The Ethics of Exploration
Friday 06 October 2023
Immediately upon returning from Poland I was plunged into another conference, this time as an online participant in the Everyday Heroism: Recognising Growth and Transformation in Community 2023 conference, hosted by the Bethlehem Tertiary Institute in Tauranga, New Zealand. Needless to say, I would have liked to have attended this in person, but I chose to prioritize the ISCSC conference in Poland and my talk in Poznań. Technically it would have been possible for me to fly from Poland to New Zealand, but that would have involved more money than I could justify spending at the moment, though I will admit it would have been nice.
In my previous newsletter I had mentioned having to rapidly shift gears from civilization and philosophy of history to writing a paper on “The Life and Death of Habitable Worlds” (which I finished while staying at the Hotel Pałac Romantyczny), and the next rapid shift was toward putting together my presentation for the Everyday Heroism conference, “Heroic Virtues in Space Exploration: Supererogation in Outer Space” Again, I mostly knew what I wanted to say, but I hadn’t put in the work to put the presentation together. As I had expected, I was in no frame of mind to write doing my journey home, so I accomplished little or nothing on the flight and my long layovers. (I doubt I could have finished my “The Life and Death of Habitable Worlds” paper on time if I had set myself the task of working on it during and upon my return.) When I got home, I had to make a last minute effort producing my PowerPoint slides for the heroism conference, but I did have a presentation ready by the time I was scheduled to speak, though this involved working on my presentation while listening to the first day’s presentations. Many of the presentations were good, and the discussions were intelligent.
Immediately prior to my talk, Kyle Fruh spoke on “Moral Heroism without Virtue,” which, if one followed his argument, undercut much of my presentation, so I started out by saying, “I am going to talk about moral heroism in terms of virtue, so you can think of my presentation as having been pre-bunked by Kyle, but I will go ahead anyway.” The room found this amusing and many laughed. Moreover, they listened to my presentation respectfully, which is about as much as one can hope for. Perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t work on this presentation over a longer period of time, as I probably would have produced much more material than justified by the time available. As it was, I spoke for my full allotted time. Also, if I had worked further on this I would have gone into much more detail on the role of virtues distinctive to a spacefaring society and their supererogatory correlates. That probably would have been too much for a general (or, if you like, interdisciplinary) audience. If I write a paper on this, that would be the opportunity to explore these questions in greater depth and detail.
Now that I have these events and commitments behind me, I have several different projects I could pursue. I still have some immediate projects I would like to finish and get kicked out the door, and I will work on these, but finishing something is rather different from determining a direction of ongoing work. To be honest, my last few conference experiences have been so demoralizing that I have thought about entirely disconnecting myself from this kind of participation and using whatever years I have left for completing book-length manuscripts. However, from my previous self-publishing I learned that most self-published books go nowhere. Even to get a handful of readers requires some preparation of the ground. (I suppose it would also help to write about something that interests others, but that is another matter.)
As distant as my recently completed presentations may seem from one another, there are strands that relate them to each other. “Big History and Civilization: Shared Problems, Mutual Opportunity” came out of a dozen years of reflecting on the role of scientific method in history and the study of civilization, and a large part of this derived from the long form essays that I posted to Centauri Dreams about spacefaring civilizations. Spacefaring civilizations in turn point to the cosmological context of such civilizations, and this is where “The Life and Death of Habitable Worlds” came from; that, and my other presentations on astrobiology over the past few years, are part of my ongoing reflections on big history, with the origins of life being one complexity threshold among others, and the other complexity thresholds include civilization. “Heroic Virtues in Space Exploration: Supererogation in Outer Space” also comes out of this milieu of space exploration, though also from a life-long interest in the mythological frameworks of civilizations. In past newsletters I have given an outline for a series of talks on space ethics of which this would form a part, so this presentation has a larger context as well.
