Perennial Space Programs and the Utopian Trap
Friday 09 February 2024
My last few newsletters have discussed various aspects of what we might loosely call technological futurism, especially through the lens of computer technology and potential emergents (intelligence, consciousness, and whatever else might follow) that could supervene upon computer technology. My stock-in-trade, however, has been thinking through spacefaring scenarios for civilization, and in light of what I wrote last week about computing technology encrusting all other technologies, transforming them in its own image (what I called an assimilating technology), we can expect (assuming technological development continues much as it has) that spacefaring technology will also be assimilated by computer technology. Thus in addition to the bifurcation of the future between a robust spacefaring capacity and the lack thereof, in the former scenario we can note a further bifurcation between a fully computer-assimilated spacefaring technology and a future in which technology bursts the bounds of computerized assimilation, growing and proliferating in unpredictable ways.
I now realize that in my paper, “The Develes Engynnes: Technological Textures of Life on Earth and in Space,” I assumed a high degree of technological pluralism, in which various space settlements develop their own distinctive technologies, and as human settlement proliferates outward into the solar system and eventually into the wider cosmos, this technological plurality will be iterated proportionately. Technology thus proliferating throughout the cosmos would have shared properties as a result of originating from Earth and human civilization, but spreading out from that point of origin and adapting to conditions as varied as the cosmos presents would ultimately be more determinative of the form of technology than technology’s single point of origin. In scenarios of Bracewell and von Neumann probes and variants on these themes, technology goes out into the cosmos first, before human beings, and as it modifies itself far from human influence and far from the conditions of our region of the universe, it may take on forms so different from its terrestrial origins that it would become unrecognizable.
Technological possibilities and constraints will go hand-in-hand with space program possibilities and constraints in the buildout of spacefaring civilization. One such kind of space program has been occupying me recently. I sometimes emphasize that the ideas I develop in these newsletters are elusive and far from definitive formulations, imperfectly expressed and incomplete, so I will suggest another such idea, which I have come to call the perennial space program. This is closely related to the ideas I developed a few years ago in blog posts, especially Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift, in which space programs stagnate and we remain bound in shallows. The existence of a space program is not in itself sufficient to liberate the fate of humanity from the surface of Earth. There are many possible space programs, and only some of them provide the means for a sufficient number of human beings to establish themselves away from Earth; most space programs, real or imagined, fall far short of this capacity.
A perennial space program is the kind of space program that some nation-states possess today. It is an instrument of national prestige, it is also occasionally a helpmeet to industry, and even more occasionally a helpmeet to science. A perennial space program gives the appearance of a spacefaring civilization without the reality of it. It is the proof of concept that certain technologies work, that human beings can travel in and live in space, that we can visit other celestial bodies, and so on. A perennial space program can be iterated perennially, continued ad infinitum, and it changes nothing. One of the advantages of a perennial space program is that it is a threat to no one. It is not a threat to other nation-states, and it is not a threat to the nation-state that pursues such a space program.
A space program built up to a given size certainly could be a threat to other nation-states, and a space program grown large enough could be a threat to the very nation-state that superintends the space program in question, because if a space program makes it possible for any human community in space to be self-sustaining and independently viable, then this community is beyond control (though not beyond blandishments that might secure its ongoing loyalty).
Those who hold the reins of power are no fools, and if they see a potential threat to their power developing, they are not going to allow it to fulfill this possibility. Thus a perennial space program, maintained in perpetuity by a nation-state (or by a coalition of nation-states), would be managed with an eye to never allow it to get out of hand. It could be allowed to grow, to have its share of triumphs (which are counted as triumphs of the funding nation-state or states), even to do great things — but always within limits that would prevent it from becoming an independent center of power or the source of anything unpredictable.
