As you may have seen, SpaceX has successfully caught a super-heavy booster returning from a launch.
SpaceX, already dominant in the US space launch arena, is now poised to rapidly scale up their launch capacity, with their goal of multiple Superheavy launches per day looking more and more realistic.
Elon Musk is spearheading this effort as part of his obsessive focus on getting humanity to Mars. He claims that SpaceX will land a vehicle on Mars within 5 years, and prediction markets show a 50% chance that humans will be on Mars within the next decade.
This will not be the first time that humanity leaves the planet of course; we did that in 1969. But unlike the moon landings, Elon's plans call for a permanent Mars colony, eventually growing into a full civilization. And he's not alone in this; due to the costs of bringing people back from Mars, many if not most people working towards Mars colonization are proponents of "Mars to stay"; the idea that the first people to go there will do so with the plan to stay there for years, building up infrastructure until return trips are eventually feasible.
SpaceX is not alone in their plans. NASA has announced their intention to build the Lunar Gateway, a habitable space station in lunar orbit, which can then be used to assist in NASA's plans to take humans to Mars in the 2030s. Components of this space station have already been built and are currently being tested for launch.
In short, this is happening. Mars colonization is not a faraway sci fi dream anymore; it is being actively worked on by the United States government and the most advanced space launch company in the world, with billions of dollars of funding and significant real progress towards the goal.
The exact timeline is uncertain of course; Donald Trump announced in 2020 that NASA would take humans back to the moon by 2024, and that's clearly not going to happen. Elon's estimates for everything are similarly known to frequently not pan out quite on schedule. But unlike certain other companies, NASA and SpaceX's poor estimates are not an indication of unseriousness. As Scott Alexander put it in his Elon Musk book review:
The end result never quite reaches the original goal, but still happens faster than anyone except Elon thought possible. A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
On Earth, billions of animals are tortured every day, and hundreds of millions of humans live in poverty. Almost nobody actually wants this outcome; pin people down on the matter and they'll say that both things are bad. And at our current level of technological sophistication, both problems are easily solvable if a decent fraction of humanity put their minds to it. But they don't.
The reason this state of affairs persists is simply apathy and status quo bias. Most people derive the set of actions they consider acceptable not from their conscience or moral reasoning, but from observing what those around them are doing. Normality is more important than morality.
This presents an opportunity any time a "new normal" is being established. Set people on the right course, and they'll happily continue down the path they're on.
Interplanetary expansion is therefore a pivotal point for ethical concerns. Access to other planets will be very limited for the foreseeable future, with a tiny number of people getting to exercise control over who goes and what they do there. Entirely new systems of governance will be set up, and due to the long communication delays, the immense travel time and cost, and dramatically different societal compositions and constraints, their social and legal systems will likely remain pretty separate from those of Earth.
There is a decision to be made. Will we export our misery to the stars? Or will we use this opportunity to turn over a new leaf in human history? Those who lead the settlement cannot fix all the sins of Earth, but they can avoid committing them anew; avoid multiplying Earthly suffering by a thousandfold for their own convenience.
Simply put, interplanetary colonization is an S-risk. But it's also an opportunity to set a new standard for everyone to follow; a standard that may eventually serve as a positive role model for those on Earth.
This decision is going to be made within the next decade or two, and it will be extremely hard to change after it is made. But affecting the outcome before it is made may be deceptively easy due to the outsized influence of one person: Elon Musk.
NASA is involved as well, but their bureaucratic incompetence means they rely on SpaceX for many of their launches, and likely will continue to do so for a long time. And most other countries with space programs have shown little to no interest in remote human colonies; some of them signed on as partners for Lunar Gateway, but their involvement is minimal. Trump has also expressed particular enthusiasm for increased investment in space, but his focus seems more on local US supremacy than interplanetary colonization, and due to the realities of his age, he's likely to cease being politically relevant in the near future. Elon is the one driving the push towards Mars, and Elon is the one with the technology to make it happen.
Elon is not a vegetarian, but he clearly harbors many charitable and humanistic sympathies, having signed the giving pledge in 2012, and recommending What We Owe the Future as a good match for his philosophy.
A first step towards good outcomes here could be something like a "declaration of cosmic rights", setting out an unambiguous commitment to respect all sentient life and never to harm them for personal gain nor let them needlessly suffer. Phrased correctly, this would match up well with Elon's "traditional sci fi" vibes, and he might be willing to have SpaceX commit to it. This would of course be primarily a publicity stunt, but it could help set the stage for later decisions.
Ultimately the most important thing is going to be the people who are actually going to the moon and Mars, and how they decide to structure those societies. There has already been a lot of good work done on space governance, and I won't rehash that here. Rather my point is that:
- Other than the potential development of superintelligence, space colonization is by far the highest impact cause area in the medium-term, with the potential for creating both astronomical harm and astronomical value.
- This is happening now. Various EA philosophers have written about a "long reflection" before humanity expands to the stars, but the reality is, that just isn't going to happen. The values that we will be propagating are likely going to be decided on within the next decade or two.
- The number of people involved in this is low. The owners of space companies. The bureaucrats in charge of national space organizations. The astronauts who will actually be going. That's... pretty much it. This gives each of them enormous power to do good, and they might only need a small nudge in that direction to affect their decisions.
Not only is this the most important century, but there's a good chance that these next few decades are the most important part of that century. We should ensure we don't squander the opportunity.
