Review: Off-Earth

by Jeff Foust
Monday, April 10, 2023

Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space
by Erika Nesvold
MIT Press, 2023
hardcover, 304 pp.
ISBN 978-0-262-04754-8
US$27.95

A session at last month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was devoted to the ethics of space. One person on the hour-long panel examined the ethics of exploration, while a second focused on planetary defense issues, such as the ethics of using a weapon of mass destruction—a nuclear weapon, whose use in space is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty—to deflect an incoming asteroid.

A third panelist looked at space exploration and commercialization from the perspective of indigenous peoples. “We have to ask very serious questions about why we want to go. And, for the most part, the reason we want to go is extract, to take,” said Hilding Neilson of the Memorial University of Newfoundland & Labrador. “What are we giving to space? What are we giving to the Moon?” He didn’t elaborate on what could be given to the Moon in exchange for its ice and mineral resources before the panel discussion moved on.

That panel came to mind while reading the book Off-Earth, which examines ethical issues with space settlement. It is something of a companion to Reclaiming Space (see “Review: Reclaiming Space”, The Space Review, April 3, 2023); Erika Nesvold, the author of Off-Earth, was one of the editors of the other book. While Reclaiming Space sought to bring in new perspectives on various space issues, many of which involve ethical issues, Off-Earth is Nesvold’s own exploration of the questions raised by the prospect of humans living and working beyond Earth.

The book explores a wide range of issues associated with space settlement. Who gets to go? Who gets to decide who gets to go? What kinds of property rights can, and should, exist in space? Who gets to run a space settlement? Should children be born and raised in such hazardous environments? Those and other questions are asked and explored—but not definitively answered—in the book, often relying on insights from experts outside the space industry.

Not only are there no definitive answers, but sometimes the advice in the book is contradictory. In one chapter on deciding who gets to go, Nesvold concludes that “the ability to pay should not be considered during selection at all” since it goes against the ideal of equal access to space and selecting the best people to go. But another chapter is devoted to labor issues, including people being exploited for forced labor to pay debts associated with going to a space settlement (“I find the idea of space labor absolutely terrifying, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read your email,” one labor rights activist told the author.) Of course, if people were wealthy enough to be able to pay for their own transit, forced labor would be far less of an issue.

Those contradictions speak to a broader issue: the relative immaturity of space settlement overall. Despite decades of discussions, we are only incrementally closer to that vision of permanent human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or free space. Why will people go there, and what will they do? That will drive many of the issues discussed in the book, which may be different for a mining camp than a scientific outpost. While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have talked up their long-term visions of people living beyond Earth, there’s been few concrete details; Musk has said in the past he is focused more on enabling Martian settlements with transportation systems than on the nitty-gritty details of what those settlements would be like.

Nesvold said the impetus for the book came when the CEO of an unidentified space mining company brushed off any planetary protection issues about mining lunar ice in a 2016 talk at NASA’s Ames Research Center: “We’ll worry about that later.” (The company is now defunct, she says.) Few in the industry, she said, seemed concerned about such ethical issues, although she notes that since then she has heard from people in both industry and in government “who are eager to buck this trend and further incorporate justice and ethics into their work,” but aren’t sure how. (Emphasis in original.) But, by and large, we don’t hear from those people in the book, or explanations those in the industry who have, at least for the time being, set aside the ethical questions raised by space settlement.

It raises a concern shared with Reclaiming Space of missed opportunities to communicate between those traditionally involved in the space industry and those seeking to bring new voices and new insights: how do they exchange ideas and share ideas, or even have a common vocabulary?

That included the space ethics panel at the AAAS conference: what would it mean to give back to the Moon in exchange for taking resources from it? “I’m not sure,” Neilson admitted after the panel. Maybe, he proposed, it could involve leaving Earth rocks behind or “cultivating soil” there.

Could learning about the Moon and our place in the solar system constitute giving back? “I don’t think so,” he said. “Because the Moon knows itself.” Does that mean the Moon is sentient? “Sentience is kind of an anthropocentric form of terminology. We define sentience relative to ourselves. For many people, the Moon has its own kind of being.”

The conversation ended, with the ethical issues of lunar exploration and resource extraction, and by extension space settlement, no clearer than before the panel.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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