For Americans, a particular aesthetic worms its way into discussions about space colonization: the wild west. We imagine the stars as an untamed wilderness, filled with hope, opportunity, and little law. The stars and planets are waiting for us to settle them.
Unpacking that Aesthetic
Charlie Stoss is here to rain on that parade.
There is an ideology that they are attached to; it’s the ideology of westward frontier expansion, the Myth of the West, the westward expansion of the United States between 1804 (the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition) and 1880 (the closing of the American western frontier). Leaving aside the matter of the dispossession and murder of the indigenous peoples, I tend to feel some sympathy for the grandchildren of this legend: it’s a potent metaphor for freedom from social constraint combined with the opportunity to strike it rich by the sweat of one’s brow, and they’ve grown up in the shadow of this legend in a progressively more regulated and complex society.
My problem, however, is that there is no equivalence between outer space and the American west. (Stoss)
Reality Check
I loved Firefly, too. But it's a fiction and nothing more.
Mr. Stoss points out that absent the more morally horrific parts of U.S. westward expansion, you still have a key problem with this tantalizing view.
From the bacteria in our guts to our thin temperature range we can possibly live within, humans have evolved on this world and no other. Any extra-planetary existence put us into uninhabitable environments. No matter how rough the existence of American settlers was, it was on Earth.
These conditions do not apply in space. You don’t get to breathe the air on Mars. You don’t get to harvest wheat on Venus. You don’t get to walk home from an asteroid colony with 5km/sec of velocity relative to low Earth orbit. You don’t get to visit any of these places, even on a “plant the flag and pick up some rocks” visitor’s day pass basis, without a massive organized effort to provide an environment that can keep the canned monkeys from Earth warm and breathing. (Stoss)
The dream of a lone-star quasi-libertarian settler simply cannot be. Individuals won’t be settling space. The collective effort needed will be massive.
I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization. (Stoss)
And settlers won’t be able to control their own destiny. They can’t leave. Too much is riding on each person involved in the project. The need for the strictest of controls will make the most confining dictatorships look positively comfy.
The truly weird part
Among a particular flavor of internet geek, saying this stuff is controversial.
There’s more to this perception than just fancy technologies. We project our politics and aesthetics onto our musings without even being aware of it.
Stretch your mind further – many hundreds of years – and it would seem pretty funny to our progeny that we saw space exploration in these terms. We’re like Georges Méliès and company envisioning A Trip to the Moon.
As an art-form, I love Sci-Fi. It’s a fun – though guilty – pleasure. But Star Trek may as well be called Americans in Space for all the realism it embodies.
Charlie Stoss has a surprising amount to say on this (and tightly related) subjects. Visit his blog here.
The planets in Firefly were terraformed. Not just colonized.
Quite true. For the purposes of the narrative, that was glossed over. Still, it’s an important part of the process if we ever want to make that stuff real (minus interplanetary herd-delivery services).