A couple of astronauts hanging out on a dome on mars is not the same thing as an interplanetary civilization. I expect mars landings to follow the same trajectory as the moon landings: put a few people on there for the sake of showing off, then not bother about it for half a century, then half-assedly discuss putting people on there long term, again for the sake of showing off.
I recommend the book A city on mars for an explanation of the massive social and economic barriers to space colonisation.
I agree. While I find the spirit of the post and the question interesting, I'm not sure the original claim is supported. Colonizing other planets remains a goal which is very far away.
The author of the book A City on Mars also appeared in the 80000 hours podcast to speak about the limits : https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zach-weinersmith-space-settlement/
The same would have been said about reusable rockets and human-level AI 15 years ago. I don't understand how one can look at a billion dollar company with concrete plans to colonize Mars and the technology to do so, and conclude that the probability of this happening is so low it can be dismissed.
The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn't driven by half of one billionaire's fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world's superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years' transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
the part he isn't spending on his social media habit, anyway...
Regarding arguments against A City to Mars, I found the link you gave under titotal's post pretty interesting. It indeed lowers my credence in this book. Thanks for the link.
However, despite reading the post, I still fail to understand the economics of going to space long term -beyond what SpaceX is ready to fund- since everything would be so expensive, with no significant added value compared to what we can do on Earth. But maybe I missed something here as well.
Whether it's economically a good idea, I don't think it is, at least not right now. People want to do it primarily because it's cool, not because it's useful. (There's also the cynical view that Elon is hyping it up in order to induce demand for his own company, which seems plausible to me given that his arguments about X-risk are so transparently wrong and he's even admitted as much in the past.)
However, once the first settlements are established and the sunk costs have already been paid, it will be much easier to make them an economic positive. It's also possible that we get a space race 2.0, as other superpowers like China become concerned about the US establishing a dominant interplanetary presence and try to create their own.
When I talked about the economic incentive, I was mostly asking about what is the economic incentive long-term? What can be done in space cheaper than on Earth ?
Mining seems much more complicated than on Earth, due to lack of water, and the fact that minerals are not being very concentrated, which makes it much more expensive to extract than on Earth.
Interplanetary presence might be more plausible if there's another space race.
A location doesn't need to be "better" for it to contribute to the economy. Some countries are almost strictly worse than others in terms of natural resources and climate for living and growing things, but people still live there.
If you're doing a comparison with anywhere on Earth, the obvious one would be Antarctica. There absolutely are permanent settlements there even though it's barely livable, but really only for relatively short term visitors to do scientific research and/or enjoy the experience of being one of the few people to travel there. It absolutely isn't a functioning economy that runs at a profit. (Some places inside the Arctic Circle, maybe, but that wouldn't be the case if shipping the exploitable resources back to somewhere that felt more like home cost spaceflight prices per kg). The profitable segment of space is the orbital plane around earth, ideally without the complications of people in the equation, and that's what SpaceX has actually spent the last decade focused on.
Antartica is also an interesting comparison point for the social and legal systems since it's also small numbers of people from different missions living on extraterritorial land. I mean, they're not really particularly well sorted out, it just turns out they involve far too few people and far too little competition to be particularly problematic.
Yes, but transport on Earth is mostly cheap, which cancels out a lot of the natural inequalities in geography. Meanwhile, transport to Mars would be super costly.
I think a significant difference with current countries is that having an additional person on Mars would be incredibly expensive compared to living on Earth - in terms of rocket, fuel, shipping stuff from Earth, getting additional supplies, getting super high-tech materials and minerals for maintenance...
That's my point; that is explicitly not the plan. Elon wants to establish a colony right away, and he's in the process of building up the infrastructure to do it. Frankley I think it makes no sense to compare the two; the US went to the moon as part of the cold war with the Soviet Union; the whole point was just showing off. The Apollo program was much too expensive to support a long-term lunar colony, and there were never serious plans to do so. The current space race is completely different. Elon is not trying to compete with anyone. He just wants there to be a civilization on Mars, and unlike the Saturn V, Starship is designed to be cheap and reusable enough to make that possible.
I haven't yet read A City on Mars, but I've heard that it's pretty poor. e.g. Peter Hague's review: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-ii.
While I agree that strong founder effects are likely to apply if SpaceX and/or NASA succeed in establishing a Mars colony, I expect that colony to be Earth-dependent for decades, and to be quite vulnerable to being superseded by other actors.
To put my model in more concrete terms: I expect whoever controls cislunar space in 2050 to have more potential for causal influence over the state of Mars in 2100 than whoever has put more people on Mars by 2040.
I tentatively agree with that, I just expect those to be the same person.
I would expect those to be the same person if AI turns out to not be a huge deal, which for me is about 25% of futures.
Yes, I'm conditioning on no singularity here.
Interestingly, the singularity could actually have the opposite effect. Where originally human exploration of the Solar System was decades away, extremely intelligent AI could speed up technology to where it's all possible within a decade.
The space policy landscape is not ready for that at all. There is no international framework for governing the use of space resources, and human exploration is still technically illegal on Mars due to contamination of the surface (and the moon! Yes we still care a lot).
So I lean more towards superintelligent AI being a reason to care more about space, not less. Will Macaskill discusses it in more detail here.
Executive summary: Space colonization efforts by SpaceX and NASA are progressing rapidly, presenting a pivotal opportunity to establish ethical norms and governance structures for extraterrestrial societies within the next decade or two.
Key points:
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