Space Ethics 101: A Physicist on Settling Beyond Earth

[00:00:03]thank you very muchan I will just get started with my slides here uh so thank you all for coming this evening or afternoon or morning wherever you're coming from um I'm gonna talk for about an hour I think about the ethics of space settlement and then I really look forward to uh chatting with all of you for our Q&A session afterwards so if you'll indulge me I'm just going to start off by talking about myself for a few slides um because a lot of people ask me how to get into space ethics it's uh both an old and a new field and as a new field a lot of people are coming into space ethics from a lot of different directions different backgrounds there are people who are philosophers and ethicist of course but also people who are working in the space industry people who have backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences and so it's a it's really fascinating subject right now to get into so I'm just going to explain my path uh going from being an astronomer to uh a space ethicist someone who works in space ethics so I got a PhD in physics um from a university in Baltimore the University of Baltimore County um and uh that was in 2015 or so I got to wear the fancy hat and um my research was in computational astrophysics I write computer programs to model asteroid belts around other stars to try to find exoplanets um and I did that for a few years nowadays I actually for my day job I work outside of Academia I work for video game company that makes a game called Universe Sandbox which is the same kind of gravity simulation that I was working on before but now you can buy it on your home computer it's very interactive it's got beautiful graphics and it's very educational to get a sense of the scale uh of the universe and of space it's a lot of fun but along the way during that process when I was working as a postto doing academic research I had a great opportunity to go out to Silicon Valley in California as part of a the first year of a program called the NASA Frontier development lab they were working on using uh machine learning to focus on planetary defense to protecting us all from from comic collisions but along the way they they really made a point to introduce us to a lot of people in the new space industry so this is this rapidly growing private commercial space business that we've been hearing a lot about in the news so this includes places like SpaceX and blue origin people who want to send people to live on Mars and and make orbital hotels but also people who are really interested in space mining mining asteroids mining the moon and Mining Mars so we got to meet a lot of these people which I was very excited about because I'm interested in Humanity's future in space but I realized as I was asking these entrepreneurs questions about various challenges that I think we'll probably face as we try to move our human activities into space I would ask them about things like um how are you going to protect labor rights if you're sending people out to work in a space mining site for example what are we going to do about Environmental Protection to um to make sure we're not using the resources too fast to make sure we're not contaminating the space environment and as I asked these questions the answers I tended to get from people in the new space business were oh well that's that's a fair question but we'll worry about that later which didn't seem right to me um that seemed like the sort of thing you need to work out ahead of time but I also recognized that I didn't have the background and the expertise to be able to answer these questions either I just like the people I was talking to most of them in the new space business they they either have a background in finance and business or in space and Technology like I do we're not really trained to think about these kinds of questions so when I got back from that uh research program I did what any good Millennial will do when when they have a question I made a podcast a podcast called making new worlds uh which is still available online for free uh I will say that uh making a podcast is a really great way to start exploring a new idea a new subject area there's a really low barrier entry you don't need to spend a lot of money to start doing it you can share the product you produce with other people and it's uh it's actually a really great way to trick people into having conversations with you so if you reach out to these uh really cool experts and uh professors and and experts in various subjects if you say oh this is for a podcast they're much more likely to answer your emails so that's a tip for you so making new worlds is about the ethical and human rights issues that I could come up with that I think that we'll encounter as we try to build human settlements in space and in particular I interviewed people like philosophers um historians sociologists activists in various subjects but also uh medical doctors Engineers technical people as well and uh that was a great experience and then I was approached not long after that about the idea of turning the podcast into a book and that's where my book came from that Hassan uh mentioned at the start of the talk it's off- Earth ethical questions and quandaries for living in outer space so it's mostly an expansion of the podcast I I took the opportunity to do more interviews with other experts I updated my research I threw in the latest space news because this is a very fast moving industry right now um and it asks a lot of questions some of which I won't be able to cover in this talk about things like should we be doing this in the first place let's explore the arguments for and against settling space let's ask why do we want a settle space uh everyone you ask has a slightly different answer to that and uh and the reasons that we have for why we want to be going about this business are really going to affect the decisions that we make and most importantly to me if we're going to settle space then how should we do it are there decisions and planning we can do ahead of time to make sure that we're avoiding repeating the mistakes of human history I'm sure we'll come up with new mistakes to make we're good at that but at the very least we can learn from our past to try to make a better future in space so my goal these days is really to try to get other space people space industry technology and space scientist people to think about these social and ethical problems of space settlement not just the financial and Technical ones so along the way uh while I was writing the book I was invited to another great opportunity which is that I co-edited a book called reclaiming space Progressive and Multicultural visions