The Ethical Dark Side of the New Space Age

The promises of our space future may seem truly fantastical but this new space age comes with a darker side..

By Andrea Owe and Timiebi Aganaba-Jeanty

On behalf of the Space Advisory Pilot Project, Interplanetary Initiative, Arizona State University

A Dream Come True?

Since the beginning of time, through science and fiction, we have constructed stories and realities about who we are and the rest of nature surrounding us. Cosmos and the unknown have played a crucial role in these narratives and they continue to evolve as we discover, learn, fail, and hope. Attempting to permanently expand the human sphere to outer space has until now belonged to the world of fiction, in part, because of a lack of accessibility. In reality, experiencing the brute physical restraints of a foreign atmosphere, facing the psychological impacts of a lifeless world, or possibly encountering extraterrestrial biology, will significantly alter the stories we tell ourselves about space exploration, our own existence, and our sense of meaning and purpose.

Image by ChadoNihi from Pixabay

Space development and exploration have suddenly been thrust into the mainstream agenda and discourse. From the bold and ambitious plans of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to smaller companies and fast-developing space nations such as China and India, the new space age is rapidly taking form. It has emerged as a puzzle board of different plans, visions, interests, and goals, which seek to both ignite public excitement and exert status of power.

In the shadows of the spectacles, headlines, and bold statements of the megacompanies and government actors, less audible voices are collecting their strength and gathering in numbers. These voices tell different stories and articulate various concerns regarding this new sphere of human activity. By reflecting upon social, political, legal, environmental and ethical challenges that this may entail, these collective voices make up young and evolving fields such as space ethics and global space governance. Space ethics generally aims to broaden the conversation about the potential of space for humankind and Earth’s life, while global space governance seeks to systematize some of these concerns into discussions about how these new activities and their promoters should be organized and governed.

In light of projected transformations as a result of global events, the characterization of the new space age as including an increased number of diverse space actors around the world, digitalization, and global interaction between governments, the private sector, society, and politics, is more important than ever. This leads to a fundamental question:

Can existing institutions and value-systems balance the divergent interests, while safeguarding the common good in the long-term?

To recognize the importance of this question means to contribute to maturing the public conversation regarding both (a) the emergence of large-scale development in space and (b) the governance regimes in place. By providing a broader, more ethical perspective that considers intergenerationality and transdisciplinarity, potential development in space could reflect a rational of actually improving the conditions of and for Earth’s civilization and its members.

We put forth this broader perspective by focusing on the following seven transformative issue areas currently evolving in response to the new space age:

• A confusion of time: When talking about Mars, the Moon, or space colonies in the same breath, are we mixing up different time-scales?
• The narrative of the past and present: What are the dangers of expanding old ideologies and value-systems into our space future?
• A question of purpose: What do we want to do in space and why? And who is going to benefit?
• The value of a rock: Is the social and intrinsic value of the objects in our solar system as important as profit in determining benefit?
• Nature in space: Is the Moon a dead ball of rock, or is it a pristine manifestation of nature? Did Mars fail because it is not Earth? And what is the difference between Mount Everest on Earth and Mount Olympus on Mars?
• Sustainability in space: Does outer space offer a way out of the sustainability conundrum? Or should we be applying principles of sustainability to space activities?
• The Wild West analogy: How should the legal and ethical requirements of international consultations, before proceeding with potentially harmful activities, be enforced?

Issue 1: The Confusion of Time

First of all, it should be pointed out that the various plans, visions, and debates flourishing in both media and scientific journals these days, operate over a significant time-span. This ranges from current and near-term missions to the near-Earth environment, to the Moon and Mars, with primarily scientific and initial development objectives, to middle-term missions of more permanent human establishments in space. Finally, we have the long-term future with possibilities such as inter-stellar travelling, radically evolved and/or engineered Sapiens, planet Earth becoming uninhabitable, and our planet’s eventual downfall. The mixing up of timescales, within the same conversation, leads to confusion. It is important that we pay attention to these different time-scales when we discuss coming undertakings in space as they tend to obscure the conversations necessary for the furthering of productive processes towards reaching concrete suggestions, conclusions, strategies, principles, and policies in regard to political, legal, social, and ethical challenges. For instance,

questions of property rights, sovereignty, and nation-states versus private corporations, may look very different in a longer-term scenario several hundred years from now,

versus a near-term scenario of the next fifty years where initial human activities in space will be much more entangled with current socio-political and economic structures on Earth, and where a clear case is not yet made for the benefits to be garnered from a potential in-space economy. The contemplations presented in this article primarily refer to near- and middle-term efforts in space.

