Stanley Kurtz enjoyed the "great debate," mostly, it would seem, because it played to his own preconceptions. It set up the false choice of doing science with robots versus doing science (and more broadly, exploration) with humans.

He drew an analogy to the colonization of America that begged every question about cost, practicality, and timing. Zubrin?s five hundred year colonization time line turns his vision into a de facto fantasy.

I think that "fantasy" is too strong a word. There's certainly nothing intrinsically impossible about it (just as there's nothing intrinsically expensive about space activities, at least not anywhere near as expensive as present practice would indicate), but of course no one can predict anything even decades out, let alone centuries. Zubrin's simply offering one potentially plausible timeline.

I, for one, think that it's foolish to even have a plan to put a man on Mars in 2030 right now (which is why arguments against the president's goals based on cost are absurd, since no one can know now how we'll do it, and therefore how much it will cost). The technologies are evolving too fast, and it's quite possible that the private sector (e.g., the Mars Society, or even the National Geographic Society) will be in a position to do it by then. Any firm plan that government officials come up with now is almost certain to be overtaken by events.

People argue against the New World analogy on two bases--the potential for material returns from space, and the high costs and technological barriers to achieving such returns.

What they forget is that many came to the Americas not just for material wealth, but for spiritual freedom. The resources that were here were not necessarily employed in trade with the old world, but were often for subsistence as a means of practicing their own religion (the LDS being the most notable example). The same will apply to space, where technologies on the immediate horizon will allow groups of people to live off the land (so to speak), free to pursue their own visions of society.

We are really not that far from the point at which it will be (barely) affordable for a middle class family to purchase the means to emigrate off planet (passage to America, or the purchase of a Conestoga wagon required the sales of much of a family's assets, and once an infrastructure is established off planet, the equivalent functionality will be comparable in cost--Freeman Dyson has written about this extensively).

Frankly, I found these remarks just baffling:

I came away from the Mars debate still seeing colonization as a sort of libertarian heaven. I used to think libertarians, while giving short shrift to the social preconditions of liberty, were at least a hard headed lot. But the libertarian fascination with Mars increasingly strikes me as a quirky (if harmless) utopian fantasy. If anything, the radical precariousness of a Martian colony would necessitate a high degree of human interdependence. The Mars fantasy strikes me as a way of pretending that, if we could just wipe the slate clean, the necessities of social life which continually emerge to frustrate libertarian hopes would somehow disappear. Isn?t this just Marx in reverse?

I don't know what this debate had to do with libertarianism. Zubrin is no libertarian, and certainly Park is not. This comment might have some relevance if there had been a libertarian in the debate, but there wasn't. Park wants to send robots to space to do science with government funding, and Zubrin wants to send humans to Mars with government funding. Where's the libertarianism?

As a comment outside the context of the debate, Dr. Kurtz' position is one shared by many, but the point is not that space is by its nature a libertarian utopia, any more than (and yes, I know he dislikes the analogy, but that doesn't make it invalid) were the Americas two and a half centuries ago. Yet somehow we created a form of government here previously unseen in the history of the world, that was quite libertarian in philosophy (certainly much more so than either major party today).

From the standpoint of forming new societies, the point of settling space is that it's a tabula rasa, and that many different groups and ideologies will find room there to do social experimentation. This is a factor that is independent of technology. Yes, cooperation will be required, and perhaps even laws, but there's nothing intrinsically unlibertarian about that. Ignoring teleological arguments about our duty to be the vessels that bring consciousness to the universe, this is to me the greatest value of space--an ongoing large petri dish in which groups of like-minded people can continue to seek improvements on society, unconstrained by existing governmental strictures that are now dominant on this planet.

It provides the best opportunity to perform the kinds of controlled experiments that might more conclusively resolve the kinds of issues that so greatly concern Dr. Kurtz. Comparing Sweden to the US to determine the potential effects of gay marriage is interesting, but not necessarily enlightening--there are too many extraneous factors to draw firm conclusions. I would think that this should be an exciting prospect to a social anthropologist, and wonder why it is not.

And I wish that he had attended this debate instead. There he could have found a true libertarian (though not a particularly knowledgable one) in the form of Ed Hudgins, but he would also have heard a broader (and more useful) range of viewpoints than one will ever get from a battle of the Bobs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Will Wilkinson has a seemingly unrelated post, but not so much as it might seem.

...what we need is a theory of just how libertarian a particular society could possibly get, given human psychology, the set of social and economic relations, the available mechanisms of persuasion, and the set of belief systems or "macro mythologies", at a given time, plus the dynamics that govern changes in these things. My guess is that for US society starting today, it's possible to get significantly more libertarian, but not radically more libertarian. What might that society look like?