of space exploration that was with an actual philosophy Professor uh Jamie Johnson Schwarz she's been working on Space ethics for a while and Linda Billings who's uh been a consultant for for NASA for most of her career so this book tries to amplify the kind of voices you don't usually hear in public conversations about space exploration and space settlement um it's got 27 chapters and and despite that it still doesn't uh include all the perspectives that we we wanted to include so that work is certainly not done I also um had the opportunity to co-found a nonprofit organization called the just space alliance with a mission to advocate for a more inclusive and ethical future in space and to harness people's excitement for space to get them to figure out how to build a more just and Equitable World here on Earth today instead of waiting until we settle space to figure out how to do things better and uh I co-founded that with another astronomer Lucen wowit who had been thinking about a lot of these same topics so that's enough about me uh let's get to the main question which is why do we need to even worry about ethics and space shouldn't we be focused more on worrying about you know breathing in space and how to build the Rockets well people like to talk about space as a a blank slate where we can build these future Utopias you see all these beautiful concept art for the colonies we're going to build in space and indeed right now space does look pretty blank right the only uh only robots are living on other planets right now there's no humans up there and uh then things look like a blank slate where we can have a lot of imagination for what we could build there but space is only going to be a blank slate until humans get there and then we're going to be bringing all of our human problems with us our prejudices our biases um our vices um so we need to think now about what structures we can build what plans we can make to uh make sure that we're not stumbling into repeating those mistakes of history and making sure that as we write on this Blank Slate we're not just making things worse in space so I'm going to talk about some examples from my book unfortunately I can't cover all of them and I'm going to break it into to three big chunks and these mostly feel like questions sometimes I feel like my book is just filled with questions um but the questions get you started thinking about the problems that we might run into and uh start sparking ideas for possible solutions so the first question I want to bring up is how are we going to live with the space environment uh in particular how should we share and protect the space environment it's actually kind of hard to get people to think of space as an environment worthy of protection because it it looks like this um sometimes I get tired of just showing lands escapes from Mars and the moon so this is actually a Venus on the left and Titan a moon of Saturn on the right so this doesn't look like the environment that we usually see in in posters asking us to recycle and protect the environment right there's no rainforests there's no pandas or coral reefs but there's a lot of aspects of the space environment that make it uh important that we think about how to protect it and how to share it so for one thing it was here before we got here right this this these environments are pristine they've never been touched by humans they're older than the human race and so we need to ask whether it's worth protecting just for its own sake and and preserving that that Cosmic history but it's also full of really valuable and useful resources that humans want to use especially if humans want to go to space to live there we don't want to have to bring all of our Resources with us um and we also uh if we're going to do this in a capitalist way and and and have a business case for going to space we need something there that we can extract to uh to recoup our costs from going up there space as an environment is also really scientifically Rich so in that way it's like it's kind of like Antarctica scientists really want to get there and study this this fascinating environment they'll put a lot of work and expense into doing that and in particular scientists don't especially want to have to share this this environment with a mining company that doesn't care about the science and is trying to dig up the land that they're trying to study so that can lead to conflict too and the most important point about space that that we need to keep in mind as we think about it as an environment is that we are capable of damaging this environment uh especially since it is generally as far as we know it's lifeless and there's no in most environments in space there's no uh uh weather or or water and so anything we do to this environment isn't going to uh recover over time the way that a forest will recover after a fire any scars that we leave on the landscape any major changes we do if we decide to pursue Terr reforming it's going to make permanent changes and so that means we need to think before we we uh do this irreversible harm we need to think about whether it's worth uh the changes that we're making so uh a lot of times when we start talking about space as an environment or space ethics in general one of the first questions that comes up is okay well who's who's in charge of making these decisions who who actually owns space this is actually a pretty well studied question at this point it's been studied by space lawyer uh governments and regulators and certainly by private companies who want to know that if they go into space to mine the moon for example that the costs they're putting in that they'll be able to get that investment back by being allowed to sell the resources they extract or sell uh tickets to a space hotel that they're building and so everyone wants to know what does that mean who who actually owns space uh we do have some international law that addresses this the the big International treaty is the outer space treaty of 1967 which was written in the Cold War in fact it's it's kind of amazing that it got signed at all if you look at the treaty itself during the hi of the Cold War one of the things that it's really clear about is that Nations can't appropriate territory in space but it's not as clear about private companies and individuals other treaties have tried to address this but uh those treaties haven't really been successful uh and of course in the Cold War they weren't thinking about private space companies they were trying to prevent another land grab by com by by Nations and so there's still a lot of debate about what that means various nations are trying to including the US are trying to argue um that private companies maybe they