 Good afternoon and welcome My name is Andres Martinez. I am the editorial director of Future Tents and Professor at Arizona State University School of Journalism Is there a weird echo? No, okay. It's just in my head Future tents for those of you who don't know is a collaboration between New America Arizona State University and Slate magazine we look at the impact of technology on society we do that at through live conversations like today's and also through great published content on Slate magazine Tori Bosch our fearless editor is Looking very embarrassed because I'm calling her out But I think she deserves a special call out for this event because if you go to Slate the Slate website and look at Future Tents we have a very robust package of space settlement Stories everything from how will we work out on Mars to some of the other themes that we're going to be hearing about today? And so thank you Tori for all of that great Content that all of you if you haven't read it you can it'll still be there Tonight you can follow us on Twitter at Future Tents now and tomorrow night. We're doing one of our Recurring my favorite movie nights, and we're showing Mars attacks, and that's at 6 30 I was noticing that the number of RSVPs for both the event in the movie seemed to be going in tandem So maybe a lot of you are doing both but if you haven't signed up we do those at the E Street Cinema and so that's it's a fun Movie to see and then there's a we'll have a conversation about The themes in the movie I'm very excited for today's event. I'm not a Space expert by by any means, but it's it's hard not to be excited about this moment in time both looking at the at the history and the anniversary that we're about to commemorate of the Apollo landing and then also all of the activity that's occurring in terms of Space exploration going forward. It's funny how when we think of manned space flight There's a temptation to think of it as history For those of us who are not in the industry You know it's 50 50 years of getting to the moon, and it feels a little bit like Supersonic flight in terms of some of those cool technological breakthroughs that are all in the past But obviously that's a very simplistic read because there's an awful lot of activities as many of you are more familiar with than I am in terms of setting up what might be the golden age of space exploration Going forward and at Arizona State University. We're very fortunate to have one of the leading space exploration schools and we have this exciting psyche mission, which is going to go to a Metal asteroid. We have researchers who are collaborating with the UAE's Mars mission. We have Our good friend Lindy Elkins Tanton is is overseeing a university-wide Interplanetary initiative, which is multidisciplinary and It its mission is to build a future of humans in space and thus to make a bolder and better society And so that is a little bit of the sensibility That informs what the conversation we want to have Here today, and it's also very much in keeping with the Just Space Alliance's mission We're really thrilled to do this in partnership with Just Space Whose mission is to advocate for a more inclusive and ethical future in space and to harness visions of tomorrow for a more Just and equitable World today, so I think it's important as we are at this threshold of what might be an exciting period of space exploration to Take a moment to think about you know, how we want to govern these endeavors and how we want to Have this next chapter of space exploration reflect our better values And so part of what we wanted to explore here today are some of the things that we ought to be thinking about including lessons From our history So with that I want to quickly just introduce the first Conversation which as I said will begin with some some historical lessons and we sort of Cheekily or naming this conversation, you know what what could be unsettling about new settlements as we look to To the new horizons, so I want to introduce Russell short oh is a contributing writer at the New York Times magazine He's the author of the island at the center of the world the epic story of Dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America I think I first met Russell at a at a new Netherlands society gathering and that Was when he was in the early stages of Reporting this book Russell is going to kick us off with a short talk So Russell if you want to move up here, and then also why don't the other first panelists join the stage Global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard M. I. T. She's a future tense fellow and this is really exciting I Promised her I would wave the book you don't have to do that But she is the author the forthcoming the Optimus Telescope thinking ahead in a reckless age So welcome Bina and Armstrong Wiggins who is the Washington DC director of the Indian Law Resource Center? So I will now let Russell Thank you very much Andres, thank you all for being here When Andres first contacted me about doing this I said you obviously you have the wrong man I I Don't know a whole lot about space But then when he explained that basically there are no precedents for this sort of enterprise. So Naturally people look to history and then I look back through the work that I had done on the Dutch founding of a colony in North America that they called New, Netherlands with its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in the 1600s and Thought through the whole scope of that enterprise with space settlements in mind It was it was very interesting because I saw a lot of possible templates or models or you know Potential parallels so I'm just gonna give you some of my reflections, and I hope that they will be Interesting and I just learned that this is a provocation. So I hope that they'll be provocative the the Controlling notion the controlling fact about this whole enterprise that I'm going to talk about in the 1600s Which I think is very applicable to The possibility of space settlements especially given Where things seem to be going is that it was founded and under the auspices of a corporation That that was there were very definite pros and very different definite cons as a result of that First let me give you a little quick two minutes of background. This is the 1600s. I'm talking about and Improbably in the 1600s this little country which is fighting for independence Becomes Arguably for a time the greatest most powerful nation in the world the Dutch Republic and this explosion happens of Creativity that is called the Dutch Golden Age and that is going on while they found this colony in the new world so, you know, you have Rembrandt and Vermeer you have this this Innovations in art suddenly they're doing art that isn't just for the church It's ordinary people and and and portraits and ordinary scenes you have Explosion in science and in people looking in telescopes and microscopes and trying to Comprehend the world and that is really centered on these provinces in Maybe most of all in commerce the Dutch at this time Founded the Dutch East India Company, which was really the first modern corporation They developed then they invented the notion of shares of stock They invented the first stock market where people would go and swap these and along with that all all kinds of other Things that we think of is very modern came in the early 1600s on the heels of this things like Short-selling stocks and naked short-selling all these terms that people in Wall Street use The Dutch East India Company becomes this The work the largest corporation in the history of the world up to that point and they're funding these vast expensive Voyages to what they call the East Indies so Asia to get the what they call the rich trade these these Products that were very very valuable pepper and nutmeg and silk and things like that and bringing them back And it becomes the engine the economic engine that fuels all this creativity So they're doing that and then they say well, this is working so well for the East Indies Let's also do the same thing for the West Indies and the West Indies meant You know if you're looking at a traditional map and you're in Europe the West Indies is basically everything on your left So everything on the other side of the Atlantic the coastal North America the Caribbean South America The West India Company then becomes the entity that founds this colony called New, Netherlands New, Netherlands was a large chunk of The eastern seaboard you had the new england colonies the English colonies of new england to the north and you had Virginia to the south and