Cibola Burn

"So when I first started getting into space ethics, the first thing I did was I made a podcast and I was interviewing experts and historians and sociologists and talking about issues that might be a problem in a space settlement, human rights issues like labor rights, reproductive rights. And every other conversation I had, someone would reference The Expanse , which I hadn’t read or watched at the time. Finally, I felt that I couldn’t keep claiming to be an expert in this stuff without watching it. I’ve now watched the whole series and I’ve read the whole series and it’s absolutely true. It’s a realistic future, a couple of hundred years from now, where we’ve settled the moon and Mars in particular and all these different political and cultural factions have grown up all around the solar system. So Mars is really militaristic and folks start terraforming; Earth is overcrowded and really smug about being the birthplace of humanity and all the poor people living out in the asteroid belt, the Belters, are being economically exploited. There’s a lot of talk about labor exploitation of the Belters and how the way that resources move in a giant economy can really affect individual lives. The Belters have their own language and also, because they’ve grown up without gravity, are physiologically different. They can’t come back to Earth without feeling a lot of pain. There are just so many really great explorations of the ways that we can harm each other in society, and how those might take shape out in space. Yes, I watched the entire series on Amazon Prime. It covers 6 of the 9 books and it stops at a good place, actually. I loved it. I thought they did an excellent job with the adaptation. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in getting into space ethics. They can just pick whichever one of the book or TV series they are more interested in as a medium and go for it, because they’re both very well done. I’m the child of linguists and I particularly love the way that in the show they have invented the Belter dialect and taught it to their actors. They do a really good job with that. In this book, humanity has figured out how to get to exoplanets, really distant planets—no spoilers on how they manage to do that. But there are two groups who are trying to start a colony on a planet far away called Ilus. One is a group of refugee Belters who are just trying to escape oppression and war, and the other is a private company from Earth that just wants to start (I think) a mining colony to mine precious minerals out of the planet. There’s a lot of conflict between the two groups, which is very realistic from history. At the same time, they are trying to survive this alien environment that they are not evolved to survive in. Yes, it’s always fascinating to read science fiction because it’s almost like reading history. The best science fiction is a mirror of what we’ve experienced here on Earth, and a speculation on how we could keep repeating our same mistakes from the past in the future, in a new, shiny, green, alien environment. The Expanse does a really good job with that. But science fiction also gives us a way to experiment with these ideas sociologically. Could we create a better society on the moon if we did it this way? Could we lock ourselves into a horrible dystopian future if we made these decisions instead? It lets us run these sociological simulations without actually hurting any real people, which I think is a great value of science fiction. That’s right. It’s called Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space . It grew out of the podcast I mentioned. I was talking to people in the private space industry, and I got concerned they weren’t thinking about any of these questions, because they were so focused on the technological questions of how to build a rocket, or the economic question of, ‘Can we talk investors into giving us money to do this?’ Whenever I asked questions about other issues, like labor rights, for example, and how to protect the rights of workers who are out doing the space mining, they would just say, ‘Oh, we’ll worry about that later.’ That didn’t sound like a good idea to me, but I also recognized that with a math and physics degree, what do I know about this stuff? So I made the podcast to ask experts what they thought, including people who had never thought about their work in the context of space. That was a really great experience. That podcast, called Making New Worlds , I eventually turned it into this book. I did more research, more interviews. It looks at all these questions about say, we have a hypothetical space settlement, how do we protect the reproductive rights of people? How do we take care of the environment, share resources with each other? How do we avoid having a war in space? It was a lot of fun to write and involved reading a lot of science fiction, which was fun for me too. Yes. So one of the most interesting parts of these conversations I’ve been having is that there are so many parallels. It taught me about things that are happening on Earth that are human rights issues today that I didn’t know about. So, for example, I talked to someone from the International Labor Rights Forum and I asked her, ‘What kind of labor rights problems do you think you will have if you put a bunch of space miners on a rocket and take them off into space? What could go wrong?’ She said she hadn’t ever thought about this before but it’s kind of horrifying. She works on the issue of fishermen in Thailand: these Thai fishing boat captains will hire migrant fishermen, take their passports away, put them on a boat, and take them out to sea for two years and not bring them back. The poor workers don’t have any control over the boats, they are physically abused on the boats. Some of them get killed and thrown overboard and you never see them again. There’s no one there to supervise and enforce labor rights protection. And she said, ‘this could happen in space with rockets, right?’ You put the workers on the rockets and you take them away. They are at the mercy of whoever is running the rockets to take them back to Earth, to protect them from labor rights abuses. So this has been the fascinating part for me of thinking about these things. Not only are we thinking about, ‘OK, how can we prevent that happening in the future in space?’ But also, ‘Wait! This is happening today on Earth—how do we prevent it from happening on Earth today?’ Yes. Antarctica is such a great parallel with space, as close as we can get here on Earth because it’s really far away from everywhere else. It’s really inhospitable. You can’t survive there without some kind of technology. You can breathe the air, which is nice compared to space, but otherwise it’s cold and inhospitable. And yet it’s scientifically fascinating. It’s beautiful in an austere way that some people are really obsessed with, and people who go and work down there have to figure out how to build these tiny little communities. They’re far away from anything else, so they have to be able to handle things like, What if the only doctor has appendicitis and has to remove his own appendix? Which has happened before. Or law enforcement. What if someone commits an act of violence against someone else there and you are far away from any sort of police or prisons? How do you handle it? Which has also happened before. It has been a great testing ground for these sorts of questions."