While the war in Ukraine rumbles on, humanity is advancing into space. But tyranny will not end where the atmosphere ends. The cause of freedom is a universal cause.
It may seem a little strange to be talking about liberty on Mars while lives are on the line in the war in Ukraine. But the war reminds us that we have not yet entered into an enlightened stage of human history in which conflict has been banished. As an ever-increasing number of nations and private corporations move into outer space, including Ukraine’s own State Space Agency of Ukraine, how are we to deal with the possibility that this new frontier will be a place for tyranny? Human liberty has a challenging and long future ahead of it.
When this war started, I was putting finishing touches to a collection of essays written by colleagues about the conditions for freedom in space. It seemed for a while so hopelessly academic and detached while people lost their lives in Ukraine. And then the horrors of Mariupol and Bucha while I exchanged emails with Oxford University Press about font size. Stopping tyranny on Mars, or the Moon for that matter, seemed a frivolity.
Yet one could turn this perspective on its head and realize that the terror of war in Ukraine in this technologically advanced age reminds us that freedom is still imperiled. Unless there is some radical change in the human mindset, liberty beyond Earth is no entertaining distraction, but a very real emergent problem for humanity as we build our most ambitious and hopeful future among the planets.
There are many people in the space exploration community who hope that when humanity leaves Earth, we will somehow change. Viewing Earth from afar will make us realize the petty insignificance of our political affairs and wars. As astronaut Neil Armstrong observed: “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
In essence, the optimists believe that when enough of us have experienced the tiny orb of Earth from far away, we will be mentally and philosophically transformed and humanity will enter into a new post-conflict nirvana.
I hope they are right. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about a new future in which war is banished and humans move on to a civilized and peaceful era. But unlike more optimistic individuals, I am not convinced that this alteration can be made real only by observing Earth from a distance. I am not assured that unless we remove the attraction that humans have for power, or properly control it, that the political organization of humans can be so radically improved.
Others take a more pragmatic approach and although they don’t strive for a utopia, when you ask them how we are to prevent the destructiveness of tyrants in space they will tell you that we need to focus on making a good legal regime. Space agencies around the world should band together with the United Nations (UN) and build an international legal order in which states can act responsibly and sort out their differences, from Earth’s orbit to places like Mars, in an amicable way.
Here again, no one can deny that this is a good idea. But as we see in Ukraine, the very characteristic of the unleashed autocrat is that they do not respect international rules. Does a nation that launches a war against a neighbor under the watchful gaze of the UN really care for a UN statement about Mars?
There are other characteristics about the space frontier that might give us even greater reason to doubt that it will be a landscape of utopias. Places beyond Earth lack water and food. There isn’t a single location in space, from the Moon to the asteroid belt, where you can find readily available drinking water and edible food naturally in the environment. You might say that we could say a similar thing about the Sahara Desert, and you’d be right. But there is more.
Beyond Earth there is an even more deadly problem: nowhere is there any atmosphere to breathe. It is impossible to take even one breath of fresh air without the oxygen in that air being produced in a manufacturing process that is likely to be controlled by someone other than you. Imagine being at the mercy of the dictates issued by someone who controls the oxygen you require on a second-to-second timescale to live.
Within the space environment there are conditions favorable to the most abject and extreme forms of tyranny. These tendencies can certainly be minimized by the judicious use of democratic procedures, open systems of reporting, freedom of expression and many of the other mechanisms we are familiar with on Earth to encourage free government. But as on Earth, there is no failsafe method to prevent the emergence of a dictatorship or highly coercive regime.
Quite apart from the emergence of tyrannies in new societies that are built beyond Earth, what about autocratic nations on Earth that resort to war and conquest projecting themselves beyond the home world? Even without the problems I have mentioned given expression in the political system itself, human settlements beyond Earth can become the instruments of Earth-based tyrannies, controlling resources, power, satellites and more besides. Do sanctions apply to a nation’s Moon base or only to transactions on Earth?
On the one hand, one could say, like Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station today, these decisions are nothing to do with people beyond Earth and we should act professionally and keep them out of the conflict. On the other hand, if we start to construct more permanent settlements in space, perhaps it does matter to us what values and ideas are propagated in these environments.
What about a Mars settlement that receives orders from Earth that the history of certain occupants of that station is not recognized and it is to be erased, consistent with their policy on Earth? Is this the type of regime and society that we wish to encourage as the vanguard of our greatest cosmic hopes?
The establishment of permanent human settlements beyond Earth is a different matter from brief temporary sojourns in space stations orbiting Earth. These settlements will forge ways of thinking and political arrangements that could affect the lives not just of those who live within them, but eventually all of us on Earth into the far future. Who wants to look up to the Moon and know that on its surface, staring down at Earth, is a violent autocrat with designs against any number of people and nations?
As a scientist, I would like to take a neutral view of space. It’s a matter of professional taste and outlook to stick to the science and avoid what some would consider as politicizing space to talk about war or freedom. Yet, at the same time, rosy views of the space frontier as all unicorns and pretty flowers will lead to exactly what we see in Ukraine – an unpreparedness for the hard reality of human nature and the primitive urges that stand ready to leap onto the stage of history when given the chance.
Hoping that the problem of defending freedom won’t manifest itself beyond Earth or, if we don’t think about it, peace will inevitably endure, will not do. Even if we can produce lasting peace and cooperation through international agreements, as we have done in Antarctica for instance, it seems to me that one should still contemplate how to handle tyranny should it emerge.
Although Mars is a quite literally a world away from Kyiv, the eruption of such violence and destruction on the 21st century Earth while rovers drive across Mars and spacecraft fly beyond the solar system shows us that we cannot rely on a mystical hope that technological development will miraculously banish the depredations of tyranny.
Not only do we need to consider how to build better governments on Earth to chain dictators, but we also need to think about how we can prevent nations from exporting the violent character of humanity beyond Earth or encouraging its emergence in new societies in the distant reaches of space. From the point of view of our far-flung future among the planets and stars, one could say that we should buckle up, because advancing the cause of freedom has really only just begun.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily the views of the Kyiv Post.