Basically everything in in the middle is this Dutch colony All are parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland Little bit of Pennsylvania so a huge chunk of land founded by the West India Company and probably the biggest initial issue that they had with it was that This colony was not the main Enterprise of the company and in fact throughout this whole basically 40 year life of this colony They are saying what about us because they're looking. This is a company and this is again I think potentially relevant to notions of space if there is a company that is the main concern and It's and this entity's relationship to the settlers Is tenuous then that becomes very problematic for the settlers and the the kind of upside of this story Is that throughout the life of this colony? There is this tension and the colonists themselves realizing the structural inherent problems in this settlement and Trying to and trying to fix them trying to make it work The West India Company then founds this enterprise it's for profit They want to make a profit and it's not making a profit right away. Brazil is doing better. The Caribbean is doing better So that's where their attention is They Decide that they don't want to do the really hard work of running this entity So they come up with an idea which again strikes me as something that could potentially Apply They are they go to very wealthy Individuals people who have made this sudden money from the East Indies and they say we'll give you a whole big chunk of This land a whole we'll give you half of a future in New Jersey's let's say All you have to do is settle it you have to pay for the people you have to pay for the Equipment the animals whatever you do it and by the way you can do it whatever way you want So this gets at this notion of governance because there was this this idea Which wasn't explicit, but it would you feel it as you're looking at the the documents from the period There was this idea that this is I mean North America for these people was it might as well have been an area without oxygen You know it was this total wilderness. It was there and it there was a sense that it didn't matter What people did in other words are we here in Europe? We have certain laws and we have the morals in the church and but all that doesn't necessarily have to apply over there so if you You know sort of Warren Buffett of the 17th century want to or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever want to like take a chunk of this land and settle It you can do whatever you want with that land and with those people so that was a potentially very problematic element fortunately, I think This it was called the patron ship system and it never really took hold There was one patron ship that really lasted but otherwise not Another very problematic feature of this being settled by and founded by a Corporation was that they wanted a monopoly on the trade that the main trade initially was furs in particular beavers And they wanted the monopoly on that And that was problematic for several reasons one It didn't give the people there the settlers on the ground a real incentive a real stake in the place One of but eventually this colony did really take off and About 25 years into it one of the prominent settlers Goes back to the home country and he makes an appeal because there was a missing piece at that time at that time And again, it was the settlers themselves who had worked all this out And the missing piece was government actual government. This was so what happened was 15 years into it after a lot of complaints from the population This monopoly was broken down in 1640. They said all right. We'll we'll end the monopoly and when that happened Individual Trading houses in Amsterdam sent one of their sons to New Amsterdam to open up a branch office and suddenly you get this perfusion of Economic activity at the ground level how this plays out in in a space colony is another matter because Presumably you have to monetize Whatever it is, you know dilithium crystals or whatever it is that you're you're you're going for And the the controlling entity then naturally wants to take control But it's only when individuals have a real stake in things that that life begins to happen. So Once this had been worked out somewhat this one of the individuals one of the leaders of the colony goes back To the home country and he is arguing that the government needs to play a role and he's pointing out He's looking over 25 years of history and he outlines several problems that they have had one of them The first one he says is and he published this as an essay is Bad government and he actually put it in italics both words and he said the managers of the company adopted a wrong course at the first And as we think had more regard for their own interest than for the welfare of the country so they were directors of a company and they wanted profits for the company and for themselves and They weren't truly thinking about the lives of the settlers among the problems. He said were Unnecessary expenses. This was a very top-down entity the West Indie company from Europe Trying to decide what they need and so he points to things that initially bad decisions that were made He says that they the from Europe They ordered the building of a ship three expensive mills a brickyard and other projects Which maybe sounded like a good idea on paper from far away? But the people once they were there realized they had other needs and by then they were saddled with all this debt for these from these projects that That they didn't really have need for another problem that he identified was I Guess you would say that the organizers the directors of the company had overlooked the role of The human heart in enterprises like this. He said that the company sought to stock this land With their own employees who left the colony as soon as their time was over Instead he said what they needed to do was think about how can we attract people who want to call this place home Who want to raise their children see their grandchildren grow up give their land to them that kind of thing? Over time that is what happened, but again, it was people on the ground seeing these flaws and working doggedly to change things By the 1650s so 25 30 years into the life of the colony They had something very interesting a very interesting mix of ingredients, and I will wrap it up by just kind of Outlining these There was a private entrepreneurship They had broken down this monopoly and so there was this very vigorous trade going on at all levels And at the same time it was under the auspices of this chartered company that took the responsibility For certain large-scale operations and in part thanks to this mission that I was just talking about There was government regulation as a result of this mission that he had To the government in Europe in 1653 this entity in on this wilderness island of Manhattan Got a municipal charter so new Amsterdam becomes an official Dutch city, which is still the beginnings of New York City That meant they had a city council the city council as soon as it first sits They commissioned a census they want to know who all lives where how much land do you have? Pay taxes we're we're getting income all right. We're gonna Do improvements we're gonna improve roads. We're gonna build a wall later They're gonna call that street wall street, you know, so there so it's this city government having that function So that interplay of those three entities Becomes very important and there was one other which was a state church Which every nation in Europe had a state church an official church at that time and what the church did was provide an orphanage and poor relief and what was different in the Dutch context which provided for I think Helped to cede what New York City became was that in this case Whereas elsewhere in Europe Intolerance was official policy. You had to you had to be a member of our church The Dutch had this official policy of tolerance of other faiths and that allowed for more and more people From different backgrounds to come so when that happens and then even though It gets taken over by the English You have this lively going concern and when the English take over in 60 And it was in fact because all of these ingredients were in place and it was this very vibrant City at that point in what was later be New York Harbor The English by then are very attracted to it and they invade it and they take it over New Amsterdam becomes New York after James the Duke of York the second city up the river Which the Dutch had called Bayver bike