what space exploration doomers get wrong about humanity

As we dream of exploring the galaxy, but some insist we're forever stuck in our solar system. Is this a cold, hard truth, or just contrarian naysaying?

In January of 1920, rocket scientist Robert Goddard was confronted with a nasty and condescending opinion article in the New York Times ridiculing his visions of rockets allowing us to explore the solar system and one day ferrying humans to other worlds. According to the author, who wisely chose to remain anonymous, Goddard must have failed high school physics because space was a vacuum, so rockets could never fly in space as there was nothing for them to push against.

Back then — as today — smug ignoramuses in popular media could easily outshout an expert who tended to publish rebuttals to their nonsense in scientific journals despite the said ignoramuses being hilariously wrong. Rockets work solely by Newton’s Third Law and don’t need to push against anything to fly. As long as they can generate any initial thrust by throwing something, anything, in the opposite direction to their target, they’re good to go.

Even a stream of photons will work as a source of thrust, though one watt worth of light will only generate about 3.3 nN, or 3.3 billionths of a Newton. Since that’s not a whole lot of power to put it mildly, we use liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and methane for liquid rocket fuel, and various nitrates and toxic salts for solid fuel boosters. We have also been experimenting with ion engines while trying to figure out how to safely and efficiently generate and use tiny amounts of antimatter to explore space faster.

It worked so well that not even 50 years after that scathing editorial, humans walked on the Moon, and the NYT was forced to issue a correction, admitting that maybe the nerds knew what they were doing as evidenced by, you know, the live broadcast from the alien landscape of our natural satellite.

Fast forward to today and there’s a steady trickle of social media posts and articles in which pessimists claiming the mantle of pragmatism and science predict that humans will never leave the solar system or settle Mars, or even the Moon. We are simply too greedy, too fragile, too optimistic, and too impatient to live anywhere but Earth in the kind of late stage capitalist society we have today. Peak humanity is, apparently, now, and the best we can hope for is maybe a small UBI to survive, or live in what will be a human farm masquerading as a post-capitalist society.

Well, to borrow from a Danish proverb, predictions are difficult, especially about the future, so a century after rockets were branded impossible to figure out outside of science fiction — which, ironically, inspired actual scientists and engineers to solve those supposedly intractable problems in reality — we’re being told that any dreams of a spacefaring humanity are nothing more than fantasies of hopeful nerds.

Why? Because we tend to equate being a pessimist and naysayer with being a sober, mature realist, and these writers want that mantle of being an adult having a sit down with a child and telling them that there is no Santa Claus, that he’s a combination of an early Christian monk from modern day Turkey and a marketing campaign by Coca Cola, and they need to grow up, study, and focus on getting a job with good benefits because that is what life is ultimately all about. In their minds, they’re being blunt but helpful, just trying to manage our lofty expectations.

So, this is where things get a little complicated. Because it’s true that settling on other worlds and traveling between solar systems is insanely complicated and we have only the vaguest idea of how to do either. But we do have an idea.

per ardua ad astra, emphasis on the per ardua

Now, the skeptics are right about a few things. A normal flesh and blood human born as nature made them is not going to get on an atompunk styled rocket and travel to a Martian city anytime soon for any extended period of time. The best they can hope for is getting to tour the Moon for two weeks after a month of training, and accepting that there’s going to be a medically supervised recovery process and an increased lifetime risk of cancers and immune system issues.

Good news, however, we actually have some stunning developments on the horizon for making human bodies far more resilient. It does involve merging more and more with machines over future generations, but there’s already great promise and leads for future research. All of these advancements are not just for space travel, mind you. They’re also extremely useful for patients with traumatic spine and nerve injuries, or organ failure, or genetic conditions. And they’re opening the door for the kind of far reaching experiments that seem straight out of science fiction.