A point that evolutionists make is that nature has to work with the materials available, so pandas build thumbs out of existing radial bones. I suspect that if we want to truly implement new societies, we'll have to start, at least in some sense, from scratch (at least in terms of existing governmental structures, if not cultures), and there's really no place left on this planet in which it's possible to do that.

Well said. I would only add that this post highlights why it is critical that Western culture's values and traditions are established 'out there'; because we'll let other (competing) ideals engage in trade, commerce and whatnot.

At least, I know my own people well enough to think that this would be so. I don't know that this would be the case if another culture was transmitted and established in outer space that had differing values and mores.

Bob Zubrin (Case for Mars) meets Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations)?

I believe that once we develop genuine and robust CELSS and the ability to incorporate space harvested resources into such systems, a rapidly growing human population is quite probable. Not through emigration but through natural increase meaning children.

Whichever human civilization first establishes a space settlement capable of supporting human reproduction will have a decided advantage in spreading its language, culture and religion amongst the future inhabitants of the solar system.

It's worth noting that your comments are longer than his original post.

However, I read his full post and I see where he's coming from on this. Several somewhat random comments below:

I attended the "debate" and I would not be as praise-worthy as Kurtz was about its quality. Both men are poor speakers. Zubrin said "Okay" at the end of every paragraph, and he expresses open scorn for anyone who disagrees with him. Park prefers to toss off blunt assertions without providing evidence, even when it is available (such as "spinoff arguments are total crap!").

Nevertheless, there were some thought-provoking comments in the discussion. I found myself lamenting that we no longer have a Carl Sagan around who can discuss these issues with a certain amount of eloquence. There were good ideas mentioned, but neither man is capable of expressing them in very poetic or philosophical ways. The best writing I've seen on this these days comes from conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Although you note that the "debate" was not about libertarianism, Kurtz does hit the nail exactly on the head here when he says that the belief in Mars exploration often stems from a libertarian impulse. So does the belief in space colonisation. Usually down at the core is a feeling that current society sucks and we need to go someplace else to start over. Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books and you'll see a clear libertarian romanticism. And the same impulse drives members of the Mars Society.

But I don't know where Kurtz got the idea that libertarians were somehow "hard-headed." They can often be silly and irrational. You mention Ed Hudgins as an uninformed libertarian, but my own impression is that Hudgins' problem is more than that he simply doesn't know anything about space, it's that he is so blinded by his ideology that he pays no attention to the counter-arguments. It's not that he doesn't read the literature, it's that he sees no _reason_ to read the literature, because his Randian philosophy doesn't require it.

As an offhand aside, it's been interesting for me to watch how newcomers to this discussion are treating it. I thought that Kurtz's original essay in National Review Online was very interesting and thought-provoking (his question about Everest vs. California is a good one). He was then cited by the EPPC guy, and of course he then attended it. I got no sense that the EPPC people know much about this subject, and the fact that they had Zubrin and Park go at it is not surprising. Personally, I think it would be much more interesting to have Kurtz, Zubrin and someone else (I'm not sure who) discuss this stuff in public.

It's worth noting that your comments are longer than his original post.

I'm not sure why, but OK.

Kurtz does hit the nail exactly on the head here when he says that the belief in Mars exploration often stems from a libertarian impulse.

Sure. I'd be the last to deny that (and in fact it's not just Mars--most libertarians are more interested in the O'Neillian version, and aren't all that interested in Mars). I guess my point is that Stanley is implying that there's something wrong with that, or unrealistic about it, when in fact it's exactly the same kind of impulse that impelled people to originally colonize New England and the Delaware Valley. My other point is that it's not just a libertarian impulse, but an impulse to form a new society based on any ideology or belief set. For example, I've written in the past, tongue only partially in cheek, about a lunar Zion.

Word I learned to today:

"tabula rasa"

n. pl. tab·u·lae ra·sae (tby-l räs, -z)

The mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience.
The unformed, featureless mind in the philosophy of John Locke.
A need or an opportunity to start from the beginning

Actually, the US Constitution is a good example of the "panda's thumb" rule, also called the principle of conservatism of evolution. The US was put together with English political comonents modified for the purpose. The U.S. Bill of Rights was taken from the English Bill of Rights, and made more universal; many of the radical features (fixed legislative terms, regular redistricting, etc.) were taken from the Cromwellian constitution of Britain. In general the Founders took the generic template of English constitutionality and made it more universalistic and more generic. The one unique feature, the federalism, was the result of examining the Swiss, Dutch, and other (yes, including the Iriquois) historical examples, although it copied the United Kingdom model in permitting each unit to have its own established church (which some did up to the 1830s. America's uniqueness came from adapting a particularist template that had worked well in England, and adapting it for rapid growth in a more egalitarian environment. (You couldn't have big estates and tenants like in England because it was too tempting for the tenants to go west and own their own land -- unless of course the "tenants" were actually slaves.)