because it was a beaver town because they traded beavers there became Albany because James was also the Duke of Albany and What they had called Pavonia became New Jersey there was a moment when they were going to call it Albania Also after the Duke of Albany, but and my little joke there is that there are a lot of New Yorkers who still think of New Jersey as Albania but But so the English take over they take over and they don't understand necessarily this mix of ingredients that had come into being But it was this this hard fought slog where you have this You know, we're all excited about big corporations and this big corporation is going to run this enterprise wait a second There are problems with that. Let's allow Private enterprise and that that's not good enough either because This we as individuals are too vulnerable here. We need government in as well you can see them over this 40-year period working that out and Making something that becomes a pretty successful entity on Manhattan Island. Thank you all Thank you Russell and It is funny when I when I first called you. I was like, I'm sure you get invited to tons of space Events, could you do another one? but I think one of the the tensions that you touch upon in terms of the the hubris of The center whether the center is corporation with far-flung operations everywhere or You know a nation that that has settlements somewhere else or when you were thinking of space officers the hubris you see this with You know early days in like world religions to the hubris of the center feeling that it can control a hundred percent What you know its subsidiaries or its representatives across the world or across the universe are going to do and that forever More the values with which they were initially dispatched and the interests are going to be Preserved and over time invariably you see that that isn't necessarily the case That's a really interesting theme and then of course the one of the reasons why I think the the historical precedent of The Dutch in what became New York is interesting is that then the idea that it was a private enterprise And so, you know, this is the I think it was this week that Virgin Galactic went has a listing where now as you could have back in Amsterdam in the 17th century you can now buy stock in this company that is gearing up to go and and engage in space exploration And I think one of the other things that is happening at ASU that I did not mention is an involvement with Blue Origin Jeff Bezos lunar ambitions, but So putting you on the spot as a as a foremost space expert If you look forward 50 a hundred years from now Do you think that the primary actors in whatever it is that we're doing in space which granted is going to look different than the history? Hopefully especially that's another thing we're going to get to but even in terms of the legal framework Which will be our second conversation, but whatever it is that we're doing to give us a Better future option or to extract mineral wealth or whatever it is. Do you think the primary actors will be? Private or do you think history suggests that it might be nation-states right now? There's an interesting mix, right? Well, I this way outside of my Comfort zone, that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. Well, I think we're already moving into a play a very uncomfortably for most of us into a place where nation-states governments are Being forced to cede authority to corporations and that is going to I assumes that happen Faster and faster and by the time if you throw in space if you throw in the limitlessness of space Then I mean the sky's the limit so to speak. I don't know what the where that takes us I'm strong. I want to bring you into the conversation because of course this rich history that Russell is talking about It's really interesting to think about it from the perspective of what? People in Amsterdam creating these companies were trying to achieve and how it might have differed from what was happening in New England or Virginia on the English side of the ledger and and there's you know from the perspective of Europeans they were discovering there were You know settling and and of course there's a completely overlooked other side of that story Which is that well, you know, there were people already living in these In North America, you know, they who did not refer to their home as the West Indies You know, which I think Russell described really well the perspective of Europe You know one east was to your left and West was to your right or vice versa so and and I think we're all trying to be super careful the the royal we in terms of like space is not going to be a do-over of our Colonial experience and I think even the outer space Street, which we'll hear more about later You know has that as sort of as animating Interest I only know that because I heard Henry say that a few minutes ago and we're going to get to that but How worried are you you work very closely with indigenous? populations in the Americas Peoples sorry that that are still struggling with some of the legacies of well, you know unintended or in many cases very intended consequences of Of this sort of cavalier attitude of let's explore and discover new lands and how confident are you? That as we go into space, we're not going to repeat Or how confident are you that we are going to repeat these what are the cautionary tales that you would want to? Insert into this conversation. Well, I am very concerned and Not not necessarily because I my background is electrical engineer at the beginning before went into political science and law and So I do really follow John Hubble and struggle very clear carefully very very closely When he was going through a lot of struggle to go to the moon how to land and I was I was really following That because I went to engineering school in the 70s a University of Wisconsin And so I'm not just an ignorant guy talking here as indigenous person about science about technology Having said that We are very concerned because even when Russell talked I listened to him and he didn't mention the human side of it What the Dutch found here? There were people here There were nations here. They had government and I just the only reason I was doing that was because I'm trying to draw a parallel There were government here. I was trying to draw. I'm glad I was provided. The Dutch has never explained. Okay, wait Yeah, he was in this still exists, right? I mean there are people from the Caribbean there from Suriname I could do a whole talk on that on that interest play between the Europeans and the Native Americans like we are in the place of the Dutch My assumption is that in space. We're not gonna find people when we're there. No He's still call aliens. We've been called aliens. Yeah, so you might find aliens out there Yes, but that's the deluge government Karl Mayan Indians aliens. Yeah United States call all the people coming to this country aliens So we're aliens think about it the way the European take When European kid get here Our governments Indian governments native people that existed here the Mayans the Aztec the Incas Big civilization the buildings are still there if you're architect you can look at that buildings They're still there build from very good materials. That's why the Mexican Cathedral survived in El Socalo because they use Aztec Civilization materials so but with that insensitivity of this colonial So I'm trying to say when this this right, let me let me finish this One continent call Europe had the dollar damage in the same world that we live in when they come to America when they went to Africa when they went to Asia are the Arab world and then later they wanted us to be like them think like them and That didn't work and look what's going on around the world today Because of that thinking and that what Russell was saying was private Mixed with maybe some government after yeah, but this is private that's going to happen and so what is going to happen to those Maybe aliens they might find down the road, but the species that exists there I didn't want to treat them like that for indigenous people when we went to Geneva for the first time I was one of the founders in 1977 the whole all Indian leaders that came from United to the United Nations in 1977 One of the most important thing for us is our land When we lose our land we lose our civilization we lose our culture We lose our future generation and so what is going to happen? Look look what happened when European came into this they tried to destroy our legal system They tried to destroy our civilization. They tried to