I have been sketching a paper on “An Ethic for Exploration,” and as this is what interests me most at the moment, I may continue to work on this. While it is intended as a popular and practical high-level summary of the ethics of space exploration, to say what I want to say will require a significant investment of time in reading Kantian ethics so that I don’t misrepresent this tradition. Any ethic formulated in terms of imperatives must acknowledge the Kantian framework to some extent, even if not directly working within it. The literature on Kantian ethics is so vast that it is difficult to know where one ought to engage and where one ought to keep one’s distance. I have been dipping my toes into Kantian waters for the past few months, but this hasn’t been sufficient for a systematic understanding.
The vast majority of contemporary philosophical ethics consists of metaethical inquiries into the meanings of the concepts employed in ethics, as well as some expository work and some exhaustively detailed case studies of applied ethics. My “An Ethic for Exploration” aims to be explicitly normative, that is to say, I am trying to formulate normative principles for exploration, and this is likely to be contentious (if anyone pays attention, which is unlikely) and something of an outlier in the context of contemporary ethics. As implied by the above, the idea of an ethics for space exploration is contextualized in civilizational-scale problems that also engage the questions of civilization, big history, astrobiology, and mythology.
Always with the failure condition in mind — that is to say, always aware that a failure condition could obtain that would put terrestrial civilization on a trajectory toward decreased complexity — the possibility of space exploration opens up a realm so large in relation to human concerns that it dwarfs our history to date, and furnishes us with a horizon so distant that we cannot exhaust the possibilities it presents. This fact allows us to reframe terrestrial history to date as a brief prelude to something much larger, and much more ambitious. But another reframe is also possible which places the past ten thousand years of settled civilization in the context of the exploration of our species prior to civilization, and this can, in turn, be pushed back in time to cover the distribution by exploration of human ancestors. Our species may be as old as 300,000 years, and our clade may go back seven million years. This is the historical scale at which we should be thinking in terms of space exploration.
Our history as a spacefaring species only began 66 years ago with the anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch a few days ago. A demographically significant human presence in space is still some time in the future, and, if a failure conditions obtains, there will be no demographically significant human presence in space and we will go extinct on the same planet where we evolved. It is only a matter of time; only a matter of the mechanism by which we go extinct that remains to be determined. That will be the end of us and our influence, except if some other spacefaring species visits Earth and excavates our ruins.
On the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, human beings have been explorers more than we have been living in settled societies, though we can’t push it much earlier in history than that. One of the distinctive achievements of our species is to have distributed ourselves on a planetary scale, but if you go far enough back in time, you come to a hominid ancestor that was an endemic species that lived in a particular biome like any other species, and did not go much beyond it. Evolving bipedalism made long distance walking possible, and stone tools made it possible to live in environments other than our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. More narrowly in temporal scope, our ability to explore further was contingent upon the bone needle and the ability to sew form-fitting clothing, and it is unlikely that this appeared earlier than 70,000 years before present.
The 10,000 year history of civilization is significantly shorter than this 70,000 years of exploration, but not orders of magnitude shorter. This 10–70 Ka. is the proper temporal scale for thinking about human expansion into the cosmos, with the understanding that cosmological exploration could continue for much longer, even millions or billions of years. This large scale history of human exploration suggests that we should think about exploration as part of the human condition, whereas most reflection on the human condition takes human life in the context of settled civilization as the norm and the point of departure. If “history” is only taken as recorded history, then the history of human exploration can be reduced to the scientific exploration of regions already settled by human beings. This period of scientific exploration is of particular interest to us, as our exploration of the cosmos will be mediated by science, but exploration will not be an exclusively scientific matter.
Reflecting on exploring well means reflecting on the greater part of human history, and framing the context of human history yet to come, which could someday constitute a period far longer than human history to date, however we choose to construe human history. An ethic for exploration, then, is an ethic for the bulk of human history, and should be at the center of human experience. And as future exploration, if it occurs (again, the failure condition), will take place beyond Earth, it is an ethic of spacefaring exploration that is needed for the human future. Since I have been participating in the meetings of the Institute on Space Law and Ethics I have filled two notebooks on space ethics (much of it trying to come to terms with Kant), and I am still far from having the perspective I want to have on the subject, but some ideas are starting to jell in my mind, and these are the ideas that I would like to put into “An Ethic for Exploration.” If enough jells, then will write this as a paper, and, if not, it will remain mere fragments.