can't appropriate territory either but they can uh extract resources and own those resources and uh that sort of thing is again an urgent concern for the space industry who want to make sure that the efforts and cost that they're putting into their work that they're going to get back out and this leads to to the the more general question of how will we share a space environment with each other um a lot of people think of space as being infinite and certainly uh these these companies that are trying to find investors like to talk about space being full of these infinite resources and certainly space is very big possibly infinite but what's not infinite is the amount of resources we can reach the the resources that we want to use in space tend to be very concentrated uh in certain areas so uh water ice uh in certain spots and craters in the moon um water in the poles of on the polar ice caps of Mars places that you want to put your landing pads or um your solar panels uh on a planet very limited and so we might end up in situations where two different groups of people want to use the same piece of land in space and that leads to questions like what does property really mean in space if we agree that no one can own a piece of land that just means you can't plant a flag uh put a fence around it and say no one can come in but uh we still have to figure out what if two people want to use the same piece of land what are we going to have use rights and and uh how are we going to handle um interference harmful interference as the outer space treaty says if uh two people's two groups activities interfere with each other on the same spot and if that happens how are we going to resolve conflicts over land use the outer space treaty talks kind of vaguely about consultation if there's going to be harmful interference but that hasn't really tested that strongly yet and it will be eventually as we start to move out there and as I mentioned uh setting aside the question of the land ownership itself who owns the resources that you extract from the space environment if you brought the mining equipment there and you extract something valuable do you get to keep it do you have to share it how does that work and on an ethical side of things we need to think about things like environmental justice so this is the idea that the costs and benefits of humans using an environment should be equitably distributed we talk about this a lot on Earth right now with things like climate change where uh poorer nations in the world in particular like island nations are feeling the worst effects and earliest effects of climate change even though they've contributed the least to climate change to to fossil fuel use which means they have benefited the least from using those fossil fuels and yet they're paying most of the costs right now so we want to avoid this situation in space and try to make sure that the costs and benefit are distributed more equally but so far the model that we're using in space as we talk about space resources and space mining in the future is sort of a lightly regulated capitalism like a company decides to pay the costs to get up there they get Investments they they build equipment they send their Rockets up there they extract the resources they want to be able to benefit from those resources to balance out their cost um and they want to be able to sell those resources the outer space treaty this is actually article one of the space treaty it's a very readable treaty I have to say if you want to go look it up so article one right at the beginning says that activities in space should be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries irrespective of how economically or scientifically developed they are um in particular this means that space fairing Nations should also be able to benefit from the use of space even though they're not actually off space fairing yet and so this leads to uh an interesting challenge to the idea of just using a lightly Cal ated capitalist model because you have to ask whether Nations and and companies in those Nations that aren't space fairing now but maybe in a few decades they managed to develop the ability to send people into space by the time they get up there will these finite resources have been used up and in that way is it uh is it unfair does it go against the idea that space should benefit All Nations uh irrespective of where they are right now another thing we have to think about with these finite resources is what we owe F future Generations so this side of environmental justice is known as intergenerational Justice what obligations do we have towards humans living in the future and of course there's a lot of examples of intergenerational Justice on Earth that we uh we can learn from things like conserving finite resources on Earth people talk about uh minerals and oil for example pre uh preserving pristine wildernesses for future generations to enjoy developing infrastructure structure for future Generations so we can learn a lot from intergenerational Justice movements and researchers on Earth to think about good models for the future in space it's also important to think about whether we need to protect the space environment for its own sake um does it have its own intrinsic value uh this is especially challenging because there's no life there so again without cute pandas or or polar bears or or even beautiful forests and rainforests it's hard for humans to to get their head around the idea that uh that there's something worthy of protection here um if there's no life that's supported by this environment on the other hand you can look at it as this pristine Wilderness and we really do care about protecting wildernesses here on Earth and I'm not sure that that's just because those wildernesses Harbor life because there are abiotic so non-living parts of the earth environment like mountains and rivers for example that humans really value and we can actually learn from the way that humans interact with those environments here on Earth to think about what we should be doing in space in particular I'm really fascinated by um different Societies in the world and different governments have started playing with the idea of granting legal personhood for different parts of their environment on Earth so my example here this is the wanganui river which is in New Zealand and um thanks to uh a lot of effort by the mayori community in uh in New Zealand they passed a law in 201 17 that granted legal personhood to this River the weni river which means that if there's for example a court case about development or pollution something that's going to affect the river they appoint a human representative to speak for the river on behalf of the river um