destroy and I can say I can read a Line a Supreme Court judge said here in the United States After 500 years, we don't have to worry about Indians our native Americans. They will be all assimilated Today I can say to you young people We're not upset assimilated. We're strong. Our movement is coming back Our movement is very strong at least in the Americas and We're contacting with all Indian people not just in the Americas But in Asia you Africa all over the world So when we think of human settlements in whether they're backed by companies or governments and Mars or the moon even short of meeting Species are are you worried about? You start off by saying you were very worried when you when you project the head to what's going to happen I mean, what are some of the things that? Those those explorations should be mindful of to not repeat the historical mistakes or I'm worried because is it inevitable the European and the native people call them the white folks never learn and We are afraid that they go there and if they find that they will make the same mistake Because in this earth We call the mother earth They are still indigenous people Uncontacted and nobody knows how to deal with that. They're killing them Okay War happen against Indian war is a murder if you read about war and they kill so many Indians That can happen again because they are not still want to learn look what happened What happened in they talk about let's make America great again But they only talk about the United States the America is the whole continent not just the United States So but they don't want people to come through the border They're still killing Mayan kids at the border Here that is important that you're making is this idea of unintended consequences Or maybe in some instances they were intended consequences or collateral damage in from the mentality of the colonizers and I think One of the things that we do when we think about the future, right? We think that we think that space settlement is a very futuristic enterprise, right? We think the people who are involved with doing it are Visionaries who are looking ahead further than the rest of us And I think one of the things we need to be careful of is what we're imagining when we imagine that future And I'm going to paraphrase loosely Thomas Schelling who's the Nobel Prize winning economist who said no matter how heroic a Person's imagination is they were never going to be able to think up a list of things. They've never imagined, right? They've never thought of right they're never going to have been on their list and I think When we look at what's being imagined right now around space settlement We see a lot of examples of the infrastructure, right? We see people we see the the sort of Matt Damon Martian version In our imaginations we think about how people are going to grow food How they're going to breathe how we're going to deal with the climate on Mars And that all of that certainly is important from an engineering point of view if you were actually getting to the point of doing this But I think we're not including enough in our imagination of that future Issues around governance issues around the planet. We have here. What's the moral hazard of deciding to or making a Clear decision that we can inhabit places beyond our own planet, right? What does that say about what we're what we're doing to the planet today about whether it's climate change or resource degradation or human rights? Are we giving up on those particular struggles and saying we're instead going to pursue this utopia abroad? What happens when we think about? Who leaves and why they leave is leaving an escape for the elite or is leaving an eviction for the people who no longer get to get to use the resources of earth and I think these are the kinds of things we need to bring into our imagination I also think from a governance point of view there I You know the framework that I'm thinking of that is in the book that you raised around Andres. Thank you Is is really to think about what we have now as an inheritance and there are I think as as Russell pointed out Part of this in the inheritance we have here is that legacy of call of how the the colonizers thought and And also their Realization that you needed a structure of government. You couldn't just have a free-for-all market where where corporations would just take whatever they wanted And then they were thinking was yeah the European type of government not government that existed here and the Ideology that they brought from the European side to the Americas is all European ideology including from colonization colonization to capitalism to Marxist Leninist to metrarchism to religious Thinking a Christianism which we didn't have Jesus in this continent So they have to bring Jesus from there for us to believe and some of them are not still Christians Yeah, so I would say that's the other part of the That we haven't actually examined the weaknesses of that inheritance I think actually right now We're in a point where we are discussing that more as a society people are looking at the Constitution and saying wow That was really good for generations of Americans to secure Individual liberties and rights, but it really hasn't done anything about the structural problems with capitalism in fact that there's For young people go to level up to level of Congress We just finished all the Constitution that existed in this continent before European came here those were Indian governments constitutions But they ignore that and they impose their own legal system That's why we call Indian law, which mean our law that existed here not the European laws that now Dominate over indigenous people when Russell talked about New York. He didn't mention six. We represented six nation They are quite people great great great great six nation There they're still there as government. They're still there their own part Then they're not belong to the United States government. They have their own passport. They travel to Geneva with their own passport So the struggle goes on so maybe that might happen in In this space, I think Andres said that they're no indigenous people in space. Well, I don't know You never know there are there by I want to get to that Yes, and I should mention to be fair to Russell he one of the the stories I mentioned that are in this great package on slate is Russell writing about this and he does get at the the sort of moral Blindness and lack of perspective on the part of the way we talk about this and the way the the initial settlers did Because and he talks about the pre-existing populations I think the point of the the talk was really We're in the position of the Dutch in this drama that we are the ones who are going to go off and and maybe be Equally insensitive So assuming because I can't go that far to assume Okay, once we have a settlement in on another planet, and there are Creatures there with whom we interact in an intelligible way Then what do we do with that? That's that's another level of Confusion But think about the British think about the Spanish that went to Mexico central and so We are talking about We're talking about people who are victimized and so one question is if we could stipulate that there are no beings on you know no the living creatures on Mars or moon Does anything does that does that mean that everything go if we're only talking about the repercussions for I mean I see the answer is no Yeah, you can think of space more like a commons. It's more analogous, right? It's analogous more to the ocean or to thinking about water Reese right thinking about resources that are shared that have no jurisdiction Overseeing them like you know at least until the United Nations and then you could argue that there are these entities Multilateral regional entities that sprung up to try to govern that resource and but that that space is much more You know and the tragedy of the commons is the you know this idea that when when there's no sense of ownership that resources will be exploited that There will be you know damage done and it'll end up being to the net net detriment of all I think is a very important consideration when we think about space because we don't know exactly what all those resources are We have these treaties. We have these ideas, but they're not enforceable within specific jurisdictions yet Yeah, and I'm concerned because of the legal framework I'm concerned because of the The only problem that exists and the only resources they're going to spend to go to the space when The climate situation is so huge. I rather put that money into climate issues Although some people are arguing that that's why we should do that's how I feel as a person. Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe Kind of summarizing what three of you are saying is In envisioning this future what baggage of ours do we want to bring with us and what baggage? Do we want not to and how in the world do we because if they're they're probably doesn't mean they might charge us a lot for the baggage? And it's another thing only the rich rich can make that trip not us Yeah, well then again, you know if I look back to that Dutch model It was it was times were good in the home country at that time They had a very difficult they could only get the minorities the the kind of lowest The people at the bottom of the social Socio-economic ladder to go so that's who were there they were from different and that's why yeah, New York Basically became the way it did because it started off with this mix of people speaking different languages and so you that's back to the point of Will it be the elites who go or or is it you know people who have nothing else? Have no opportunity here. I did one of the reason Human violation against natives were so gross Because of the kind of people that came from Spain to the Americas With Christopher's Columbus and with others because they were basically butchers most of them Yeah, you know so I did see an interview with with Jeff Bezos recently where he talked about how You know, maybe we can this idea of offshoring a lot of the unpleasant You know activities that we have to do on earth You know, maybe there'll be more resources, but it was almost as if you know I think he had a line where he said something like we can we can zone earth for residential You know and like that's outsourced and I think this gets a little bit to the idea of even even short of talking about you know If there are creatures out there, there's a there's a way in which you might disrespect or abuse The environment's there because you know, it'll take off some of the burden here And that gets a little bit to the like the what England had in mind with Australia as this, okay We'll put our prisoners there. Never mind the fact that there are there are people living there, too but we'll just Outsource our prisoners over there. We'll be now very quickly because As as we feared this is flown by and I feel like we're just getting started Thankfully we have two more conversations and I also want to I should have mentioned this in the beginning after the Three conversations. We will have a reception. So hopefully we can you some of you can stick around and we can continue talking but being a very quickly one of the your your Fantastic book which is coming out in September Or is it late August late August, but you could probably order it already on You you pose the question question as to how do we acquire the wisdom? to prevail over recklessness On behalf of our future selves, right? That's it's so Beautifully worded first of all, but I think it's very apropos of when you think about such the challenges of Creating structures that are going to work, you know a century two centuries from now as we enter this new space, sorry What why does it seem like our societies and our democracies? Struggle to think beyond and to plan for anything beyond the next, you know budget cycle and you were in the White House in the previous administration working on climate change, which is a similar kind of Challenge, I mean I think now we're getting more and more aware. Thankfully of the urgency around climate change But it is another one of those things that often to seem very abstract in terms of the sort of long-term nature of it and how can we Yeah, how long do you have so to give the very highest level So our economic structures and political structures are not well-suited to these long-term problems I think that's pretty obvious the election cycles the way that Corporations report their profits, but I think that it's a sort of it's a myth that this is just human nature that human nature is Incapable thinking ahead. I think people actually do think ahead think of look at all of you in this room thinking about space Settlement when we have real issues that are immediate as well And I think that this kind of thinking right can be enabled by Culture we put ourselves in environment. We put ourselves in exercises We use to inhabit our imagination about the future and that's I guess my the connection I would make to this conversation because there's so much more I can say about that is that what I find the most interesting about talking about space settlement is what it does for us to help us imagine and envision the future of society On this planet and we're regardless of where society is so it helps us understand both what we've inherited both the ill and and The benefits of what we've inherited from the past But to understand like what's missing in that inheritance and how do we shape that so that it's a better heirloom for the future? And that means we have to be thinking about if we think about governance or a new constitution of future We have to be thinking about the indigenous rights that were left out of that if we're thinking about The failures of Capitalism we should be thinking about building in anti-corruption and economic rights into future charters for these settlements But that imagination of using space is a place that's easier to sort of let our imaginations wander to should also help us to think about the future Here on earth more practically And so I think there are a number of tools that we can use to do that and and part of it is just It's allowing ourselves to embrace that way of thinking and not to allow the immediate measures of what we're doing Interferer with a sense of being able to imagine that better future We have a couple of minutes for one or two questions, and I apologize. I haven't left us that much time, but If you could wait for the microphone and introduce yourself It's coming Aaron, oh, surely with this is not Aaron. Oh surely with the National Space Society I have a quick question that I'd like a one-word answer for from everybody and then and Accepting the premise that if we can retain The you know the knowledge the wisdom of doing things better respecting human rights, respecting indigenous, etc, etc Is space settlement something we should that is fundamentally beneficial or fundamentally bad? at a very base level and Second part yeah, again. Yes. No Can space settlement help solve major problems? We're facing right now or in the near term so basically it should we Try to create space Yes, or no, I think it's sorry. I think it's value-neutral it depends on us It's hard to say yes just that if we can learn from our past mistakes And and try to do the right thing I think because I'm also a scientist You know, I think it's important to understand the space But I'm fearful because we have so many problems here and this earth the earth is upside down right now And we need to think about that. I'm not sure So I'd be curious how I'm strong just given what we've been discussing and you and your enthusiasm around the Moon landing and Apollo 11 and and with your background as an engineer and a scientist On that on the other hand your Historical knowledge that we've been talking about when that happened. Did you feel a trepidation of oh my gosh? We might be Starting something that could go awfully awry or were you as enthusiastic and bullish on That moment as a lot of the country was particularly given what else was in the news Was there a part of you that was like Yeah, yes, but in that moment too. Yeah, because All the mistakes we're doing here You know, we might not even see the result of space exploration Because this earth might disappear. So when Armstrong said small step for you're like Okay, it's a long-term project. Yeah, he's not not sure term project So, uh, I in deference to the next two conversations I should cut this off But again, we're going to stick around and we're going to be around at the reception So feel free to to approach us starting off with a historical discussion is always a lot of fun And it it can often be unwieldy But I hope you found it as interesting as I did and worthwhile and now we're gonna we're gonna segue into a Uh Focus conversation on sort of the legal framework. I do want to introduce My partner in crime for this event Erica Naz fold who is an astrophysicist and a developer at universe sandbox She is the co-founder of our partner for this event Just space the just space alliance. I should also mention another thing I neglected to mention at the outset is that