Space Is The Place

Frontier Building

Long term space flight to distance world for colonization are a waste because they're inherently inefficient. If we could also keep people alive on an artificial structure for what may be several generations, why travel at all? Why not simply build space colonies around our own Solar System? There's less variables in the structure's not traveling in unknown celestial territory. Until there's a way to make distances irrelevant, there's no point in trying to make them or move one's civilization in that direction. Even for exploration purposes.

Energy mastery should be at the forefront of exploration not simply survivalist expansion. Energy mastery is survivalist. You only colonize in order to acquire more resources for a civilization's energy needs; the inputs we live on. However mastery of energy would no longer require inputs as energy would be harvested directly from the universe itself. And no I don't mean zero-point energy as there's no such thing; there's just energy.

Whatever the case maybe, energy has to be an abundant resource for a lot of things to be worthwhile. Otherwise we're only ever doing this stuff for the sake of energy. Which means we never get away from the corporations, there'd always be a "Big Oil." A civilization's main goal is to escape the scarcity trap.

Any long term travel must be done with the understanding, that they will be a new people. Return trips are even more inefficient. The journey isn't about colonization, it would be humanity branching off into a new way of being. As soon as you leave, you're not an Earthling anymore. You're human but what is your being anchored to? Colonization for resources is in reality an expansion of business interests. It'll inherently lead to conflict as people's desire for an independent identity grows with their independent living on another world.

Expansion for profit repeats the old cycle human cycles that leads to conflict.
Expansion for survival, anchored in local self-sufficiency and freedom from scarcity, is the real frontier. Freedom from resource competition. Freedom to explore different ways of being.

Some people view it as unethical but you'd HAVE to go hard on the gene manipulation to make living on a new world viable long term. Going into any new environment, we should start off with seeing how new human life adapts there. Observe where our genes begin to change and evolve on their own and start manipulating them there. It is the only way to quickly have a colony that can survive its environment.

Any new world is inherently hostile to not just new humans nut any new external life form. Humans, as we are now, are exquisitely adapted to Earth. The moment we step outside Earth’s tight environmental band, our bodies become fragile machines needing constant, artificial support or they must change. There’s no middle ground, either we live in sealed metal and glass bubbles, forever at the mercy of airlocks and life support. Or we adapt our bodies to be more robust in the local conditions.

Human augmentation is the only real viable path forward; augmentations for radiation resistance, different gravity tolerance, new metabolisms, altered reproduction. Even basic terraforming is so slow and energy intensive that it only works in concert with bioengineering. The reality is to survive we must adapt ourselves as much as we adapt the place. If not we’re condemning ourselves to wearing our home.; wearing our earthly environment. What exactly would be the point of venturing into the stars to new frontiers if we have to take our former frontier with us, wear it even?

Our identity as homosapien will fundamentally have to change, the people wouldn’t be that anymore; homo but not sapien.

There’s a question in such scenarios about ethics, gene manipulation or editing, but then ethics will and must change on the matter. What’s more ethical than the people we’d be sending out onto a new world, surviving there? Is it wrong to shorten the timeframe on what we know nature will do naturally? Of course there's the variable that our willful actions are never as neat or clean as nature’s slow methods, but we're human and dealing with human timescales. And in an engineered survival situation which all colonization is, time is of the essence. It greatly improves one's odds if simply being in the environment isn't fatal.

In space, you edit or you die. Any serious talk of traveling to a new world is fundamentally dishonest if editing or reengineering the human condition is not also seriously discussed. Evolution simply won’t do it fast enough on its own, not unless we’re ok with how long these things will take. Ethics demand that the ethical position itself flips. Any discussion has to be honest that they are pursuing a new path for the human condition, a new species of human being for a new environment.

This changes the typical idealistic notions about space travel and colonization. It’s not just simply get on a boat and go there and live; you cannot go and live in a place that will kill you for simply being there. Being there in complete disharmony with the local environment in every way. Colonization means divergence > Divergence means biological divergence > Biological divergence means gene editing > Gene editing means we are founding a new branch of humanity. This branch will have it’s own identity as it will live and can only live in it’s own branch of reality; it’s own environment.

