. Maybe that's irrational, but can't irrational motivations drive our decision sometimes? I mean, my whole research program is probably useless and impractical and therefore irrational. Does that mean that we shouldn't do art and culture and stuff like that?

00:17:19
Speaker 8: To be honest, I have the exact same drive. I also would love to be out there and want us to be exploring and want us to poke around and see what's going on, And that certainly motivates me as a scientist. And there's nothing wrong with emotional motivations. Let me say it that way instead of irrational. The key here, I think is not to try to use an emotional argument as if it's a rational argument, I think. And the other key I think is it's important to identify when there's multiple motivations going on, especially if your individual motivation is maybe different from the organization's argument that they're poting forward. I think a lot of people are very driven by these emotional feelings that they want to be out there, they want to see humanity out there, and then they go off and try to cook up a good marketing case for it that doesn't acknowledge that they're being driven emotionally, I think we need both.

00:18:05
Speaker 3: And let me be clear, I don't want to be out there. I want humanity to be out there, but I'm staying here on Earth like I'm a total wimp. There's no way you're getting me in the spaceship.

00:18:14
Speaker 8: And the other important thing, like I'm not trying to say some arguments count and some don't. I think it's just really important to figure out what your motivations are, not just because then you can decide, like the binary yes or no, should you do this? But our motivations will drive our decision making in every aspect of our planning, and so it's important to be very self aware of that and aware of the people that you're working with so that you don't end up having an obstacle in your decision making because you didn't realize one of you is trying to make a trillion dollars from space mining and the other one just wants to retire in space. That's going to lead to some different decision making.

00:18:48
Speaker 3: Well, I think most people probably feel like space exploration is overall good, and maybe there's different motivations. And I totally agree with you that we should be upfront about what they are, But I feel like the context for understanding which these arguments are good or bad or where they come from is that there are arguments on the other side, right, that there are reasons to not just rush headlong into space exploration. And that might come as a surprise to some folks, Like what's an argument for not settling space? What's an example of a reason why we should not be building colonies on Mars Organmede.

00:19:21
Speaker 8: That's a very important question, and I actually think that all of these arguments for space have their opposite argument. So one argument for space settlement of space expression that I didn't list is just that we could make money doing it. But it also costs an enormous amount of money to do any of these projects, especially the ones that are being proposed for the future. And so you know, from a very pragmatic financial perspective, we can say, as a species, as humanity, or as individual investors, is it worth the huge amount of time and money that we need to invest. Will we get that back or will we just kind of be pouring it down the drain and then a few rockets will explode in the industry will collapse. That's a decision.

00:20:01
Speaker 3: Should we be building more elementary schools or funding space explorations.

00:20:04
Speaker 8: Yeah, is there something else we could be putting that money and brain power into on Earth that would help better ensure that humanity is going to survive, better ensure that people on Earth will have better lives.

00:20:16
Speaker 3: More parasitology grants, for example, exactly.

00:20:19
Speaker 8: The most important.

00:20:20
Speaker 2: That's right. I'm glad we all agree.

00:20:23
Speaker 8: And on the existential risk idea, the idea that if we don't escape the planet, then our species risks being killed off, has its reverse argument as well. There are people Daniel Dudney is one of them. If he wrote a book called Dark Skies in the past few years who argues that trying to settle space will increase the risk that we will kill ourselves off. Because he makes this political science argument that more activity in space will mean more nations arguing with each other about what's happening in space, and more weapons in space, potentially weapons of mass destruction. We could destabilize the global balance and end up in a nuclear war that would kill us off because we tried to leave the Earth, and so there are risks. There are risks that going to space could lead to nuclear war. There's also just risks that the opportunity cost, we could be spending that money elsewhere. There's risks that if we do it too fast without deliberate thought, that will just make a mess of things, and that maybe it would be better for everyone in space and on Earth if we took it a little slower. And so I've heard all these arguments, and I think it's really important. Even if you're someone like me who thinks I'm pro space settlement, I think it's it's important to listen to all these arguments, including the people who say no, we're not ready to go to space, because they tend to have the best and most observant criticisms of the plans, so they can poke holes in your big plans, which is important.