Lucianne Goldberg who is the other co-founder of just space Alliance and was going to moderate the third conversation Unfortunately, couldn't be with us today at last moment. So I want to thank Luciana and Eric. Oh, thank you. Thank you So if you're in the second conversation, come on up Thank you, Andres We're gonna wait one second till I can count to three on this stage Well, maybe I'll get started while we wait for Amanda Who I have been told has arrived Um So as Andres mentioned, my name is Erica Nezold. I'm an astrophysicist and a developer for a video game called universe sandbox Which is an astronomy simulator But in my spare and unpaid time I'm the co-founder of a nonprofit that we started just at the end of last year Called the just space alliance, which I started with Lucianne Walkowitz. Um, who unfortunately couldn't be with us today Hello, Amanda. Nice to see you come join us You know, you're gonna talk next. I should let you stand. All right, so The panel that I'll be talking about right now We've titled law and order or game of thrones because it's always good to get in the pop culture We'll be talking about the legal landscape of space exploration and space settlement Which sounds like the last panel sort of I've got into one thing. I'm really interested in talking about is how we Codify our values about how we want to use space and who we want to be in space Into a legal framework that can protect all of us Um on the panel we have uh, henry Hertzfeld Who's the director of the space policy institute at george washington university And julia panfield who's the director of the new america future of property rights program But first, uh, we'll be hearing from amanda when who is a board member of the just space alliance and the ceo and co-founder of rise Which is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to uh, protecting the civil rights of Rape and sexual assault survivors. So amanda's gonna start us off with a brief talk Um, a sort of a provocation to get us started and uh, then we'll have a conversation. Hello everyone. How's everyone doing today? The coffee hasn't hit yet, but it's 3 p.m. How are you guys doing today? Um, awesome I'm a super nerd. So I always like being in new america not saying you guys are nerds, but I do have to say Um rest in peace denarius Targaryen. Um, I have a queen of my heart I I actually just joined this panel specifically because you named it that law and order versus uh game of servants um So most people know me for my activism. Um By day. I'm an activist by night. I'm a nerd. Um, no, I'm always a nerd. Uh, but um I my background is in astrophysics. So, um, I specifically Do exoplanets? Um, I worked on kepler at the harvard's center for astrophysics. Um, and then at nasa headquarters I think alex mcdonald is speaking here Um, which is really awesome alex um, also fellow nerd uh, but um I um, I had life happen to me. So I'll just start off with The legal side You know, I my dream is still to be an astronaut And I think that both astronauts and activists have one very important common Um Treat and it's that you have to be pathologically optimistic in both things Um one to get on a rocket and be shot into space and the other to try to convince people like congress Sorry, if any of you are on there, um to work work but um I uh, I fell into my activism. Um because Uh, I needed civil rights. So, um one of the most pivotal conversations that I had was um after I was raped, uh, I Went to the hospital had um a rape kit procedure done its evidence collection. Um, and I found a broken criminal justice system. Um, and uh, I remember walking into the boston area rape crisis center There weren't enough seats for us in the waiting room And I thought to myself if I have the resources that I do then what is everybody else going through? Um, and at this time I You know, I still want to be an astronaut and um one of my mentors, um, lilin melvin He's an astronaut. Um, you might know him from a very viral photo of his official astronaut photo with two dogs Um, but uh, I'll never forget it. He he said amanda space is going to be there It's going to be there after a year So if you want to go fight for rights and change the law then you should go do that um, you know and I uh, I really took that to heart Um, but in my activism work, uh space has always propped up. So Long story short I decided to rewrite the law um and pass the sexual assaults where our bill of rights unanimously through congress became the 21st um, bill in us history to do so, uh on a On the record vote in both chambers of congress. Um, and then after president obama signed that um, we've passed now a total of 27 laws um in the past 26 months, which I'm really proud of um, but uh Everywhere we go our icebreaker has always been space because space inherently is uh, a shared sky, you know, uh, and so um, the work that we do now, uh, which is focused on bringing the activism to a global sphere Um, it actually has a really direct overlay Um with space Actually, just yesterday I was with the nasa administrator Um at the australian embassy where they shared a story about apollo 11 um during apollo 11, um the images from the moon um were Not clear. Um And the california satellite receptors um got the images upside down. Uh, and so um nasa reached out to australia, which happened to have um the the right side up image And together that was uh, the collaboration Between nasa and australia To let the rest of the world see what was happening On on our moon. I think that everyone who was alive at that moment remembers right where they were when they saw that image And the stories that come from space exploration That come from science fiction Are so important And the law is just another way of telling the story is the story of who we are Our principles our values um in our shared humanity Um, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention the overview effect Everywhere we go Uh when we're talking about human rights And when we open up with with space um to break the ice Every single country has their own culture And then has their own stories about the stars. Um, but the thread that runs through this fabric has always been Um about what it means um when justice does not depend on geography And as we were looking at the legal landscape of Uh of our future You know, we have a chance to not reimagine but to imagine What it looks like when we step forward with thought, um, and we step forward Having an orbital perspective Um, I'm talking to a crowd that is predisposed to know about the overview effect But for those who don't know, um, many astronauts when they go into space for the first time experience this Cognitive psychological experience Where by everything that's ever lived or died is on this pale blue dot. And so it fundamentally transforms them Some might call it an existential crisis, but others call it The overview effect, uh, where astronauts leave earth as technicians. They return to earth as humanitarians And this this idea that we are all We're all together Is uh, it is I think very profound It's what drives My activism And something that I look forward to discussing on this panel today. So thank you Thank you very much, Amanda So I just want to start off our discussion of of legal systems in space by talking about property rights For a couple of reasons one is that we have some experts in property rights on the on the panel one is that It seems to be where a lot of today's conversations are when we talk about legal systems in space because we're in these early days of People who are planning to do research extraction or or want to use territory in space But we don't yet have a really consistent way to talk about who has the rights to do that Or at least not everyone understands what the system in place is and the third reason I want to start off by talking about that Is because it's Armstrong so eloquently explained in the first panel So much else comes out of land and who has the right to land And who has access to wind so many other potential injustices So to start off with I'm hoping I can ask Henry to to give us a quick primer on the current status of Property rights in space. I know you can probably talk for some time on this But I know that the outer space treaty Always comes up in these conversations and maybe some of our audience hasn't heard about it So maybe you can give us a quick background Actually, I think it's More appropriate not to talk about specific property rights But to talk a little bit about the outer space treaty and the framework of space law Goes back. Of course the outer space treaty