Our contemporary space programs are limited to satellites, human beings in orbit, and a few scientific missions into the rest of the solar system. Still remaining perennial, a space program could go to back to the Moon, could go to Mars, and indeed could iterate itself as “flags and footprints” missions throughout the solar system. It could launch probes to other stars, expand the reach of science and exhibit a human presence far beyond Earth. As long as it is kept under control, a perennial space program could not only give the appearance of a spacefaring civilization without the reality, but also the appearance of expansion and success, all without anything untoward giving anyone the idea that there is the possibility of a life not tied to the powers that be.
The growth of a perennial space program could well include human settlements off Earth’s surface, as long as they are suitably managed (and artfully hobbled, so that they can never achieve independence). An appropriately dependent space settlement will play into what I will call the utopian trap. The utopian trap is a problem that will be faced by space settlements, which must be founded as de novo settlements at a time in our history when nothing is out of our control because surveillance technology is already so far advanced, and the small number of human beings who manage to make their way off Earth to populate a new space settlement will be highly vetted and presumably cooperative as a requirement of participating in the experimental settlement. De novo settlements in the New World, in an earlier episode of civilizational expansion, had a great deal of latitude to adapt to the environment and run their own affairs, but de novo settlements today and in the future will be subject to the same assimilating technologies that tightly bind them to their terrestrial masters.
Almost all planned cities have been disastrous insofar as they are planned, and they are eventually made livable by the departures from the plan that people living within these cities have forced into acceptance by making a place for themselves within this planned structure. A planned community off the surface of Earth will, I think, be as disastrously planned as planned communities on Earth, but with leaving the city or departing from the plan made far more difficult than any planned city on Earth. Our technology is already far in advance even of planned cities as recent as Basília (not yet a century old), and insofar as assimilating computer technology transforms a human settlement into an omnipresent panopticon, it will be even less livable than Basília. Nevertheless, the plan will look good, and its designers will make it sound good — it will look like a utopia on paper — but that doesn’t mean that it will actually be a good place to live. But the built environment, as important as that is, will be secondary to the assumptions built into the social model, which will be as inescapable as the built environment.
Maintaining control over a dysfunctional settlement (a failed utopia) will not be difficult, and maintaining control of the whole of the spacefaring infrastructure also will not be at all difficult to do in the near- to mid-term, because any space settlement we could contemplate planning or building at present would be utterly dependent on technology from Earth. It is likely that several generations of development would be necessary to construct an industrial infrastructure in space sufficient to serve the needs of a population in space. Raw materials would be relatively easy compared to the task of building machines that can build other machines on an industrial scale, and it requires several generations of such machines used to build better and more precise machines before one can eventually produce the high technology machine tools necessary to build technology sufficient for a space program. And sufficiency of maintenance is not yet sufficiency of independent expansion. For human communities off Earth to not only maintain themselves, but also to expand in their own way, at their own pace, they will need their own technology.
For a space community to have its own technology means, at least to some extent, an independent industrial and technological infrastructure, and this is what the assimilating character of computing technology militates against. Thus assimilating computer technology will naturally play into the hands of those who would aspire to be the managers in perpetuity of a perennial space program. Insofar as spacefaring technology is yoked to terrestrial technology in a vast assimilated and assimilating network, this technology will be well behaved, and those who employ this technology will have to behave because they will not have the technology to defy the technology that keeps them alive.
Obviously, in making these observations I can see the possibilities for those who can hack and jailbreak technologies, and we can certainly expect this to be a feature of the future in addition to the assimilating homogeneity of technology. Still, technologies that have been modified remain on the margins of the mass of technology, and are not likely to become a new center of their own. We can consider the historical analogy of when all telephone technology in the US was controlled by the Bell System, there were “phone phreaks” (the spiritual ancestors of hackers) who would modify and hijack telephone technologies, but they were always on the margins of the phone system. A technological infrastructure assimilated to computing technology would not be a business monopoly, but rather a monopoly of standards administrated by those who exploited their first mover advantage to place themselves in positions of control. There might be opportunities on the margins of this technological behemoth, but these opportunities would be marginal by definition.