Image by Aaditya Arora from Pexels

Issue 2: A Narrative of the Past and Present

Secondly, there is a heated debate in this sphere between the use of terms such as “space colonization” and “colonizing Mars” and that of “settlement.” This debate is concerned with the continuation of a certain narrative, ideology, and definition of development, which can be translated into a specific set of values. In short, this means that there is a specific story being continued by the dominant voices shaping the new space age - one of capitalism, industrialism, and individualism, bearing historic legacy to the ideologies and value-systems of colonization, anthropocentrism, and human instrumentalism.

This negative interpretation is, first of all, not globally agreed upon. Secondly, the argument stands that the proceeds of these notions have brought the global world to its current state both in terms of immensely rapid economic growth, technological innovation, and scientific progress, at the same time as igniting immense issues of inequality, social injustice, and environmental destruction.

All these issues are wrapped up in a sort of cost-benefit analysis which justifies these practices for what is considered a greater net benefit, in other words, a specific definition of ‘development’ that determines benefit from the lens of a few dominant actors most able to assert their needs, desires, and self-determined rights.

This lens is not necessarily the desired or wise one for the advancement of a civilizational step beyond Earth, where nationalism and elitist models of governance will prove ineffective in an environment where these superficial borders do not exist. On the contrary, many argue that the new space age should — being the foremost manifestation of human accomplishment — represent progressive values of diversity, social justice, environmental wisdom, etc., rather than repeating old habits, mirroring the past, and generally taking the form of an exclusive, elitist project.

In a context of development in space, it is therefore important to actively defying the threat of a re-birth of these old ideals, both in terms of which values are being promoted, and ensuring active and ongoing dialogue with other nations and actors entering the stage whom may hold different ideologies, values, and definitions of development.

Issue 3: The Greater Purpose

The above touches upon an underlying philosophical question which the neoliberal definition of development tends to downplay by placing the goal of increasing profit and growth as its priorities, namely;

What is the greater purpose of the particular activity proposed in space, such as resource extraction? For example, is it an infrastructural step towards becoming a multiplanetary species, or is it a manner of lifting environmentally destructive practices off Earth? Or something else entirely?

In all cases, we need to answer the following three questions: What will be the greater benefits and how do we allocate the benefits? Should we leave the planning and development to the private sector or should limited government resources be used towards these goals?

In the first instance, equitable allocation of benefits is complex. It is through ensuring diversity and inclusion that the most optimal solutions can be found to address this challenge. Secondly, from a governance perspective, some academics argue that private business models do not work due to various uncertainties, in particular the length of time with no expected revenues. Instead, the private-public partnership model is proposed, provided successful completion of a prospecting mission is undertaken by government. In essence, government must make the first move. The case must, therefore, be made for how this is in the public interest. Governments have historically been weak at articulating an effective and expansive case for space. These same authors, therefore, argue that “Prospecting missions on the Moon by governments should occur if and only if their return exceeds the opportunity costs (where) returns are based on expectations of higher revenues such as taxes, higher employment, and growth.” Presumably, efforts must be made to ensure that this will result in a fair distribution in the community.

It is much more likely that, left unchecked and with no sustainability plan, resource extraction in space with the purpose of adding to Earth’s economy, will significantly increase the already immense gap between rich and poor, and rather add to global problems of social inequality and injustice.

Image by Milan Rout from Pexels

Issue 4: The Value of a Rock

Another related point, and one in regard to space mining and resource extraction, in particular, is that asteroids and comets potentially hold a variety of materials, including the building blocks of life. This means that beyond economic value, which has become an increasingly popular manner by which to evaluate smaller celestial bodies due to their richness in metals and other materials, they also hold great scientific and social value, and possibly also intrinsic value.

This begs the question of the philosophical justification for protection of celestial bodies, that goes beyond the justifications made under planetary protection principles and guidelines. From a governance perspective, is the COSPAR developed Policy still the best in class guidance? NASA 2019 updates are still regarded as the ideal model. In the scenario that we should discover a comet or asteroid which contains microbiological life, many would argue that it comparatively would be much more important to preserve and study this life, than to contaminate it or destroy it in order to extract some other resource that celestial body may hold, for economic profit. The argument for scientific value, however, applies regardless of the presence of life.