Was drafted in 1960s. There was precedent before that And it was came into effect in force in 1967 So it's been around for a long time and it is basically a set of principles It's written been written by states And it applies to human activity And the use and exploration of space And it is government. It is nationally oriented But we have international the regime And the principles do include things like international cooperation Space is for the benefit of all mankind for the province of all mankind. These are words in The first article of the outer space treaty But the interesting one is in this case really is article two Article two says no nation may appropriate Any celestial body And By any means including sovereignty or by any means of use It's an interesting article when you look at the Travaux preparatoire, which is the French name for the Basically the conversation is leading up to the treaty The main focus of that And I'm referring back to our first conversation was not to repeat the Idea the province of colonialism from earlier times So the space in essence is an area where there is no sovereignty So land and land rights really are not there That doesn't mean there aren't property rights in space anything that any nation Anybody puts into space Is their property? Not only that there's no way To not be responsible or liable for that property You can sell it, but that doesn't really absolve you from being a launching state Article six of the outer space treaty is also very important it says that essentially There's states have an international response international responsibility for their activities in space And there's a paragraph a line in there That includes not only governmental national activities, but those of non-governmental corporate or individual activities as well It's the only industry the only sector that i'm aware of where states Have taken not only the responsibility, but in article seven the liability the financial responsibility for what they do They're also required to authorize And continually supervise the activities of their citizens So that when we worry about corporate activity when we worry about individual activity They need to get under the current regime a license permission from the government And really the elements that we focus on for that permission Are safety in space and then the financial responsibility And safety can include Not interfering not with others activities in space It calls for international collaborations in other parts of the treaties so that Today's space is not Every an area Without law The other side of the coin is that the treaties are not self-enforcing nations have to pass their laws to enforce these treaties As pointed out earlier earlier Nations have different cultures They take they look at things differently and they sometimes interpret these treaties slightly differently But still we have a framework. We have something to start with reflects True the politics and values of the 1960s But the ideals that are there of Using space for peaceful purposes And One of the main things to sort of side issue to this conversation not to have nuclear Weapons, but it means a mass destruction placed on celestial bodies or in orbit. I think that's important But it is in an environment of cooperation We have some precedents in the world that are maybe better examples than new Amsterdam Antarctica is one And then we have the international space treaty Now behind that international space station. I'm sorry and behind that you have An international agreement among those nations participating and a code of conduct So we've thought about a lot of these problems have we solved all of them forever? No But we have been able to cooperate Internationally and to develop a regime up there of exploration and science I personally am not worried about settlements. I think we have I think they're so far in the future that we can't predict what they'll look like We can't even predict we can't even keep human beings Particularly a lot of human beings alive in space Or have real settlements the way we envision a colony or a settlement I don't think the lack of sovereignty is going to hurt any of this We can have international agreements that guarantee some sort of right to use parts of Of space without the sovereignty the ownership the borders and so on So anyway, I I I think that This is set up differently But that though then some of the explorations of the past But it's fragile It doesn't mean that it will actually work out that way But we don't know how it will work out and that's going to be the challenge for particularly the young people here has As we learn more and can do more in space and develop new technologies So you mentioned that You don't reporting the problem because you think it's so technologically and maybe physiologically difficult to to live in space that this shouldn't be a problem in the near term, but I I I certainly hear hear that argument whenever whenever any sort of space ethics are discussed is why do we need to worry about it now One thing I think That I value about conversations about spaces that people are so enthusiastic about space that you can often Use that enthusiasm to talk about issues that we're having on earth. So to that end Julia Maybe could you tell us Why do property rights matter here on earth today? Some of the issues we're having and then how you can foresee that mattering in space assuming we'll ever solve our technical challenges Sure Thank you and thanks to my co-panelists So I have to say at the outset that I'm a little bit of an interloper into the outer space discussion because my primary area Of work and study is land rights and property rights here on earth Uh, and again, I guess to some extent most of us are interlopers into outer space Uh, so why do land and property rights matter here on earth? Broadly, I would bucket that into a few different reasons One is for the reason of conservation. So in order to Take care of a resource you have to value it to some degree Right, so assigning rights whether they're private rights private property or communal rights Whether they're ownership rights or use rights Or other types of rights develops a system whereby people can cooperate to conserve valuable resources Um, another one, uh, which uh, was uh, touched on earlier is, uh, cultural reasons For many people around the world land is not just the place where you put your house, right? It's your unit of belonging in a society It's the unit through which you measure your culture and your society's history Um And then the third probably the one that's clearest in a way in the american modern american capitalist context is, uh, by as a means of wealth creation, right? The classic formula of land plus labor equals, uh Equals wealth so when you apply labor to land you are able to Uh, to reap a profit Property rights are important in that sense because People will invest in a resource only if they are secure in their ownership or future use of that resource Right, so the example here on earth A lot of my work, uh in the past has been with, um, cocoa farmers for example A farmer won't plant a tree on land that they Have insecure rights over Because in the 10 years that it might take the tree to grow That farmer may be kicked off their land and then their investment will be all for naught, right? so In a sense giving people Comfort that they will not be kicked out Kicked off of their land or territory encourages them to invest in it Another easy example is renting versus owning right the types of upgrades that homeowners make to their homes Are quite different than those that renters will make Because a homeowner knows that they will be staying in that home long term Um, so that's just you know, I mean there's a Pleasure of reasons for which property rights are important. Those are a few of them But to kind of take it back up to space This idea of being assured That uh are being secure in our investment. I think that this is something that's playing out Right now with private corporations and the us space act of 2015 right so the us space act of 2015 grants property rights To mining companies and other companies over resources That they may extract from space so in a way This is You know a dialing forward of the concept of securing your property rights realistically a company is not going to finance an extremely expensive mission To a different planet or an asteroid if they won't be assured that whatever they would want to extract there Is going that they would have a legal claim to it Now that's not me arguing in favor of the 2015 space act. I