Human augmentation and genetic engineering is a prerequisite for viable long term extraterrestrial settlement. It’s unfortunate but to survive, the homosapien cannot be "organic.” The overriding ethical priority in any frontier scenario is keep people alive, healthy, and able to thrive. If the unmodified human body can’t do that, then not modifying it is negligence disguised as moral high ground and unethical. We can’t cling to Earth-centric ethics when Earth’s context is gone.

This is an honest and ethical framework:

• Survival is ethical.

• Suffering is unethical.

• Waiting for suffering to do the adaptation for us is unethical.

• Actively shaping our biology to survive well is a moral duty if we leave Earth.

If the people we send run into catastrophe, we cannot send them help. And people here being people here would say the catastrophes are why we should not be sending people off to die and want to kill off any colonization programs. This is how the same civilization that dreams of the frontier will strangle its own frontier the moment it gets real. Voters, taxpayers, moralists and even corporations that fear blowback will demand programs be shut down.

At some point too risky becomes a sorry excuse given the risks already being undertaken or being asked to undertake. Space colonization without bioengineering is just wishful thinking with airlocks, camping, temporarily, in hostile places we can’t actually live in. Being able to live off and within your environment seems much resources intensive than sustaining and maintaining life there.

Maintaining a closed habitat means recycling air, water, waste, and nutrients within a tightly controlled bubble, essentially a giant life-support machine. Living off the land means interfacing our biology with an alien biosphere or geology which is far more complex and risky. The soil isn’t fertile or may be toxic. The air, if there is any, is unbreathable or corrosive. The local microbes may not exist or they exist but are harmful. The energy and resource flows don’t match what an Earth-based life needs. Our “organic sapien” being will not do. The only way “living within” a hostile environment makes sense is if we change ourselves biologically to handle that environment directly. it’s research, bio-risk management, and constant monitoring, it’s not cheap. Not compared to building a ship and going.

If we won’t address all the ethical pre-requisites, requirements, and responsibilities can we morally pursue the undertaking?

If we still need an Earth-like environment on a world that is not Earth, then we should be looking into a ground base space-station and not true colonization and we shouldn’t call it that.

Much of Science-Fiction, general understanding and expectations says that human augmentation is something that comes after humanity has transcended Earth. However this path is not in line with a real long term strategy for survival or success. The biology must be robust even by the metrics of its own home environment. We can design and build the most robust technology we can, but nature is undefeated and technology fails, gear fails. So what happens when we’re not left with our devices but none? Even on Earth it would be ourselves we fall back on.

Before you can have and use Mjolnir Armor, you’ve first got to have someone who can wear it. If you can’t survive naked on Earth, you won’t survive clothed on Mars when the suits break. It's not unethical to harness and boost our resilience if we can, when we should.

Long-term distant space colonization is inherently unsustainable because we export inefficiencies instead of mastering closed-loop self-sufficiency here first. Without mastery of artificial, indefinitely viable life systems, energy, biosphere, entropy, we’re just building even more fragile wannabe islands in harsher oceans. Any serious investment in off-world colonies before we master complete energy sovereignty and artificial biospheres is premature theatre destined for failure, and an expensive one at that which real cost is lives. The benefit of this path is those who go down it will inherently be wearing their coffins relabeled a “space suit.”

This path is one a civilization takes who's members see beyond themselves. Their work is directly to make the next generation of their species more resilient, not just make a profit. This shift emphasizes and prioritizes what would otherwise be byproducts of spacefaring, genetic evolution in the migrating species. But rather than wait for these changes to occur, we induce them.

Massive changes in our immediate environment will trigger subtle changes within our biology. These subtle changes in biology will result in significant changes in our physiology; the difference between humans and chimpanzees is 1.2%. That's what it takes to get off of this planet, but what does it take to survive once we've left? Even our 1.2% needs a lot of help in order to survive a fraction of what the chimpanzee is capable of physically.

This shift would transform exploration from a privately interested endeavor into a publicly invested one. No amount of private capital overcomes a biology that’s unfit for the environment outside the one that created it.

The truth is, biology is the hard part; Space is Mjolnir. If you want to get to Mars or any world away from Earth to stay, live, and thrive, then this is the reality you have to go through to get there; the reality you have to overcome for you or your works to survive. If you disagree with that, I’m here to debate it.

lol