Issue 5: Nature in Space

This leads us to a historically reflective perspective on human expansion into space, provided, in part, by environmental philosophy. Environmental considerations in space are gaining increased attention, both in light of our current environmental situation on Earth and our current and coming activity in space. For example, there are evolving ethical and governance discussions around the interpretation of the legality of creating, or not remediating, space junk in the near-Earth environment, around the protection of space environments from harmful contamination and what is allowed under Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty (OST), around the conservation of space environments for future generations, and around the possibly intrinsic value of places in space, as represented through the development of protected zones.

While environmental ethics for Earth are greatly useful in these debates, outer space poses a slightly different ethical terrain with its abiotic environments, high levels of uncertainty, and intrinsically hostile (to humans) environments. These various ethical scenarios thus comprise the abiotic environments in themselves, interference from terrestrial life, the possibility of simple (microbiological) extraterrestrial life, and the encounter between such life and terrestrial life.

Image from Pixabay

To encounter what is in terms of what is not, draws on a sense of lack, of something not being present, but what is there can also be considered remarkable in its own right. For example, objects and places in space are often talked about as ‘hostile’, ‘merciless’, and ‘hellish’ — we characterize that which is unfamiliar to us as ‘dead’. To transcend this human tendency for an Earth and life-bias, some argue for planetary protection to be expanded to address other forms of harmful contamination beyond biological and organic character. It is also worth pointing out that we are not in a position to fully know what might be worth protecting in space. An often-cited source for the justification of intrinsic value in abiotic environments and a response to the human biased position is Holmes Rolston’s naturalistic and cosmically oriented ethic:

“These other places are not places that failed. Nature never fails. Nature only succeeds more or less with its projective integrity… We ought not condemn Mars because it failed to be Earth, although we may value it less than Earth… Learning to appreciate these alien places for what they are in themselves, not deprecating them for what they failed to be, will provide an ultimate test in nature appreciation.”

Other components in the universe may be irrelevant to us, but irrelevance for one generation of one specific species in one specific spatiotemporal location does not necessarily equal that those other components have no value.

Such a cosmic perspective on value derives from a notion that there is value wherever there is positive creativity. It is productive power, not merely experiential power, that produces value. This means that as all elevated forms, such as life, have come out of these non-living but active parts of nature, a distinct separation is not possible. Nature is not passive until acted upon by life and mind. Complex appreciation of abiotic environments has also evolved for certain locations on Earth:

Places like the Grand Canyon, the Sahara Desert, Mount Everest, and the frozen landscapes of the poles are not primarily valued by humans for what organic or biological life they may hold, but for their aesthetic quality, and how such environments psychologically affect us.

However, looking at the way we treat an environment that we do find valuable and can not function without (Earth), explains the complexity of finding intrinsic value for places that cannot sustain life. An illustrative example of the diversity of conceptualizations and evaluations of places in space happened at a 2018 conference in Berlin where A. Owe argued the above point, only to be followed by a corporate presentation that compared the Moon to a giant gas station.

Image by Johannes Plemio from Pexels

Issue 6: Sustainability in Space

From this contemplation on nature in space, it is logical to move on to an argument regarding sustainability. The narrative of space sustainability has widened and proliferated in the context of increasing activities such as mega-constellations, the threat of collision and interference with the operation of space objects, permanent establishments, and space mining, which may affect the long-term sustainability of space activities.

Guidelines adopted by the UN are slowly being adopted into national legislative and policy frameworks but calls persist for better space situational awareness. Through measurement, we can actually make better decisions.

However, based on analogies and our historical behaviour on Earth, the narrative of space resource extraction tends to be framed as a modern gold rush. As soon as we get our hands on these resources, all our issues related to unsustainability on Earth are solved.

In reality, humankind has no means of knowing whether cosmic resources will be available to us through our means of technology and appropriation at a ratio that would ‘eliminate’ any concept of sustainability. This means that a concept of sustainability will to a very real degree also apply for humans in space for at least the near future. Even if a concept of sustainability would never apply to the universe itself, it certainly applies to us in our current form and thus our activities. Henceforth, sustainability in space will be relevant to us, even if sustainability would not apply to space itself.

As such, issues of rights, ownership, fair distribution, and not at least — what the resource is meant to be used for — will apply just as they do for rare and valuable resources on Earth. To give a banal and purely hypothetical example:

If one company wants to extract water from an asteroid to aid the millions of people without access to clean drinking water on Earth, while another wants to extract the same water to produce rocket fuel for private spaceships for wealthy space tourists, then it should be clear to most that the latter is comparatively less important by ethical consideration.