00:21:41
Speaker 3: Well, that makes sense as much as I'm, for example, an advocate of exploring the universe and potentially meeting aliens. Is also the risk that if you advertise your location to meet aliens, they're like, oh, why don't we come and kill you and eat you or nuq from orbit. So yeah, absolutely there are risks.

00:21:56
Speaker 8: There well, and even scientists. I'm a scientist too, I'm motivated by no and stuff. But we have plenty of history, especially in non astronomy fields of examples where learning stuff and being able to build new stuff led us to cause a lot of harm from the discoveries and the technologies made, which to me isn't an argument to not do science, but it's an argument to think about all the ethics and human rights stuff at the same time that we're doing the science and technology.

00:22:21
Speaker 1: The rockets that took us to the Moon are the same rockets that we're being dropped on England during World War two and are puplicated historically exactly.

00:22:30
Speaker 3: So we're not saying, hey, space is bad, our exploration is bad. We're saying there's nuance here. We should understand the motivation of our arguments. We should acknowledge that there are two sides of this, and we should proceed carefully rather than just rushing headlong into it and launching stuff because we can.

00:22:45
Speaker 8: That is my arch Other arguments exist.

00:23:07
Speaker 1: I think it's reasonable to assume that probably this stuff is going to move forward at some point no matter what the argument is. Right now, most of the people who have been to space are highly trained, highly fit astronauts which were picked by governments or super rich people, or the people picked by super rich people as space tourism kind of opens up. Right now, the sieve seems to be like money or being you know, cream of the crop intellectual, physical, But presumably settlements at some point are going to be just the rest of us, people like me who would never get it, who could never afford it, and could never like get picked by NASA. So when that stage comes, what are the important things that we need to think about for who is going to be there in the first settlement and how we pick these people?

00:23:49
Speaker 2: And it sounds complicated.

00:23:51
Speaker 8: Yeah, deciding who even gets to go to space is a problem we do with now. As you said, the increase in private spaceflight really felt like a huge opening of the field because suddenly you just have to be a fit military test pilot or picked by NASA. Now we have this whole other set of people who get to go to space, who don't necessarily need to meet the fitness requirements. But this new pool not necessarily that big either, as you point out, it's still pretty limited, and we can think about how we'd want to keep expanding that, and we can think about, well, so the people we've picked so far have been for specific purposes. NASA is trying to accomplish certain missions, mostly science exploration, technology testing. They pick people who can do that. The private space flight people have their own motivations. In this stage, it seems to be just raw raw space exploration is good. Let's send the first whatever person to space on private space flight. That's great. But if we were going to build a space settlement that we wanted it to last, then that leads to bigger questions. That's much different than what NASA is trying to do, and so we have to ask questions like, maybe we don't need the strict physical and medical requirements because people are going to age and get sick and injured in space, so we'll have to deal with that anyway. Maybe we need to think about reproductive fitness if we want to have reproduction in space and perpetuated space colony with multiple generations. But then asking prospective space settlers about their fertility and their interest in having children. That goes against a lot of our ethics and our arguments for inclusivity today, and that leads to a lot of murky questions as well. And then there's just who do you pick? Do you pick a bunch of astrophysicists I'm in a fan of that plant, but I also would like to be living on Mars with maybe some dentists and plumbers and teachers for the kids and artists as well. And so all of these questions get us back to questions about, well, what kind of person do we actually value in society which has this dark other side of what kind of person don't revalue in society? And do we want to intentionally exclude them? What kind of a were creating a dystopia here? Accidentally? There's tons of questions like that.

00:25:51
Speaker 3: It's really interesting how this stuff is decided. I feel like a lot of times in brand new technologies, we have decisions being made mostly government right funding agencies because there isn't initially a commercial return, but eventually things get picked up by private industry, and then decisions are being made basically because of capitalism. Right, So where do you think we are there and how should we be making these decisions? Should we let capitalism decide basically who gets to go live on Mars? Or should we have like you know, table of experts and government advisors figuring this stuff out for the benefit of society as a whole. Would it happen if it's led by the government, like, at some point it needs to become capitalism driven, I feel like, but I don't really know anything about it. Tell me what's your thoughts about that transition for space settlement.

