“Going to space will not end war because war isn’t caused by anything that space travel is apt to change, even in the most optimistic scenarios,” they write. “Humanity going to space en masse probably won’t reduce the likelihood of war, but we should consider that it might increase the chance of war being horrific.”
The pair imagine rival space nations exchanging asteroid fire or poisoning whole biospheres. Proponents of space settlements often point to the fate of the dinosaurs as motivational grist, but what if a doomsday asteroid were deliberately flung between human cultures as a weapon? It may sound outlandish, but it’s no more speculative than a floating civilization with a thousand Mozarts. It follows the same logic of extrapolating our human future in space from our behavior on Earth in the past.
So should we just sit around and wait for our inevitable extinction? The three books have more or less the same response: What’s the rush? It is far more likely that humanity will be wiped out by our own activity in the near term than by any kind of cosmic threat. Worrying about the expansion of the sun in billions of years, as Musk has openly done, is frankly hysterical.
In the meantime, we have some growing up to do. Mandel and Rubenstein both argue that any worthy human future in space must adopt a decolonizing approach that emphasizes caretaking and stewardship of this planet and its inhabitants before we set off for others. They draw inspiration from science fiction, popular culture, and Indigenous knowledge, among other sources, to sketch out these alternative visions of an off-Earth future.
Mandel sees hope for this future in post-scarcity political theories. She cites various attempts to anticipate the needs of future generations—ideas found in the work of the social theorist Aaron Benanav, or in the values expressed by the Green New Deal, or in the fictional Ministry for the Future imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson in his 2020 novel of the same name. Whatever you think of the controversial 2025 book Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, it is also appealing to the same demand for a post-scarcity road map.
To that end, Mandel envisions “the creation of a governing body that would require that techno-scientific plans, especially those with a global reach, take into consideration multigenerational impacts and multigenerational voices.”
For Rubenstein, religion is the poison, but it may also offer the cure. She sees potential in a revival of pantheism, which is the belief that all the contents of the universe—from rocks to humans to galaxies—are divine and perhaps alive on some level. She hasn’t fully converted herself to this movement, let alone become an evangelist, but she says it’s a spiritual direction that could be an effective counterweight to dominionist views of the universe.