---
title: Cognative bias in space exploration
date: "2024-10-16T06:50:02Z"
emoji: "\U0001F680"
publishDate: "2024-10-13T16:19:00+0100"
bookmarkOf: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html
references:
  bookmark:
    url: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html
    type: entry
    name: Conceptual models of space colonization
    summary: 'I''m thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space
      colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit,
      "the Earth''s too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket",
      and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out
      in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF
      epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed in his Mars trilogy in the 1980s.'
tags:
- SciFi
- space
- speculative
---
Charles Stross explores the biases we bring to “Space Colonies” by using that name, and wonders if there are other approaches that may succeed.

I really enjoy Stross’ analytical dives; at this point I reckon I’ve read almost every published story he’s written and I can absolutely see how analyses like this one build the worlds he writes about. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate his writing so much, this approach is the very definition of Hard [SciFi](/tags/scifi) but every story I’ve read is also _firmly_ planted in the human experience & human motivations. (In short: he’s a _good author_.)

### Highlights

> When we talk about a spaceship, a portmanteau word derived from "\[outer\] space" and "ship", we bring along certain unstated assumptions

---

> [a spaceship is not like a sea-going vessel](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the%5Fmyth%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fstarship.html), can't be operated like a sea-going vessel

---

> Which leads me to the similar term "space colony": the word _colony_ drags in all sorts of historical baggage, and indeed invokes several models of how an off-Earth outpost might operate, all of which invoke very dangerous cognitive biases!

---

> The American model of colonization—a cognitive bias that underpins both the American _and_ Russian space programs' associated ideological drive towards human expansion—is biased towards an unpopulated or underpopulated terrestrial biome with breathable air, plentiful sources of water and minerals, a biosphere that naturally turns sunlight into biomass that can be directly eaten or fed to food animals, and so on.

---

> companies are artificial social constructs that _offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in_.

Now _this_ is an interesting framing! It explains why _countries_ are having a hard time when they fail/feel they are unable to tax companies effectively (for fear of scaring a company off): the externalities are pushed into the country and, without effective taxing, the profits kept for the company; the burdens of handling kept by the country, but also the expectation of handling them.

---

> Worryingly, religious belief rather than economics seems the most plausible incentive for space colonization.

Stross includes “the Earth's too fragile to keep all our eggs in one basket” here.