It’s also true that given our current economic system, space exploration will be a slow, painful, woefully underfunded slog. The net worth of the world’s richest and luxuries for their consumption currently take precedence over literally everything else. Those tycoons do very much want a solar system spanning empire with up to a trillion of us working as their indentured servants. This is their dream and why they’re demanding that we give them unlimited power to run our world as they see fit, hoping to become immortal digital gods through the power of AI.

One of the reasons that it’s actually amazing that we’re sending robots all across the solar system is that we do it on a shoestring budget. There are tens of thousands of scientists who could help us advance space travel and exploration, but will never get the chance thanks to the relative pittance space agencies get. Every year, we spend tens of trillions of dollars subsidizing fossil fuels and covering for billionaire tax cuts, and $117 billion on everything even remotely space related.

Not great, right? Yet this is a policy choice, not an irreversible, immutable law of the universe that means all roads lead to a exploitative cyberpunk dystopia where we’re all doomed to live our lives under predatory hyper-capitalism until our species goes extinct. We can, at some point, change course and build political movements which pass and enforce laws and policies that tear this approach down to great fanfare. We are actually clamoring for this right now. We just don’t have the tools and the critical mass to start making those changes.

Yes, until we learn how to transform ourselves into a species that’s capable of living in deep space and different gravities long term with minimal supplementation and side effects, start spending way, way more money on advancing science and technology to try all of these ideas for interplanetary and interstellar spacecraft, and realign our society to focus on exploration and scientific advancement over the long term rather than quarterly stock market returns, yeah, we’re probably kinda stuck here.

It’s true that space exploration skeptics aren’t entirely wrong when they talk about the world as it is now. But they fail to conceive of anything different and assume that our society, scientific advancements, and engineering capabilities are fixed in stone. That everything we outlined above isn’t just a choice, but some sort of limit humanity can’t venture beyond without no longer being humanity as they know it. And if future space explorers aren’t going to have the same ideas, values, and would alter their biology for the task, the skeptics seem to hint, they may as well not be us.

from skepticism, to pessimism, to nihilism

Of course, our experiments with warp drives, on a quantum level and beyond, are not guaranteed to pay off. It could take a lot longer to produce enough antimatter for ion engines with the power to take us to the edge of the solar system or beyond than we want. There will be disasters, setbacks, and some ideas will prove impossible or just badly conceived in the first place. But if our species’ history shows anything, we’ll try, and we’ll get a lot farther than the skeptics think, even if we don’t achieve what we’re aiming to do, or it takes us longer than we hoped.

Some of the same people who read essays dismissing powered flight as suicidal, and that NYT article claiming that rockets that fly through space are lunacy and humans will never leave the planet as children, ended up watching the live broadcasts of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing on the lunar surface.

What if Goddard listened to those skeptics, took their naysaying to heart, then tossed Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s equation in the trash and abandoned his “obviously doomed” project? What if he didn’t stick to his twin guns of science and math as he did? Would we have eventually come around to the notion of rocketry, or would we still be waiting and dreaming of the first human to complete an orbit around Earth today?

Thankfully, we’ll never know the answer to that question. What we do know is that the idea that only 417 years since the invention of telescopes, and less than one hundred years since we gained the faintest idea of how space-time works, we truly understand the limits of humanity, as well as all the laws of physics is utterly absurd.

And if you start making statements as monumental as “humans will never leave their solar system” or “people will never settle on any other world,” you’re crossing the line between healthy skepticism — because yes, it’s always good to ask questions rather than believe the most optimistic prognosis — and veering into pessimism for the sake of pessimism.

At this point, you’re not an adult telling a child that their odds of growing up to be a famous movie star are low and explaining why. You’re an old grouch who grows at children to give up on their dreams because having dreams is stupid, they will never come true, and that life sucks and then you die. Which is your right, but holy shit, to see the world as full of dead ends and very finite potential instead of looking for some glimmer of promise, progress, and hope, especially in dark, heavy, turbulent times of rapid change? What a terrible way to live...