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| Cognative bias in space exploration | 2024-10-16T06:50:02Z | 🚀 | 2024-10-13T16:19:00+0100 | http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html |
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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 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, 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.