00:26:40
Speaker 8: There's definitely a lot of arguments right now that capitalism is the only way to get us into space because you need that sort of incentive to innovate and to take risks, and government didn't have it, which is why we're not all living in space right now, so capitalism is the way to do it. I think that those arguments are so popular right now because capitalism is what's driving current space exploration, along with the existing government. They haven't gone away, but I'm not convinced that they're going to finish the job. I'm not convinced that capitalism is going to be what gets us into space. And I think it's possible that generations from now, what finally gets us a permanent space settlement is going to be some other political and economic system, and by then they'll be saying, well, you know, communism is the only way we could have done this, and this is why we need a tyrannical government.

00:27:21
Speaker 4: You know.

00:27:21
Speaker 8: They could have their own argument for why their system is perfect. And the interesting thing is that each of these systems is going to come up with a different way to pick who gets to go live in space. So for now, maybe it's well, whoever can pay, whoever can pay for a ticket on a SpaceX passenger starliner to Mars gets to go. We don't care whether their dentists or not. We don't care that maybe it'll be a bunch of particularly wealthy people and none of them know how to farm, for example, and that could lead to its own troubles. This is the sort of thing we've seen historically happen on Earth. If you had a bunch of rich colonists and nobody who knows how to do the work. That causes a lot of problems, or it could end up we swing back towards some sort of international government efforts, and they take a long time to decide who to send, and they have a lot of arguments and committees about it, and they try to balance everything fairly. And there's other risks with that as well, and including the fact that maybe that goes slower than doing it in a capitalist way. So notice here that I'm not saying here's the correct way for it. I'm saying this is another example of how your motivation will drive the choices that you make. It could come down to, we've developed all the technology, but haven't invested in a space settlement yet. But now the asteroid's coming and we have to evacuate some amount of people to perpetuate the human species. And then you have all sorts of what we call lifeboat ethics Titanic level, like the ship disaster Titanic level, with decisions about who we put on the lifeboat and what's fair, who do we save, how do we make sure that it's enough dentists, whatnot, and so that would cause a whole different set of decisions.

00:28:56
Speaker 3: I love the dentists are your standard like pretty use but not very exciting kind of categories.

00:29:02
Speaker 8: It's really important to me. The dentists are in space.

00:29:04
Speaker 3: We love you dentists. It's important. But I want to follow up on the historical comments you made about what we've learned, Like clearly we've done this kind of stuff in the past. You know, we gave away land to people to encourage them to move west, or we stole land and then gave it to people, and even further back, kings and queens funded expeditions to the New World because they thought there were returns there. What have we learned from our many mistakes and successes in the past.

00:29:31
Speaker 8: Some of us have learned from over stays is the key I think the benefit we have in thinking about expanding human civilization into space. We have all these case studies to look at lessons learned over the history of the human species, and the benefit we have is that we have all of human history to learn from. So to me, it's a waste when we don't do that. And at the moment, I can say from experience that scientists, at least in the US, don't get a lot of education in history beyond you know, basic grade school level. We tend to just beyond it and think it's irrelevant. But now we're trying to, you know, reinvent colonial sized societies, and without having a reference, we're just going to repeat all the same mistakes. That's my concern, and this is part of what got me going with the podcast I created. I decided maybe I should talk to actual colonial historians and ask them their thoughts, and you know, I should read up because as an American, this is mostly the colonial history that I think about. So there's examples in the colonization of North America, places like Jamestown, which is a colony that failed a bunch before it finally stuck. And the historians I read this, a lot went wrong with Jamestown. One of the issues is that they had a lot of more well off colonists and not a lot of laborers to do the work, and so they struggled to do the basic work. They struggled to satisfy the company that sent them. The company wanted them to make stuff for them to sell, cut lumber, et cetera. Didn't give them enough time to build their farms and such. That's something you can imagining happening in a space settlement. All sorts of lessons that we can learn from the pass and not just to North America but around the world. And it's just important that we bothered to do that because it's going to save us so much time and pain to at least recognize what could go wrong before we repeat the same path in space.

00:31:12
Speaker 1: What do you think are the most relevant historical analog So, like you know, Daniel mentioned settling of the West, and I have read people who would love to see like a space Homestead Act sort of thing. I read a bunch of that literature and then I decided, well, this isn't going to be a big part of a city on Mars because Antarctica and the deep seabed are more analogous. But what do you think, And of course, if you talk to a lot of space settlement people, they'll tell you that the Outer Space Treaty is going to get thrown out the window and we can have a Homestead Act. So what do you think is the most interesting to study historically as it relates to settlement.