because it has rights as as a legally living entity um there's a few other places around the world uh that have done this with rivers and with mountains and uh just a couple years ago in 2021 uh a few lawyers and space researchers got together and write what wrote what they call the Declaration on the rights of the Moon that is similarly trying to argue that the moon itself should have legal personhood and should have a representative speaking for the moon itself when we talk about mining for example on the moon and you can go look up that declaration uh and even add your signature I think still at this point so that's all talking about if if space is a lifeless environment but what if space isn't lifeless um we don't know yet uh there's certainly places in the solar system that we're still not sure whether there might be some microbial life or or maybe even larger life in certain places so right now there's a a set of policies reg guidelines in particular that are for planetary protection so planetary protection is the idea of preventing forward contamination taking accidentally taking Earth life especially microbial life and contaminating a space environment you bring that Earth life there and it starts to grow because there's some water and some warmth it could uh it could spread and contaminate that environment back contamination is the idea that we want to prevent uh bringing space life back to Earth that hasn't been an issue we're less worried about that now than we were a few decades ago because now we understand how inhospitable most of the solar system is but it's still something that we think about and as I said there are guidelines talking about how to um sterilize your spacecraft for example depending on where in the solar system you're going um to try to prevent this contamination and for the most part the history of planetary protection is about preserving the scientif scientific Integrity of this environment so it's mostly been pushed forward by scientists astrobiologists what what they're afraid of is that they'll get up to Mars for example find some microbial life get really excited and then not be able to tell whether it's real alien life that evolved in space or whether it's just some microbes we brought from Earth that have been spreading for a while and so um for the most part this has been a focus of uh protecting that that scientific integrity and this is starting to get a little difficult because now we have more and more people going to space who aren't going for scientific research reasons they're going for other reasons and they are uh less interested in in spending the time the effort and the cost to go through following all these guidelines and sterilizing their equipment and so I think as as human activity increases in space there's going to be a lot more conflict about whether we follow these planetary protection rules which is going to be tough for the scientists and then we should ask well what if we do find life even if it's just microbial Life on Mars or one of these moons where we think there's liquid water does that mean we should still put all this effort in to avoid contaminating that environment and we have no idea right now if Earth microbes would be able to compete with space microbes and whether they'd interact or or affect each other at all but we do need to worry about the fact that multiple times on Earth we've seen uh new groups of of organisms and humans come into an environment and bring a lot of invasive species and wipe out the local life so how much do we need to worry about that if we find life in space this is kind of tough for humans to think about again because we tend not to rank microbes particularly high in our scale of life forms certainly not as high as as humans and other animals um otherwise we wouldn't be able to clean our bathrooms but if we found microbial life in space that would be an interesting question um it would be special microbial life that's certainly true more unique more scientifically interesting maybe worth protecting for that reason and also it's worth asking if if we find microbial life in space that life will be native to that environment and we will essentially be the Invaders and so there is there an ethical problem with this with us coming in and wiping out local life just because we want the land that's that's calls back to a terrible history on Earth so people like Carl Sean have suggested that if we do find microbial life say on Mar Mar s that we shouldn't interact with Mars at all at that point we should leave Mars to martians and that's still a hotly debated topic inside Space settlement advocacy today so water break ah okay so the next big set of questions that I'm going to ask moving on from how we interact with the space environment is just asking how are we going to interact with each other right so as I mentioned before humans we're going to bring a lot of our own issues with us and a lot of our issues as species is about how we interact with each other how we cause each other harm and how we protect each other how we balance those things so one uh fascinating subject to me is Criminal Justice in space so imagine we have a space settlement people are living there on a permanent basis how will we address interpersonal harm say between individuals in that settlement uh you can imagine all the normal uh crimes that you would see on TV these days so so violence and and theft Etc and we should also ask well while we're thinking about this is how you would address harm caused by an individual against the community things like um sabotage or the kinds of thefts that you do from from public resources so first of all if someone gets accused of a kind of crime like that some kind of deviant Behavior as criminologists would say how would you start by even determining guilt and conducting a fair trial this could be especially tricky if you have a really small community a fairly new space settlement because uh suppose that the accused person is the settlement's only only um uh life support engineer or they're the child of the commander of the settlement how do you guarantee that you have an impartial trial and then an even more difficult question is what happens after the trial what happens after guilt has been established what do you do with that person to protect the community and and address the harm that's been done I've been really surprised as I've been talking about these topics for the past few years and writing about these topics how many people immediately respond to this question with the idea of throwing someone out of an airlock so there's even a TV Tropes page about it there's so much science fiction in which people who have done wrong just get thrown out the airlock it's