Thread by @hughhowey

🚀 A THREAD ABOUT LIVING IN SPACE 🚀

We aren't going to do it. Not by the millions, and probably not even in the thousands.

There's something deep in our DNA to explore and push out into brand new niches, to see what's over the horizon. This drive is powerful because it compounds itself: People who feel it go out and make lots of copies of that same drive, and so it keeps spreading and spreading.

But there's also a powerful drive to improve our current conditions, to tidy up our nests, to build walls and fortifications and to "hunker down." It seems very likely to me that humans have "jobs" within our eusocial structures, just as bees, ants, and termites have jobs.

The divisions between "progressive" and "conservative" may be as basic and simple as the differences between those who want to wander out and try new things and those who want to "hunker down" and fortify what is proven to work.

This is an excellent survival strategy.

It's an even better strategy for making LOTS of copies of tribes and spreading them out like seeds across all niches. We multiply on a cellular basis (mitosis). We multiply on an individual level (procreation). I think we also multiply on a societal level (out-grouping).

This works pretty well as long as there are niches to expand INTO.

(By "pretty well" I mean that tribal civil wars and familial strife make life damned miserable as groups hit Dunbar's Number and have to divide over and over)

A problem arises as you run out of niches. There is no more lateral expansion. Which is why dreamers began filling popular science rags with underwater cities of the future, and floating blimp cities, and moon colonies, and science fiction hacks wrote of underground silos.

We're always looking for the next place to move into. Because it's in our bones. Because we're the children of the children of the children of people who moved into a new niche, conquered it, hunkered down, and then drove out more drone-liberal humans to do it again.

Here's the thing about how nature programs us to behave: There is no forward thinking, only a selection among what works in the short term. So nature can't "plan" on what happens when available niches run out. It maximizes for the immediate gain.

Just like how nature never planned on us harvesting sugar cain and corn fructose and making cheap calories readily available. Instead, it gave us a sweet tooth and insatiable appetite because calories used to be scarce, sugars especially. Fatten up. Get ready for lean times.

The biological urge to expand outward is now pushing up against the harsh realities of space, and the results are going to be as awful as they are predictable.

Some very wealthy and intelligent people are going to go broke and insane as a result.

One of the things the International Space Station highlights is our lack of desire to do what's already been done. The most logical commercialization of space would be an orbital hotel where people pay millions to spend weeks circling the Earth in zero G.

There is a vast yachting industry that charges people $200,000+ per week just to float on the water. There are enough millionaires to justify an orbital Hilton. Reusable rockets and modular designs make this affordable and scalable. But neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have plans.

Because living in space and making money are not the real goals of these companies. Doing something "new" is. Exploring the unexplored niche. Scratching that genetic itch.

We will get a desolate moon base and a ghost town of a Mars colony as a result.

We will get as bored of these remote bases as we are of the continuously occupied ISS. As bored as we got of moon landings.

Our desire to explore all niches is not met by the masochism required to inhabit them all. We don't raise our children in intolerable places.

Antarctica is a perfect model. It's a place people visit, a place for research, a place to sample remoteness. No one raises their children there, even though there is far more to support life there than on the Moon or Mars. Infinitely more.

Robotics, Virtual Reality, and demographic changes are the real death knell of this failed biological urge to expand outward. Robots will be the ones who mine asteroids and explore Mars. VR will be how we view Earth from simulated orbit. And demographics ... oh boy demographics.

As populations begin to shrink and people keep moving into cities, more and more niches are going to EMPTY OUT. Something that has never happened in human history has already begun.

The very drives discussed here are waning due to other influences.

Those influences include the hedonism of cities, where so many foods, social connections, and types of entertainment can be enjoyed for little cost. And the expansion of women's rights and employment which is a large driver of reduced fertility rates.

Fewer people with more ways to entertain themselves will lead to less physical expansion and more creative and intellectual expansion. We will send out probes, but no one is going to want to live in space for long. Certainly not enough people will want to raise their kids there.

Before this becomes obvious, we will spend trillions in capital that would be better spent here on Earth, and we will spend countless hours dreaming up fruitless Mars schemes, instead of trying new social, economic, and political ideas here.

It's fun to dream science fiction dreams and to imagine that anything is possible in the future.

But history will not look kindly on those who dedicate their lives to these dreams of living in space.

Yes, we need dreamers. We need them here. We need them now.