00:31:42
Speaker 8: I think there's two big categories of it. One, I think we should be looking at the Western countries colonization of as much of the world as they could grab, and the history of that, what they tried, what went well and what didn't, and in particularly what went well for them and didn't, but all also what went well and didn't for the less powerful people in those societies, obviously the indigenous people.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: Over time?

00:32:06
Speaker 8: What is colonization with that particular attitude of colonization, What does that do to the environment, What does that do for future generations, what does that do for marginalized labor workforces? And how can we not go that way in the future. I think it's also really crucial, and I don't think there's enough of this yet. And talks about space ethics, I think it's really crucial that we learn from the parts of human history where humans migrated and expanded into places where no humans were living yet much earlier than colonization, learn how that went well and didn't because Western people didn't invent moving to a new place and building a new community there, They just did it once everyone already had inhabited those places and decided to do it all over again to grab their resources. And so learning more from, for example, indigenous cultures that expanded across North America, South America, Australia and how they learned to coexist in a new, desolate, isolated, harsh environment, and how not only just the practical how did they interact with the environments, but how their cultures developed around sustainability or settling conflicts within their communities and with other communities. I think that's all really valuable because they have had communities and societies in these places for tens of thousands of years, much longer than postcolonization era has consisted. And I think there's so much we can learn from how that worked, and to just present an alternative to colonization, because a lot of times, if you say, maybe we don't want to use this wild West colonization model in space, Westerns kind of shrug and go, okay, well, you know, so you want me to not go to space, there are actually other options here.

00:33:42
Speaker 1: So I've read a bunch of astronaut memoirs, and reading those memoirs makes it very clear to me that astronauts are humans too, and that humans I know, right, and that humans go to space and they come back and still do bad human things sometimes, which makes me wonder what is governance and crime and punishment and stuff like that going to look like on a Martian settlement. What are your thoughts who's going to be in control in an early settlement when a crime happens, and what should we do about that stuff?

00:34:13
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:34:14
Speaker 8: I think this is another question that hasn't been studied enough except by the reliable science fiction writers. We've been thinking about this stuff for ages. We think a lot about how we're going to survive in space and the legal stuff about you know, the Homestead Act, who gets to own mars et cetera. But I don't think we've thought enough about the idea that, you know, hell is other people, right, and so maybe our biggest dangers in space will be the people that we go up there with. And that's the extreme argument for it. There's also just the more minor. You know, what if you just have a disagreement with a neighbor over something, whose turn it is to take out the trash, or you stole my space suit, whatnot? What do we do about it? And here on Earth we have laws, we have legal systems, we have various different ways to address calm, but we need something in space. We can't just assume that everyone will just perfectly get along. But it's unclear about how a lot of that's going to work. The Outer Space Treaty says people in space have to follow the laws of their countries back home. That sort of handles the issue of whose laws do we follow, But it's going to get more complicated as people are living more long term, especially if we move farther and farther away where it takes a long time to call back to Earth. You know, unless you've brought a judge and lawyers with you, you're going to have to settle your disagreements where you are. And then there's the bigger question, Okay, what happens if you decide that someone is guilty of whatever you've decided as a crime in your space settlement, what do you do with them? And when I ask people this, their knee jerk reaction is to say throw them out the airlock, because that is what all the movies do. But if you push a little farther, you can usually get people to agree that maybe not every crime should carry capital punishment. And then the next thing that they usually say, well, we'll put them in space prison. But that also is tricky. We don't have space prisons yet. We would have to build them. That's going to take a lot of time, effort, money, space like literal room, especially if we're doing something like digging underground tunnels to live on Mars or something a lot to dig another tunnel. You have to feed them and give them air and radiation protection and water and heat power. Someone has to guard them. Maybe you've removed that person from the labor pool and maybe you don't have a lot of labor to go around. Is this actually what we want to do? And usually at that point in the conversation, they say, Okay, well, what's the alternative, because this is another case where Americans in particular don't really know of any other way to handle crime because we're a very prison focused culture. But again, there's so many examples on Earth of ways that especially small communities address behavior that's not desired. I called that in their communities, and in a way that makes sure that the victim of a crime feels safe and is made whole, the person who committed the crime is unlikely to do it again, and that the community is as a whole feel safe. And there's ways to do that without building up person. And so that's what I've been encouraging, so that we try to think about that ahead of time, because no matter what we come up with, we need to come up with it ahead of time. We don't want to wait till the last minute here and then have to decide under duress, because I think that'll probably lead to unpleasant outcomes for everyone involved.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: Everyone out at airlock.