it's very clean apparently very efficient um and it's it's a very common cliche but I think that uh even people who are very pro- capital punishment would agree that this is not the correct approach for every possible crime in a society we we have to figure out some way to address harm without just killing everyone who who breaks the rules so if you ask most Americans who aren't obsessed with airlocks uh in most westerners in general what we should do with with law Breakers in space most of them just suggest that we have space prisons because that's how our system works here on Earth but there are a lot of practical and ethical problems with building prisons in space and I'm just going to go through them now so practical problems first of all you need to build a prison right they don't come built in um that requires resources it requires the labor to build it it requires the actual physical room that you need to keep shielding from radiation and pressurized with air this uh this photo is of San Quenton State Prison which is in the state of California and the first cell block in this prison was built by incarcerated people who were living on the prison ship Wan just off the coast so they worried the stone they built the prison and then they got moved into the prison um so would that be something that we'd end up having to do in a space settlement forcing the uh the accused people themselves to to build their own prison and then once you have built your prison you need to Main maintain it so that requires labor if you're going to have guards and attendance you'll need to remove that labor from doing other useful things from the settlement and of course it requires resources you have to to feed uh the people that you've incarcerated you have to give them air and heat and of course the people that you have imprisoned in your your space prison they've been removed from your labor pool and in the early days of a space settlement labor might be especially scarce so that could be a problem for the settlement as a whole unless you want to force them to keep working while they're serving out their punishment um and certainly some legal systems including the one I live in today still include Force labor for inmates um but that tends to lead to a lot of exploitation uh and ethical problems so speaking of ethical problems um this picture is a a published design of a space prison by um an astrophysicist named Charles cockle he calls it exocon fact which is uh the Extraterrestrial containment facility it looks a bit like a panopticon and uh he was trying to design a a Humane prison uh that looks honestly very much like earth-based prisons but no matter how you design a prison they are intrinsically designed in in ways that that are considered problematic by by criminologists and activists and psychologists so for one thing they tend to be very violent spaces where just by definition your ties to the community are severed which makes it very difficult to uh reintegrate into the community in a healthy way afterwards um they really often tend to amp if y existing inequalities in a society uh and in space habitats in particular a lot of psychologists are already studying the fact that we expect long-term space travel and living in space to really strain people's mental health because of the the isolation the confinement um The Darkness the fact that you're not going to be surrounded by Nature all these things that we know is unhealthy for humans and so if you deliberately design these space prisons within a space habitat that are intended to be isolating and confining uh it's probably only going to exacerbate people's mental health problems so if we're worried about all these different issues with space prisons what are the Alternatives we still have to address the issues of criminal Behavior but it turns out there are a lot of Alternatives that that people have used here on Earth prisons are actually a relatively recent invention on Earth plenty of uh communities of humans throughout history and today use uh systems that don't involve prisons at all but still address harm behavior of members of their community and I always like to point out that as of today there are no prisons in space so if we one day have space prisons it will be because we decided to build them which means that we have the choice and the opportunity right now to decide not to build them and and take the time that we have now to consider whether there's better Alternatives so one example um that a lot of activists in the states at least are working towards is called restorative justice which are problems that address uh BR enclosure and and feeling of safety to the to the victims of a crime uh improving the safety of the community as a whole and addressing the causes of crime and criminal Behavior at the individual level and in the society as a whole so it's worth taking the time now to really look at all these Alternatives especially the ones that work well for small isolated communities and see whether there's any systems we want to put into place now hopefully before a crime in space happens um that don't involve just a building another prison in space so we've talked about harm between individuals in a community and harm caused by an individual towards the community but we also need to think about organizational harm so when a community harms individuals within the community in particular when the leadership harms the community so for example how do we protect uh workers in space for being exploited how do we protect the population or minority population in a space settlement from being oppressed by the leadership of the settlement and this is actually going to be uh an extra challenge in space compared to Earth because the there's a lot of physical characteristics of space that will make uh feeling free to protest against Injustice that'll make that difficult so for example um as you can see in this picture um it's space is very isolated very remote um travel in space is very difficult and so if you feel that you're being oppressed if your rights are being uh taken away you can't just Escape you just walk out and go live off the land because the land looks like this it's also going to be difficult to even just get to another habitat depending on how close they are to each other uh and so that's a limitation there's also a concern that if life support uh is is controlled in in a central way this depends on how you design it and if the control of the life support is controlled by the the leadership of the settlement whether that's un employer or a government then that makes it a lot riskier to protest against that government because um whoever controls the life support can shut down any activities that they don't