Off-Earth
Erika Nesvold
MIT Press, $27.95
Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold once asked an executive of a company aiming to mine the moon how he planned to address risks that mining equipment might carry microbes from Earth and contaminate the moon (SN: 1/10/18). His response: “We’ll worry about that later.”
That’s a reckless mind-set when it comes to preparing for people to live and work in space, Nesvold argues in her new book, Off-Earth. It means making decisions with your eyes closed. History is full of cautionary tales of mutinies, exploitation, and humanitarian and ecological disasters that would be all too easy to reproduce in space.
“Space settlement advocates often advertise space as a blank slate where we can build utopian societies free from the crowded territory and bloodied history of our terrestrial home,” Nesvold writes. “But adopting a ‘worry about it later’ attitude toward human rights and ethics strikes me as a path to repeating the tragedies of that history through ignorance.”
Nesvold is a developer for the education software/video game Universe Sandbox. In the last several years, she has shifted her focus to how to build a fair and just future in space, cofounding the JustSpace Alliance, a nonprofit working to do just that. Off-Earth is an extension of her 2017 podcast, Making New Worlds, which asked ethical questions about space settlement. The book takes some of the same questions and expands on them. Each chapter title is a question: “Why are we going?” “Who gets to go?” “Who’s in charge?” “What if I get sick?” “Which way is Mecca?”
Most chapters start with three vignettes, usually from different time periods. A chapter outlining debates over whether to settle space at all starts by asking the reader to imagine being in the 1600s and deciding to uproot your family and head to the New World. A chapter on how land usage and ownership rights might work in space imagines a person…
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