A condition of our humanity

But is there not ultimately something dehumanizing about Deudney’s deterministic vision of the future, which paints human action and choice as entirely constrained by the material conditions described by his geopolitics? He might have argued that there are perennial problems of the organization of national and international politics, that space expansionists have not sufficiently considered those problems because of their utopian assumptions, and that unless they take them seriously their enterprise is not likely to go well. But instead he argues that his theory allows him to predict outcomes in a more or less distant future that are sufficiently fated as to motivate us today to start down a path of renunciation, as if there is no possibility for human beings to meet the novel challenges of law and order that he suggests will arise in alien environments. This outlook is all the more problematic given that, absent any breakthroughs in space propulsion systems, we will have a long time to think about, and adjust to, most of Deudney’s most troublesome scenarios. And here it is also worth noting that the most immediate threats, which are and have long been based in our space-transported nuclear arsenals, suggest (so far) a record of how prudence and ingenuity can navigate highly dangerous waters.

Lest the picture I am painting seem too rosy, I must add that we should have the right expectations for what it would mean to “meet” those challenges. Certainly expansion into space may be accomplished in ways that are more or less dangerous, but in any case “safe” is not on the table. Nor should we want it to be. “Spam in a can” or not, the early astronauts were heroes. We should want heroes, but heroism requires danger. That many professed shock when the idea was floated that early Mars explorers might have to accept that they would die on Mars is a sign of how far we miss the real value of our space enterprise as falling within the realm of the “noble and beautiful.” It would be better to return in triumph, to age and pass away gracefully surrounded by loved ones, and admired by a respectful public! But to die on Mars — to say on Mars what Titus Oates said in the wastes of Antarctica, “I am just going outside and may be some time” — would be in its own way a noble end, a death worth commemorating beyond the private griefs that all of us will experience and cause.

The story changes for species-level risks, but perhaps not so radically as some might think. We should certainly seek to avoid destroying ourselves spectacularly by a profligate lack of concern with maintaining a human future, but we should also seek to avoid constantly eroding and degrading our humanity by always taking the “safe” course, by the effort to recreate for ourselves a world without risks or tradeoffs. Deudney exposes how this kind of techno-utopianism is at the heart of his space expansionists, but in the end seems a little unclear himself on the extent to which the fragility of human life is not a problem to be solved but a condition of our humanity.

—Charles T. Rubin, “The Case Against the Case Against Space,” in The New Atlantis 64 (Spring 2021): 90–98