00:37:32
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean it's clean. I guess it always looks really dramatic in the movies. I get the appeal, but that's a quick way to kill everyone off, and that's not usually the goal of a space settlement.

00:37:42
Speaker 3: And again, if business is involved, are we giving businesses the right to set laws in territories they control? You know, that might make sense, but I feel a little weird about giving Elon Musk right to execute whoever he thinks is not, you know, following his laws.

00:37:59
Speaker 8: Yeah, everything I was talking about were examples of two people in the community sort of hurting each other. There's also the protections you might need to protect an individual from the community. And that might mean there's an oppressed group and the government of the space settlement is oppressing a minority group, for example, how do we protect those people? It might mean it's a labor workforce that's getting exploited by the company that runs the space settlement. What can they do about it? You can't really quit and go home when you're in a space settlement. It's really probably going to be a lot harder to go on strike or protest if you're in a place where the government or the employer can just turn down the oxygen and make you all go to sleep. And so there's that kind of levels of legal protection needed as well.

00:38:41
Speaker 1: So I was thinking about writing about punishment for a city on Mars, and we didn't end up deciding to tackle it, but we did read about how you get people in line in communal settings, and like the hutterrightes that's a religious group. They're very insular. They do trade with the outside world, but they have a very elaborate like shunning procedure people who don't follow the rules, where if you're an adult who's not following the rules, sometimes you have to like sleep in the children house as a way of just sort of like showing your temporary demotion. And in a community where like if you get kicked out, you no longer get to see maybe your parents, or your kids, or your wife. Shunning is a very good method of punishment that doesn't require a prison, and it usually is coupled with almost immediately when they repent and stop doing it, you open your arms and welcome them back in, because otherwise, how psychologically awful would it be to be stuck in a community where everybody is shunning you and treating you awfully. Do you have like other examples of how it works in other communities.

00:39:37
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think you make a good point there that leaving open the door for redemption and to rejoining the community. Is going to be super vital, because yeah, otherwise the person just can't fit back in and you've lost them, whether you're throwing them out an air locker or just locking them up forever. One of the examples I was given during my podcast was about a community in Ethiopia, and I'm not Ethiopians, so it'll be difficult for me to describe its completely accurately, but she told a beautiful story about how when someone in the community harms someone else, everyone gathers them together under a great tree, and individually, each member of the community goes to this person and it says, do you remember when I broke my leg and you help me bring the crops in? Do you remember when I was sick and you brought me medicine? And reminds the person of how they are a member of the community, a valued member of the community, and that they are still accepted, but that they've done harm and here's how you can address this harm and be welcome back in, which is the sort of thing again as an American, as a Westerner, just sounds too good to be true, like it can't possibly work, But there is a lot of work being done in the US in particular on what's called restorative justice, which is this idea that you can figure out ways to make sure the victim feel safe and is made whole, and make sure that the perpetrator acknowledges and addresses what they've done without prison. It's just so hard to describe what that looks like in very simple terms because it usually takes effort, it takes conversation. The community itself needs to help facilitate that conversation, and it looks different for every crime, in every interaction, and so it's much more complicated than just saying, well, lock them up, but it tends to have better outcomes, and there's a lot of research being done on that in the US right now. I think some of this will get easier in a small community. I think a lot of it is related to culture, and it's hard to predict how a culture of a space settlement is going to evolve away from the culture we have today. Being isolated and being so interdependent on other humans, I think will make things like shunning be a bigger threat and help people not engage in harmful behavior to others. But I don't know. These sci fi authors have imagined it going the other way and have it make us worse people, or make it more likely that some tyrant will take over and keep everyone online. It's not clear yet how it's going to go.

00:41:45
Speaker 3: Well, what's the sort of worst crime that's been committed in space so far?