Dwayne A. Day said:

?Read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books and you'll see a clear libertarian romanticism.?

Is that a joke? Society in his books was clearly socialist, stated as such, with a heavy hand of government, and he is widely regarded as a very left-wing writer. In fact, that made the Mars books much less interesting for me.

On government in space - While my politics tend toward the libertarian side, I think it is extremely likely that government will have to play a big part in space. The key issue is that it will be so easy to kill people in space. If you can slightly change the trajectory of house sized rocks, you can destroy Earth cities. If you have high delta-v rockets, you can move rocks large enough to destroy Earth civilization. Or even worse ? go to the Kuiper belt, and create your own 50 mile comet, much harder to stop than an asteroid in an earth-like orbit. Space stations, O?Neill colonies and domed cities are trivially easy to destroy. Also, they will require very carefully controlled environments. So expect many regulations, something like the FAA for spacecraft, and defensive weapons.

Bill White
"Bob Zubrin (Case for Mars) meets Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations)?"

I haven't read Huntington, actually. Heard _of_ him of course. T.R. Fehrenbach introduced me formally to the concept of culture transmission via his excellent history of Texas 'Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans'.

It's a good read; Fehrenbach knows his subjects and he writes clearly and well.

Rand,

Just a thought on part of what you said. You were talking about eventual off-planet emmigration, and brought up the example of the migration of the LDS church to the Western US. There is an interesting piece of LDS history that I think may be useful again in helping facilitate emmigration. Back around 1850, in order to help poorer families emmigrate to Utah, the LDS church set up what was called the "Perpetual Emmigration Fund". Basically, it was a revolving fund where people would be loaned the money for the trip, and then were helped by agents administering the fund to find cheap passage to the US, and then organized into groups to head across the plains to the Mountain West. Over the ~40 years or so that it operated, they helped somewhere over 100,000 people relocate from places like Scandanavia, the UK, continental Europe, and even as exotic of places as Tonga and Samoa to what is now Utah, Idaho, and Arizona. In fact, many of the bigger cities throughout the West started as colonies founded mostly by members of the LDS church (IIRC, San Diego, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and some others were either originally LDS colonies, or had a very large LDS population in their early years)......

Anyhow, the point being that maybe once off-planet transportation starts dropping a bit in price, something like this could be used to help catalyze the development of space.

~Jon

"Rand: My other point is that it's not just a libertarian impulse, but an impulse to form a new society based on any ideology or belief set"

Hm. I wouldnt actually care about what type of society will establish itseft first or second in space. I'd be happy with same old that we have down here too, just as long as i can get a job or buy a ticket up there.
In the long run, theres ample room for everybody.

Comments to this post are pretty much as good as I've seen on a possibly contentious issue. I hesitate to enter, but, what the H!
Dwayne,
My choice for the discussion would be Michael McNeal of Impearls, Jay Manifold, Voyage to Arcturus, and, of course, Transterrestrial's Rand, of course it would have to be in some venue I could access.
Rand,
I'm with you on the L-5 habitat for various societal experiments. Would be the true beginning of the humankind diaspora, necessary for the species survival I believe. Read O'Neal and Dyson in my relative adulthood, but in high school I read James Blish's "Cities in Flight" trilogy, to date myself this was in the mid-50's.
Great exposure for the time to the concept of seperate societies in space.
Jim,
Regarding your thoughts/opinions on the philosophical basis of this Nation and its Constitution, you should read Gordon Woods' "Radicalism of the American Revolution". I believe it would give you a very different concept of the formation of our Nation.
VR,
Spot on in regards to Robinson's Mars books.

The question isn't California or Everest, but Plymouth/Jamestown or Everest. California came so late in the colonization of America, it doesn't compare to going to Mars. Our ancestors braved a long sea voyage, and then death rates of a third to half in their first year here to start America.

And for what? So they could lower their standard of living while living in the wilderness? Obviously that's not how they looked at it, or they wouldn't have come. And yet, by the the time of the American Revolution its been claimed (I forget who, John Keegan perhaps?) that New Englanders as a whole were the best off people on the planet.

I suppose that's one reason I support space exploration/colonization -- it turned out so well the last time we tried it, despite the dangers, cost, and sacrifice.

I don't see how the need for cooperation precludes a libertarian society. Libertarianism isn't a model for hermits living by themselves; it's a blueprint for voluntary cooperation for mutual advantage. Libertarianism does uphold the right for people to live like hermits if they choose, but also recognizes that, most of the time, people can make themsleves better off by trading and cooperating on mutually agreeable terms.

"The key issue is that it will be so easy to kill people in space. If you can slightly change the trajectory of house sized rocks, you can destroy Earth cities. If you have high delta-v rockets, you can move rocks large enough to destroy Earth civilization. Or even worse ? go to the Kuiper belt, and create your own 50 mile comet, much harder to stop than an asteroid in an earth-like orbit."

