Psst. Wanna Buy a Planet?

© Laurence B. Winn

Sep 1, 2001

In October of the last year of the second millennium, Space.com published the "Top Ten Reasons to Inhabit Outer Space" by a freelancer called Yasha Husain. The list:

* To secure a future for humanity
* To build a new frontier
* To find new energy sources
* To build an industrial settlement on the moon
* Better-quality images of the universe
* The SETI effort (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
* Mining
* Learning the history of our universe
* Environmental benefits
* Meeting the challenge

Note that all of these reasons are about us collectively: our future, our environment, our understanding of science. In the history of human beings, none of these reasons have mattered. Only one does: the answer to the question, what's in it for me?

Historically, the answer people most wanted to hear when they asked "what's in it for me?" seems to have been: money. Economic prosperity. A chance to make good.

The next most sought-after answer was, and is: refuge (for holders of unpopular beliefs). Tolerance. Freedom. A chance to make a difference.

Behold the individual, the product, according to historian Walter Prescott Webb, of "the Great Frontier in which men could think, believe, and labor without finding themselves in conflict with the hoary institutions of an old order."(1)

Individualism in the United States, where it was the root of American culture for at least three hundred years, has been largely submerged by the ideal of the corporate collective. And the desperate, sometimes amusing, struggle against corporate domination is expressed by popular cartoon strips like "Dilbert", whose troubles reflect the absurdities of conglomerate life. Like Dilbert, the individual craves revenge.

Our purpose is to examine the particulars of a proposal to choke the corporation by feeding it a succulent bone, one that will tempt it with such profits that it will be unable to resist delivering up what physicist Jerry O'Neill has called the "High Frontier" and producer Gene Roddenberry "The Final Frontier".

The Space Settlement Initiative, a legislative proposal by activist Alan Wasser, suggests that the U.S. Congress (a collection of individuals if there ever was one) give land grants on the moon and Mars to corporations or multinationals that build space settlements and transportation systems to get people there at a reasonable cost.

There are a host of details, most of them aimed at getting around the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits national sovereignty over heavenly bodies, but does not address private ownership. The U.S would recognize and defend the rights of the moguls to subdivide and resell their claims at regolith-cheap prices of $100 an acre of so for prime lunar real estate.

The catch is the condition that the seller must build and maintain a space settlement, and provide transportation to anyone, of any nationality, willing to pay the price.

There are reasons to go along for a Congress focused on the well-being of the United States and its citizens, but we must save space, so to speak, by letting Alan Wasser tell them himself. (2)

The trouble with the proposal is that there is just nothing in it for the legislator, who is being asked to promote an undertaking that will very likely change the system he or she has mastered so well. Frontiers do that. After all, the opening of the American frontier had the effect on Europe of making some of the first (mostly monarchs and religious bosses) last and some of the last first. Frontiers demand change in the way government is conducted to fit the new conditions. What if space colonists implemented a kind of Internet-moderated democracy that made representative democracy, our republican form of government, obsolete? Without a frontier, such things would be impossible, much as John Locke's ideas about equality were impossible to implement in Europe. Might not new ideas developed in space colonies also infect terrestrial populations, leading to some kind of anarchy (gasp!) in which the present bosses had trouble being bossy?

Come to think of it, there is one thing we could offer the Congressfolk that might serve their individual interests. We could offer space colonists immunity from prosecution for crimes committed on earth. Of course, our Congressional leaders may think that voting for a space settlement initiative that contained an immunity clause would entice the Justice Department to launch investigations of the "aye" voters.

On the other hand, Congress might come up with legitimate reasons for nixing the plan. Here's one: Is it wise to hand over the military high ground to a collection of CEOs whose canon of ethics amounts to some 300 Ferengi Rules of Acquisition?

Think it doesn't matter? Neither did the Pentagon in the sixties when some crackpot scientists at General Atomic raised the possibility of lofting nuclear battleships into space (see "The Point Loma Legacy"). The Pentagon thinks differently now. In fact, some of its denizens are calling the gulf war, with its space-based secure communications, reconnaissance missions and munitions guidance, "the first space war". (3)

Apparently, the coming "weaponization of space" includes such innovations as kinetic energy rods, solar energy weapons, space-based laser cannons, microwave guns, robo-bugs, suppression clouds, oxygen suckers, and destructo swarmbots, among others.

Kinetic energy rods, reminiscent of the weapons used to secure freedom for "Lunies" (in Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), are examples of the lightning bolts that space-based commercial consortia could hurl against offending parties on the planet. It is said that a five-pound rock dropped from space could sink an aircraft carrier. The Pentagon has proposed using rods, each tipped with a laser "air spike", dropped from orbit and directed against targets on earth. Such a rod (or "flechette") could, it is said, penetrate the earth to a depth of a half mile to destroy underground bunkers.

Giant mirrors in space - solar energy weapons - could scorch facilities, destroy crops or raise giant storms.

Another way to phrase the original question is, do we want this kind of capability in the hands of civilians of many nationalities operating peacefully in space, or would we rather see space weapons in the hands of Strangelovian military masterminds from the U.S?

Maybe the Congressfolk should vote "yes" on space settlement. That way the Justice Department will think, heck, why would they attract that kind of attention to themselves if they had something to hide?

(1) Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier, University of Texas Press, 1952.

(2) Space Settlement Initiative

(3) New York Times, 8/5/01, "The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space"