00:41:49
Speaker 8: I don't think off the top of my head. Kelly can help me hear that there has been anything officially considered a legal crime committed in space so far. There is often pointed to an event with the Skylab crew that was at the time by the newspapers called a strike a protest. It was said that the crew was mad at NASA and churned off the radio and said they weren't going to work for the day. That's not actually how it went down. It was much less dramatic than that. It wasn't a mutiny, for example, And I think so far it's been mostly professional disagreements at that level.

00:42:25
Speaker 1: I think there was one astronaut whose partner I think they had like broken up, and she went into her banking accounts.

00:42:33
Speaker 8: Oh, that's right, from space, from.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: Space, and so it was like a small law that was broken in space. Well, it feels small to me relative to murder, but a smaller law that was broken in space.

00:42:42
Speaker 2: And then there was an.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: International incident where one of the soyez is so these are like the vehicles that bring people from Russia or Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, was found to have a hole thrilled in the side.

00:42:54
Speaker 8: Of it, a tiny damage.

00:42:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And.

00:42:57
Speaker 1: It wasn't clear if that was because a technician who was building this drilled the whole and then was like ah, crud, and then like patched it poorly and the patch fell off in space. But Russia was saying that it was one of the astronauts on the US side who was having a mental health crisis and wanted to go home, so they drilled a hole to try to push an emergency return.

00:43:15
Speaker 8: Yeah. I don't think that was proven though, that's right.

00:43:17
Speaker 1: No, no, no, it wasn't and all of the US astronauts are like, no, absolutely, that's not what.

00:43:21
Speaker 2: It was happening.

00:43:22
Speaker 1: But I think what's interesting about that is, you know, the International Space Station has multiple nations represented, and depending on which module you're in, there's different jurisdictions and depending on what country the astronauts came from, and in the end, they kind of weren't really able to figure out what to do about it. And so I think if anything more serious happened, I don't know what they would do or how that would be dealt with. It gets complicated, I think when you've got multiple nations together.

00:43:46
Speaker 8: Yeah. I also think the space agencies are incentivized not to talk about stories like this. I mean, they're going to report it, especially you know in the US, but the news is going to get their hands on it and probably blow it out of proportion. But it's not like NASA wants to get out the idea that this kind of happening in space. I'm not saying they're covering up crimes. There's a lot of things about astronaut privacy that NASA really keeps more private. There have been some cases in analog situations. So they do these experiments down on Earth where they seal people up in a small habitat for a certain amount of time to test crew dynamics and also things like can they recycle their food and things like that, Or they go out to isolated place like the Antarctic or the Arctic and live in an isolated environment for a while to ten they're on Mars. There have been cases there where there's been interpersonal conflict and to the level of sexual harassment and conflicts like that, and so I don't think there's any reason to assume that kind of behavior won't happen in space as well.

00:44:40
Speaker 1: I do love your point that we need to figure out what our plan is ahead of time. I was reading about naval punishment and like, they didn't have space on the ship for a prison, and they didn't want to have a member of the crew not working and then maybe another member of the crew watching them not work and making sure they don't And so the flogging was there answer, Like if you hit someone, you beat them quickly, then they can return right back to work, and it's a severe, immediate punishment. And so I think it's important for us to decide which one of these things do we want to be trying when we move out into space, and which punishment regime do we want to take with us.

00:45:14
Speaker 3: I just want to say that flogging works really well in my research group as the motivations for.

00:45:20
Speaker 1: We have a book on our shelf called In Defense of Flogging. It's an economists take on why it's an efficient punishment system where maybe you'd rather get flogged than spend five years in prison, or thrown out or thrown out the airlock. So anyway, lots of options for punishment. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about babies in space.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: All right, Space babies erica ethical or not.