like just by turning down the oxygen which makes it very difficult to Stage a protest or or go on strike for example and there's actually quite a lot of parallels in human history especially about Labor rights and these kinds of environments um so I'll just do a a quick view right here um this is the factory of the pman palace car company this was rail car company they made rail cars in the states in the town of Pullman Illinois which was um the sort of the prototypical company Town company town is where the company employs everyone in the town and uh everyone who lives and works in the town also pays rent to the company they buy food from The Company Store everything is controlled by the company and that tends to lead again to a lot of exploitation uh at in the pman company in pman Illinois what happened is that the uh the company reduced wages uh during some economic downturn in 1893 but they didn't reduce rents so all of their employees were were running out of money unable to pay their rents this led to a strike this is a photo of the protest from the strike the next year and you can easily imagine the same thing happening in a space settlement if it's a mining company that built the Space settlement itself then is everyone who's working for the company and living there are they also paying rent to the company are they buying food from the company are they buying air from the company and what does that mean if if the economy changes and if people start to go broke what's going to happen another example uh that I like to bring up is from the Transcontinental railroads that were built across North America um very harsh working conditions very isolated working conditions building very important infrastructure for the US and in particular there are a lot of Chinese immigrant uh laborers who did a lot of hard work um on the the Transcontinental Railroad but they were discriminated against they weren't paid as well as their as their white counterparts and at one point a group of these Chinese workers went on strike at their work site in 1867 and within a few days the rail car company the railo company decided to just cut off their supply lines so they were out in the mountains they were no longer receiving any food uh or other supplies and that really quickly broke the strike so again you can imagine the same situation in space if group of workers who are working out at a at a site in space if they decide to go on strike it would be very easy for whoever controls their food or their water or their air to uh quickly shut down that strike and the last example I like to bring up is the uh fishing industry in Thailand today because of course there are still labor rights abuses happening today what happens out uh in Thailand is that uh poor migrant workers from Myanmar they can't afford to travel to Thailand so they go into debt to come to Thailand their debtors take their passports away stick them on fishing boats and send them off to Sea where they're then essentially trapped both physically and legally on the boats and this can easily lead to a lot of uh abuse physical abuse exploitation um and I've talked to labor rights indust labor rights experts today who are working on the Thailand fishing industry problem who say they can easily imagine the same thing happening in space nobody can pay their own weight to to space who's going to go out and work there they go into lab into into debt in order to um be taken out to Mars or to an asteroid mining fac faity then they're in debt to their employer they have no way to get back on their own they're isolated maybe no one's monitoring the work site you can see how this could also lead to exploitation and abuse in certain situations so um there have been people asking is there anything we can do to prevent these issues um as we design space settlements in particular um some people have suggested designing the ability to protest and the ability to leave and fight oppression physically design it into the habitats so for example make sure that the life support isn't centrally controlled make sure that it's distributed or it's modular in some way that uh that the leadership can't just shut down a strike by turning off the air make sure that people have a right to travel maybe a guaranteed right of return if they want to come back to earth or guarantee that everyone has access to space suits so they can get in a Rover and go to another settlement if they want to escape and of course we can also design these kind of Rights into the legal system and even into the culture of of space settlements to make sure that we are really valuing uh Liberty and the right to protest and the right to organize in the future all right and the last topic once we've figured out how to live with the environment we figured out how to how to survive each other how do we build H go beyond surviving and and build places where we can Thrive where we can have healthy and Rich lives uh as we live out our lives in space so one important key to that is making sure that we have uh the ability to ensure that we have a healthy population so we need to think about how to plan for medical emergencies in space um this is something people already work on today of course um and it's a it's a challenge because you it's hard to plan for every possible emergency and there's always a concern that you won't have the right medication the right equipment or the right expertise so uh there's a lot of examples from certain environments in Earth too uh Antarctica is a great example of places where this sort of things has happened this is a a photo of a doctor Soviet doctor named rasov who was working I think he was overwintering in Antarctica and uh developed appendicitis and he was the only surgeon um there and so I've I've censored this for your sake but this is an actual photograph of him performing an aid appendectomy on himself with the help of a couple of assistants with mirrors and so these are the sorts of situations you get into if you don't have enough uh medical expertise for example and so these are things that uh space agencies and and planners think about today but long term there's there's even more types of health issues we need to think about if we have people living out there entire lives in space we need to worry about more than just acute emergencies we need to think about how to how to treat chronic conditions like diabetes or or health or heart heart issues long term um we need to think about paliative care as people reach the end of their lives how are we going to uh make sure that we've prepared for that uh in a space settlement and of course no matter how much planning we do no matter what we bring along uh we're not reproducing all of Earth's Health