Issue 7: Space is Not the New Wild West

Finally, it should be emphasized that the need for a new appropriate legal and policy foundation for these new multi-stakeholder ventures is yet to be agreed upon and implemented in international law. Some States (US, Luxembourg), however, have taken unilateral leadership to stimulate regulatory regimes with respect to resource exploitation. The lack of universal regulation, as well as unilateral actions of states, should not, however, translate into a principle of “first come first serve” in space, or other Wild West analogies. This is one of the most actively discussed topics in the socio-political and philosophical debates concerning the new space age and perhaps one of the most pressing issues.

It has been a popular strategy among corporate initiatives to attempt to argue that there is a loophole in the OST due to its failure to specifically mention individual private entities. This, however, is addressed as “national activities (must be) carried out in conformity with the provisions” of the treaty.

Two examples of novel activity in space which illustrates the limits of the legal and ethical frameworks, or the challenge of balancing competing interests, are the Starlink project of Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, and the tardigrade incident by the Arch Mission Foundation, both events of 2019.

Starlink is a project which proposes to launch over 12,000 satellites for global internet access and has caused major problems for astronomers and is potentially aesthetically changing our view of the sky from Earth. The underlying problem, however, is the lack of any international structure to guide these megaprojects and evaluate their effects on society, as they have planetary and intergenerational implications. (This problem equally applies to other global trends such as climate change.) The ASU Interplanetary Initiative Space Advisory Pilot Project, which both authors are a part of, is one such project that seeks to highlight these social implications. The JustSpace Alliance is another.

The tardigrade incident refers to the event where the US-nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation added thousands of micro-animals called tardigrades to an Israeli lunar lander at the last-minute, which then crash-landed on the Moon. Tardigrades — the toughest life form known to Earth — have been proven to survive unprotected in space. The goal of the Arch Mission Foundation is to create a digital and biological “backup of planet Earth” in space, but the team failed to inform both Israel and the US about including the tardigrades in the cargo, and as such there was no governmental approval. Under Article VI of the OST, “the activities of non-governmental actors shall require authorization and continuing authorization by the appropriate party.” Besides the state of the micro-animals on the Moon, questions remain concerning who the “appropriate” party was.

Both issues hinge on the lack of appropriate international consultations, before proceeding, as well as the threat of “harmful contamination” or “harmful interference” with places and activities in space, as laid out by Article IX of the OST. Before we even think of new regimes, how do we ensure enforcement and adherence to the tenets and objectives of the ones we already have? Further, consideration of morals and ethics must accompany any legal interpretation, as that is a matter of potential deadlock. To address this, new dispute resolution mechanisms should be explored.

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Calling for A Transdisciplinary and Intergenerational Perspective

These concerns about how we may go about shaping the new space age reflect the dark sides of our socio-political and environmental past and present. Those of us carrying these concerns aim to ask whether we ought to continue and expand certain practices and ways of being into space and the future, or if this civilizational event, on the contrary, provides an opportunity to do things differently. The serious debate is whether there is actually something about space that should make us act differently, in the face of our short-comings on Earth.

What we decide today, will determine what we do in the future. If we continue to use the value-systems and ideologies of the past to guide the development of legal and policy guidelines, this will fail to balance divergent interests and safeguard the common good in the long-term.

To address this, in light of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 16, the time is now to promote peaceful and inclusive societies through strong institutions. While the UN COPUOS has governed space exploration since the 1950s, a new institution where both intergenerationality and transdisciplinarity are a focus may better serve the greater good, because these two perspectives offer an opportunity to take us beyond our own individuality.

If we collectively make the decision to act transformatively, ushering in the new space age can be a light that provides a promising opportunity to represent values of altruism, diversity, and environmental wisdom. In short, if the overarching objective is to expand the sphere of Earth’s civilization into space, then that should include the rationale of improving Earth’s civilization and the conditions for and of its members, through articulating and implementing meaningful common objectives.

Image by Rakicevic Nenad from Pexels

Andrea Owe is a Space Ethicist, Researcher and Advisor in Future Studies at www.andreaowe.com

Timiebi Aganaba-Jeanty is an Assistant Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University (ASU), with a courtesy appointment at the Sandra Day O Connor College of Law, ASU.