Space-colonization complications

Charles Day’s column “Space barons ” (Physics Today, September 2021, page 8) discusses how the Sun will eventually reach its red-giant stage and “humanity will need a new, distant haven that only spacecraft can reach.” Day writes that “in so far as commercial space travel will make that possible, we should commend it however grudgingly.” Also, in the book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977) and in a September 1974 article in Physics Today (page 32 ), Gerard O’Neill of Princeton University explores the idea of space colonization. More immediate threats, however, might well cause us to become extinct long before the Sun’s red-giant stage.

Thorny questions arise: Which species might be chosen to survive? Would fiat, a random drawing, or voting decide the selection of future “leavers” and “stayers”? Should the prospect of escape from Earth be skewed in favor of the descendants of funders (a pay-to-play system)? Might our descendants muck up a future nest just as quickly as we have fouled our current one? Might we decide that humanity has been a failed experiment not to be protected from oblivion?

Perceived existential threats and our responses could change over eons, adding an element of uncertainty to decisions we might make today about distant havens. Moreover, we don’t know how humans will evolve in the future.

The column asks, “Equity of access aside, is it a bad thing when rich people fund science?” Certainly, setting aside equity of access raises questions of morality, fairness, and justice. And rich people funding science can mean that the astonishingly wealthy are dictating priorities that impact the survival of the wider population. Such priorities might naturally trend toward sending a favored few to “sexy” distant havens that lurk in the dim future, with slim odds of success and at the expense of egalitarianism and more immediate needs of the populace.

On reflection, there are many alternatives to grudging commendation. Planet Earth has already demonstrated itself to have been a sustainable home for plants, and that could perhaps be replicated on a distant haven.