00:45:59
Speaker 8: I find space babies to be the cruelest creatures. The idea of having babies in space is obviously a fascinating one, and it's also crucial to the whole idea of having a permanent space settlement. You can't have a space settlement stand on its own if you have to keep shipping humans from Earth. So the question of whether we can produce more humans in space is both an important one, both scientifically and ethically. So the scientific part is the tough one. We don't actually know if humans can have babies in space. We don't know that about any stage of the process, about conceiving, about growing a fetus in utero in a healthy way. We don't know how harder or easy delivering a baby would work in space. And we don't know if children can grow in a healthy way in the absence of, for example, Earth's gravitational field, or if all this radiation exposure you get in space is going to cause problems all along the way. So tons of interesting scientific questions there, but we also don't know how to even ethically study those questions because most bioethicists and medical researchers will tell you it's very ethically murky to perform science experiments on pregnant people and fetuses, especially the fetuses that can't consent. So it's tricky, and I think that there's a good chance that the ethicist will be arguing about this while some space tourists are just making it happen someday, and we're going to end up with this experiment happening unmonitored and unprotected. So it could be that we can't do it. It could be the humans can't reproduce in space. That's going to put a big damper on people's plans for conquering the universe, and we will have to reanalyze all of our plans for space settlement. It's also possible there's some middle ground here where we'll be able to do it, but maybe it'll be a lot more difficult, maybe it'd be less likely. Maybe we'll need some sort of extra technology help, like artificial gravity or radiation shielding or artificial wounds, which could turn into a thing where wealthy space settlers can afford to have children, or you have to get special permit from the space government to use the artificial womb and have babies, which could cause a lot of issues. And maybe it'll be super easy and will be superfertile in space and have babies everywhere, which will lead to other problems, like maybe we have an overpopulated space settlement and we have to figure out what to do about that, and boy do we have examples of that on Earth, and how it has led to government trying to control fertility and punishing people for having too many children or forcing them to be sterilized so that they can't have more children. Often throughout history this has in particular led to people deciding to limit other groups' fertilities, but only for certain people. We want to limit population growth, but only for these people we don't think should be reproducing, and that's just eugenics and leads to all sorts of other really terrible outcomes that could happen in space. And in space we could go the other way around too and have underpopulation and have questions about whether we can force people to have children which also has a few parallels throughout history as well, and leads to things like outlawing abortion, birth control, knowing about contraception, and things like that.

00:49:15
Speaker 3: It feels to me like space is sort of putting a spotlight on what's already kind of a tricky question, you know, about is it ethical to have kids? We try to avoid ever restricting people from having kids, but you could also always just ask questions, like some people in their living conditions, should they be having kids? You know, if I want to like set up camp near a volcano, is it ethical for me to have kids, knowing that the kids could be like bathed in lava one day as they sleep. Nobody tells me I can't have kids or I shouldn't have kids. Lots of people out there are terrible parents, but nobody like gave them an exam and says, hey, are you going to be a reasonable parent. Why shouldn't we just apply the same like lass a fair thing to space and say, hey, you're going to have kids in space. Maybe they won't just take correctly, maybe they'll get cancer, maybe they'll end up nine feet tall. It's on you.

00:50:06
Speaker 8: Yeah, if you think about what we owe to the children, like what rights do they have here? That does have interesting questions. Maybe we're making them more at risk for radiation induced illness, like you mentioned with your lava example. Maybe they can grow and be healthy and have healthy lives on Mars, but because they're growing in a lower gravity environment, they can't ever return to Earth because they'll collapse and die. Is there something unethical about that? Are we somehow taking away their birthright to go back to the planet that they evolved on or will they not care because they're not from Earth and they're too cool for Earth And it's not a big deal.

00:50:40
Speaker 3: I mean, Kelly's decided to have her kids in Virginia. Now they have to tell people they're from Virginia. Not to overcome that their whole life when they could have grown up in California. How do you deal with that, Kelly?

00:50:49
Speaker 1: It's beautiful here and I think they're very happy, and I feel bad for your California kids.

00:50:54
Speaker 3: Well, clearly they're brainwashed. Propaganda is everywhere, but there.

00:50:59
Speaker 8: Are exemples of this on Earth where people have to make the really tough decision about whether to become refugees certain parts of the world. Are they going to decide to take their kids on this really dangerous journey, like a rocket trip to a new place they've never seen before, where potentially they're never going to be able to return to their home country. That's a similar decision, and on Earth we let parents make that decision. They have to make that decision for their kids if their kids can't make it, and generally what we hope is that the parents are working in the best interest of the kids. In those cases, it's usually because the kids are at risk if they stay where they are. It's sort of a different idea. We're talking about space because at the moment, there's no asteroid headed for the Earth. So most people who want to go raise kids in space, it's just because they want to, not because they necessarily know that it's going to give their kids a better life. But you're right, we have a bit more of a hands off attitude here on Earth, and we let people raise their kids how they want, but not completely. There's plenty of limitations that the state puts on what people do with their kids different ways. In different places in the US, they're required to have an education sometimes that's better monitored than in other places, and in other places around the world, there's more restrictions on whether you can or can't make decisions about your own ability to have kids. And this all comes back to the balance between someone's own bodily autonomy that they should be able to decide what happens with their body or not, versus what society needs or wants from them, which when it comes to population level, stuff is affected by whether people are having kids round.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: So we've kind of scratched the surface of the many interesting ethical questions that you brought up in your book. Sometimes it can feel sort of overwhelming and helpless to think about all of this stuff. What are some options for things that we can do now to try to make sure that we do settle space when we get there to that point that we do it in an ethical and just way.