Care system in space so inevitably something will happen where our resources are too scarce compared to the need from our patients so we have to ask what to do uh and generally what the medical community does is called triage and figuring out how to distribute scarce resources to Abundant patients in a way that saves as many lives as possible and as I mentioned we can learn a lot from AER Wilderness rural areas on Earth um we can do things like uh cross training to make sure you have more than one surgeon more than one dentist uh make sure you've you've packed your equipment and medication in a really uh efficient way this picture is the kit used by Robert Falcon Scott in his 1910 Antarctic Expeditions this is the same kind of idea of course we've got much better equipment these days you have to think about what you'll need most urgently think about what can serve multiple purposes and in space in particular we're going to think about what can we produce locally can we grow antibiotics or insulin or something without having to bring it all from Earth we can also think about how to prevent medical problems so we avoid having to to face these issues in particular what's really common in space agencies today is Health screenings uh they very very strict health and and physical fitness screenings if you want to be an astronaut and that's uh mostly because they don't want to send people into space who are at higher risk of having a health emergency or who need uh maintenance of some kind of chronic condition and this means that uh the astronauts and the space Travelers so far have been uh extremely able-bodied and a lot of disabled people and chronically ill people have been ruled out but in the long term if we're talking about sending people to space for the rest of their lives then we need to maybe reframe that question and realize that when we're talking about the rest of our lives all of us will become ill Andor disabled or face some kind of medical emergency at some point and in fact uh as has been pointed out by a lot of disability rights Advocates space is disabling for everyone none of us were were intended to to to live we weren't involved to live in these kinds of environments and so it makes more sense to try to design our space technology our space habitats to be as accessible as possible to make sure that we can we can treat chronic conditions that might develop even in healthy people later down the line and once we do that we can really open up the the pool of space travelers to include all of these excellent candidates who might be ruled out by a health screening today and of course uh besides learning from Wilderness medicine we can also learn from pandemics on Earth um that the emergency triage that I mentioned before that happens in an ER or an A&E um for you folks uh or or the scene of a natural disaster or scene of mass violence that kind of practice is very well established and well practiced it comes from Battle field medicine in particular but we also need to worry in space about a a a longer uh slower disaster like a pandemic or um a a radiation leak where you don't have enough uh radiation treatments for all the patients who' have been exposed for example and of course we all have learned a lot about this this in the last few years uh different cities and hospitals ran out of ventilators during the pandemic uh We've run out of um or or in the early days of vaccines we didn't have enough vaccines to go around and we had to think about how to distribute those resources in the best way and answering these questions and defining what the best way means really reveals what a society values and there are a lot of there's a lot of research that goes into this and public consultation even before the covid pandemic there's always been a lot of discussion about well who do we want to prioritize in a in a pandemic or some other disaster where we don't have enough equipment to save everybody do we want to prioritize younger people do we want to prioritize people who are more likely to survive do we want to prioritize uh the the doctors and nurses and healthcare workers and in space that would be maybe you want to prioritize saving the engineers um who can keep the the ship or the the settlement running um and so these are really questions you need to work out ahead of time uh like most triage prot Protocols are developed ahead of time because in the moment it's really easy for emotions to take over so aside from medical emergencies and and general medical concerns we also need to think about what to do with future Generations if we want to have permanent self-sustaining human populations in space then we have to be able to reproduce in space we have to be able to replenish the population uh in ways besides just bringing more people from Earth and so we need to think about what obligations we have towards this this future generation we need to think about inter generational Justice and also it's a challenge anyone who has kids knows this the we can't ask these future Generations what they want they can't consent to the decisions that we make and so we have to try to decide for them which is a big responsibility and one of the first difficulties with this is that uh we don't actually even know if it's possible for humans to reproduce in space or or safely uh grow grow fetuses and and develop healthy children um there have been some uh some animal studies done in space on different parts of uh of the conception and development process so far um the the evidence has not been extremely conclusive either way but there hasn't been human testing because of the other challenge here which is that we don't even know how to study this in an ethical way most medical researchers bioethicists they really frown on doing experimentation on pregnant people and their fetuses for obvious reasons um this has led to some difficulties here on Earth uh for example um pregnant patients often are not included in drug trials which means that then those patients don't know if they can take certain drugs um so this is already a bioethics Challenge on Earth and uh and trying to figure out whether humans can safely conceive and and grow children in space is is going to be difficult and whoever the first people are who take those steps are going to be taking an enormous risk but say we figure it out figure out how to have healthy reproduction in space then we still need to figure out how to balance that reproduction with the needs of the society so for example um if we're in a space settlement where resources are very very scarce so our potato farm on Mars can only grow so many calories and feed so many people what happens if people have too many babies how do we control that and of course