If you can easily push rocks into an intercept trajectory, you can also push rocks out of an intercept trajectory - provided you see it in time.

So instead of imposing FAA-style regulations on movement in the Solar System (we'd like to see more traffic in the Solar System than we currently see in the sky!), we'd have the space military spend lots of time watching rocks and moving the ones that are on an intercept course, whether they were placed there naturally or by malevolent design.

Using weapons to poke holes in space habitats is another issue, of course. Inside the habitat, you might see weapons restricted based on their ability to penetrate the hull. For a long while, you'll expect to see the inhabitants of any station prepared for an air leak as a matter of course, whether inflicted naturally or intentionally.

"If you can easily push rocks into an intercept trajectory, you can also push rocks out of an intercept trajectory - provided you see it in time."

A pretty big provided. Also, two guided actions are much less probably than one guided action. I wouldn't sleep well if that were the solution we come up with. Especially since, more than one object at a time may overwhelm any defense in place for it. A terrorist could over a period of time send numerous objects into such orbits that the intersection with the target happens in a small time window even while the initial guidance events occur over a very long period of time.

Can we prevent terrorists from emigrating to space once it becomes feasable? Not likely. Welcome to the wild west (east?), part deux.

Another example of a revolving fund type of arrangement is the early (pre-independence) movements to help Jews move to what is now Israel.
I don't know how these movement morphed after independence - they may still be going today, though I suspect they've been co-opted by the government.

Israel provides a good model in other ways, too. The Kibbutz movement was quite successful at bringing agriculture to land that had previously been considered barren.

Ken:

It is much easier to look for a rock that suits your purpose and adjust its trajectory at just the right point than mounting a mission to deal with one after you see it coming. Worse would be the issue of artificial comets ? today it might be possible to move an earth-intercepting asteroid, but a comet would come in at such a steep orbit that it would be very unlikely we could do anything about one. But I agree there would be weapons. Still, there are many millions of rocks and ice balls out there, so it would be far easier and safer to track the ships while keeping weapons for backup. Further, it is almost certain that moving asteroids will be a major business. Something so potentially dangerous will be regulated.

On space habs: I was thinking more about external dangers. It?s just so easy to get large relative velocities in space ? It would be very hard to build a space habitat that could easily weather a cloud of BBs striking at 36,000 mph. Or worse: Deliberately rammed by a space capsule. Space is a very unforgiving environment where even seemingly trivial accidents can kill people, and you are regularly dealing with high-energy hardware that can be very dangerous. In an environment like that you tend to develop people that are extremely careful and procedure oriented. That doesn?t bode well for libertarian style culture.

So how do you protect against those dangers without holding traffic in the Solar System at similar levels to traffic in the sky today?

VR
"On space habs: I was thinking more about external dangers. It?s just so easy to get large relative velocities in space ? It would be very hard to build a space habitat that could easily weather a cloud of BBs striking at 36,000 mph. Or worse: Deliberately rammed by a space capsule. Space is a very unforgiving environment where even seemingly trivial accidents can kill people, and you are regularly dealing with high-energy hardware that can be very dangerous. In an environment like that you tend to develop people that are extremely careful and procedure oriented. That doesn?t bode well for libertarian style culture."

To me it argues that an orbital habitat would be a riskier place to live than one buried under Luna, behind triple pressure doors and meters of regolith.

Which isn't to say it would be risk-free; but one errant cargo pod won't ruin your day.

A libertarian culture can be sensitive to QC and procedure, actually. I think the real answer to the 'state control' vs 'libertarian' run habitat is .. we'll see. Isn't the point that there is endless room to grow and experiment?

"So how do you protect against those dangers..."

Declare spaceships to be WMDs and invade space?

I think the short answer is you don't. The presumption is that the sane vastly outnumber the insane and we have a duty to be vigilant.

The second tier answer is that if you want to protect yourself from a concentration of force you disburse. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, big cities or two towers. Crackpots have been foaming at the mouth to destroy the twin towers since their foundations were laid. Not removing one iota of responsibility from the doers of evil, when you shout "here I am" which is what the makers of the tallest buildings are saying in spades, you've just put a target on yourself.

Third is to gather intelligence of possible threats without creating an environment that breeds these kinds of threats. People that believe everyone is out to get them (usually teens and twenty somethings, but occasionally others) are rather easily persuaded to join movements that are unhealthy and destructive. We need to be watchful and government has a responsibility to get human intelligence regarding any potentially harmful group; the wise and skillful use of it's intelligence budget being the limiting factor.

I hope that big brother does not become so intrusive, but I also believe in vigilence. I guess we'll see how the scales balance.