00:52:50
Speaker 8: Well, just having these conversations at all is super important, because the alternative of just giving it a go and seeing what happens, I think, is not the best choice. So any level of conversations, more.

00:53:00
Speaker 3: Conversation, launch baby launch.

00:53:04
Speaker 8: At any level of conversation is good. Encouraging people to have these conversations at the decision maker level is very important. Reading Kelly's book, I think purchasing and reading Kelly's.

00:53:13
Speaker 2: Book is super important with yours.

00:53:16
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely by books about this topic, and as an individual, I think definitely trying to learn more about history if you're interested in space is very important. It's not immediately obvious that should be the case, but as we've talked about, there's plenty of examples from history, and not just the history of your part of the world. I think North Americans, like myself, focused a little too much on the history of North American colonization, but again, all of human history to learn from. Let's do that. I think anyone who's working anywhere near space, whether you're in an astronomy department at university, or you're working for a space startup, or you're working in government regulation, there's plenty of ways you can work towards making your company more ethical, making them make the right decisions. But I also think it's really important to look at your organization and see if it does it embody the kind of values you want to see in a space settlement. Is there a labor being exploited, are there people being marginalized, or is everyone being treated well? Because whatever values we have in our society today is what's going to get pushed forward into space in the future. So the better we can treat each other now on Earth, the easier it'll be to transfer those norms into space. And that's just as important as building a good legal system or safe technologies, is to make sure that the values we want to see in our descendants in the future are what we're actually actively working towards for ourselves. Now, we can't just wait and say, well, they'll figure it out, they'll be better in space. We don't need to do that hard work. We have to do it for them.

00:54:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree, And I think a lot of people see space settlement in their minds as some sort of utopia where we go there and we don't bring any of the problems we have here, and that we somehow all magically get along. But we all know that we're going to make the same mistakes. Somebody's going to invent white chocolate even if we don't bring it with us, right, Like, this is just who we are as humans. We I agree with you. We need to acknowledge that and face those and figure some of this stuff out before it happens.

00:55:04
Speaker 8: That's right. Space is only a blank slate till we show up.

00:55:07
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:55:08
Speaker 1: So if folks want to stay in touch with Erica, they can go to Erica nesvuld dot com. That's E R I KA ne E s v O l d dot com and you can sign up for her newsletter to stay up to date on Erica updates. Absolutely well, thank you so much for being on the show, Erica. It was I was going to say a lot of fun, but maybe space ethics isn't always supposed to be fun. But it was certainly very informative and I enjoyed talking to you.

00:55:31
Speaker 8: I had a great time talking about you think.

00:55:33
Speaker 3: And I think the takeaway message is not we shouldn't settle space, so that we can't settle space, but then we have to do it thoughtfully and carefully. We shouldn't just rush into it and do it because it seems fun, right, So we don't have to feel like we're being pessimist about it. We're just being thoughtful.

00:55:48
Speaker 8: That's right. And we'll leave the white chocolate behind.

00:55:54
Speaker 3: Thank you.

00:55:55
Speaker 2: That is the right note to end on.

00:56:03
Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

00:56:07
Speaker 2: We would love to hear from you, We really would.

00:56:10
Speaker 3: We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

00:56:15
Speaker 1: We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows.

00:56:19
Speaker 2: If you contact us, we will get back to you.

00:56:21
Speaker 3: We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Danielandkelly dot.

00:56:27
Speaker 2: Org, or you can find us on social media.

00:56:29
Speaker 1: We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on all of those platforms.

00:56:34
Speaker 2: You can find us at D and K Universe.

00:56:37
Speaker 3: Don't be shy, write to us