human history is full of examples of uh the harms that can be caused when governments try to limit uh the population um we've seen things like forc sterilization uh forced abortion denial of support and assistance to families that have too many children which then inevitably harms the children and often what we've seen historically on Earth is that this kind of attempt to control fertility is usually focused on certain groups and not others um which tends to to lead to a slippery slope towards Eugenics all of which again we could see again in space in the name of protecting the the survival of the the community if we're not careful and think about what the ethical thing is to do ahead of time and of course space settlements might also face the opposite problem uh if instead of resources being scarce the humans themselves are scarce labor is scarce um then they might worry about underpopulation especially if they have a a sort of unbalanced Society where they have a lot of older people who can't work uh and not enough younger people and while this isn't as uh talked about here on Earth we have also seen examples uh cautionary tales from history here on Earth as well uh with underpopulation in particular in Europe and after World War I so much of the population was wiped out that certain countries like France and Russia did things like outlawing abortion and contraception and even things like birth control education which really takes away the rights of a person to control their own reproduction and control their own bodily autonomy and really all of these questions are about this central question of how do you balance the needs of the community with an individual's rights to control their own body and so this is a question we're going to have to keep asking um we also need to think about the rights of those children uh once they're born and and as they're growing in space it's very possible we don't know for sure but it's possible that children that are born and grow up in space in a different uh gravity environment for example just won't be able to return to Earth again we haven't tried this with children but we know with adults uh adult astronauts who spend months in space are often unable to walk when they return to Earth after they land they have to be carried it takes a while for their their heart to get strong enough to keep their blood pressure up and their muscles to get strong enough to walk around and it's possible if you grow up in space your muscles your bones Your Heart Won't develop enough to let you come back and and walk around on Earth which leads to an interesting ethical question is is that ethical are we are we stealing something from them some kind of Birthright uh by taking away their ability to Return to the Planet where their ancestors evolved and we can look again to Earth and parallels here on Earth there are Refugee families who have to make a similar decision on Earth today of whether to take their children on an extremely dangerous journey and take them to a new place where potentially they will never be able to return to their Homeland um so parents have been having to make these kinds of decisions for their children throughout human history so now that I've gone through all of these examples uh you might be asking okay well what do we do about all of these things I have a few suggestions right here at the end of the talk uh one of course as I've been demonstrating is that you should learn from experts uh we should be inviting social scientists into all of our planning and talking about space settlement so this includes philosophers and ethicists of course and also historians especially Colonial historians uh people who can tell us how humans have lived together in the past and of course that also includes anthropologists sociologists and uh lawyers and political scientists who can tell us how to turn ethical conversations into actual policy there's so much we can learn from history there's of course all the cautionary tales about how uh oppression and exploitation arise throughout history how in particular the history of colonization across the Earth has caused genocides both intentional and unintentional catastrophic environmental damage like on uh the island for rapanui or Easter Island is shown here and and Lasting inequality that that still exists today so we really need to study this history especially as people talk about space colonization we need to think about whether that's the model we want to bring forward into the future in space of course there's also success stories we can learn from history how we've uh learned to live within the limits of our environment um how we've overcome periods of Oppression and of disaster how we've built systems that uh protect people and and perpetuate our values and along those lines we can also learn from activists who are working today uh on a variety of different topics of course um but most activists are able to to dream of a better world not just complain about something specific but think of a better future and develop concrete plans on how they think we should reach that future and that's a really valuable skill they also have a lot of practical skills like uh raising public awareness uh lobbying for policy change and uh and pacing themselves to work on a goal that they might not see in their lifetimes which is also important for space settlement and of course we should learn from marginalized communities most most of the loud public conversations happening about space settlement are happening in white Western and and developed countries but most people would agree that our future in space belongs to everyone I like to read a lot of work in African futurism uh indigenous futurism the the image I'm showing here is a piece of art by an afro futurist artist named Jackie and Jerry who has this series called that I I highly recommend there's there's so much we can learn from these communities uh especially non-western philosophies and worldviews and especially with regards to the environment and how to live sustainably with an environment but really on all of these topics and uh finally my last slide uh is to just we should just keep having these conversations um I I appreciate all of you come to this talk I hope you continue to have conversations about these topics after the talk I love uh people who love space I love that we like to imagine our future in space we're also problem solvers and I just want people to harness that enthusiasm and those problem solving skills to work on these human problems as well and to to develop a vision for the kind of world we want our descendants to have um both in space and on Earth and I will stop there and I'm looking forward to our Q&A [Applause] session