think that there's Several problematic aspects to it But I think that that's sort of the dialing forward of the prop why property rights is important lens that in part Led to the negotiation and passage of that act. Let me comment for a minute on that. I was involved in in that act Basically, you're right the companies there were two companies in the united states that were planning uh, raising money to Mine and asteroid to take something from space and on the belief that it was valuable Uh, the fact that resources are in space We know Whether they're valuable or not we don't both companies have gone out of business on the other hand and but but They needed an assurance from the united states government Because they were both u.s. Companies that if they did And they needed to get investment that the uh, our government would not say. Oh, no, it belongs to us and we and the government and congress was by uh, they were representatives from both parties that sponsored the bill And eventually after several years in the making with an earlier bill that didn't go through But it was a baby step and it didn't say anything about its extraction. That's where I wanted to be clear It said it gave the right Of companies or individuals to own resources that they obtain in space They did not define in that act what obtaining is what a claim is or a lot of Underlying regulatory issues that would have to be addressed in the future Today, I think there's a realization that even trying to find things on the moon doing the rnd As we know governments are going to be doing that As well as governments contracting or partnering with companies We're talking seven to ten years from now And whether there is any value in them or not, believe me is a very serious question And there may or may not be I can't answer that it's a I don't think anybody Can there are a lot of proposals out there Even water It's not pure no matter where it is in space Is it cheaper to do that or is it cheaper to launch a block of ice? Up there if you want to use what I have water up there I don't know the answer to that and that is that is what we are doing We are in a research research and exploration mode But We have with that In the United States Luxembourg has a law some other nations are thinking about it As to whether and parenthetically we think that is a proper interpretation of the outer space treaty and our treaty obligations There are developing nations and others for different reasons that don't think that is within the obligations So there's going to be a lot of discussion in the future This is not a settled issue internationally, but we're giving our companies the opportunity to give it a try That's really overdoing Another aspect of this I want to talk about. Yulia mentioned this Classic equation of land plus labor is wealth. That's how you get wealth out of the territory that you own you apply labor to it But as much as land rights and property rights are being discussed by a lot of policy and law people There doesn't seem to be too much discussion of labor rights and perhaps that's because the outer space treaty directs the governments to Supervise the activities and presumably protect the rights of laborers But Amanda this is actually Leading to a question for you, which is that aside from property rights As someone who has a background in fighting for legal protections for people What sort of other concerns do you have about space that you feel we have should have more of a legal structure to protect people for? fundamentally in my opinion the law isn't morality, right and so wouldn't I make a living out of reforming the law A lot of people often ask me You know, why is the law a certain way for a certain group of people? Right Most of the laws I've written are for the united states and so in particular for me the law is a gender that gender is not female And when we're talking about institutions and we're talking about space space law or the ability to again think of The way that we're going to regulate ourselves Of course, this gives us the opportunity and the chance to think about well, who are those people the laborers? And what kind of institutions Are we trying to set up? you know space Has so much power not only in the legal sense, but also in the diplomatic sense You know It's uh for me pandas in space are the two things that get everybody happy um Um It's uh space has so much soft power in it, you know It was really funny yesterday um at the australian ambassadors residence the nasa administrator Straight up said that he was there because australia invited a senator from the appropriations committee And so they brought an astronaut to between the administrator and the astronaut In their remarks about a mateship they call it Between the united states and australia The reason why the appropriations committee should give more resources to nasa But in the in the sense to We see A different form of international cooperation in the international space station You've mentioned this before Where it's about survival. It's you know, um, there are certain needs that come first But one of those needs in my opinion are the needs of laborers and people So it is important as we think about architecting the future That everyone is included in that future The outer space treaty you two had an excellent conversation backstage that maybe we can replicate About the outer space treaty which is yulia I think I read a piece of yours recently suggesting that we perhaps need to revisit the outer space treaty or replace it Can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on that? Yeah, and I think that we were being a bit provocative Opposing the question. Do we need a new outer space treaty? And I think that um, actually I think that this was Something that was mentioned in your podcast Yes, uh, which is excellent Um, please listen to it. But you know, it's uh, that when you read a treaty the first thing you should look at is the date Um, you know the date on which it was ratified because really I believe that treaties are a product of their time and You know as henry mentioned at the time the outer space treaty was negotiated in the 60s The major issue that was at the forefront of the global collective's mind was You know put the possibility of nuclear war between the ussr and the united states And this you know, kind of two nation space race So from my reading the two most critical things that the outer space treaty does is it says we can't you know Put nukes up in space and it says that no country Can appropriate a celestial body so it limits sovereignty claims in outer space Um, but other than that it's uh, quite broad and vague And that's partly by design Because at the time it was negotiated. We really didn't have the capability to You know for space exploration, you know, not even thinking about Settlement or asteroid mining or any of these things It was I think almost inconceivable that have A disproportionate amount of say over how space is governed Well, I Disagree a little bit with you Yeah, I know the The treaty of course is a compromise. Yes, it is vague most treaties are they are international compromises When I mentioned the words non-governmental entities in there that actually was not in the us Proposal, but it was in the soviet one because they didn't have private companies We did have some telecom satellites that were heavily regulated but built by private companies up there And we agreed to that compromise Are the treaties business friendly not particularly are we headed into a more corporate environment in space most likely? Uh, but I do believe that the words are there that we can interpret without changing anything Think about a new treaty if the proposal is not has been around for a long time It's pretty much been put to bed by the lawyers. We're not in a treating writing era right now We'd have to get an agreement politically with russia with china and with a number of other countries It's not going to be easy Even if we could do it it'd be 20 years in the making We talk about corporate investment. What do companies want predictability stability and fairness? You don't have it when you're talking About changes of this sort that could go on in discussions for a long time I think it's the first way of discouraging investment actually um But interpreting them in a better way For allowing Not only us but other nations and their companies as well to participate I think that is possible and I think there's a lot we can do there Well, you might say we amend the treaties That too because of un rules is a very difficult process And if you uh, if you pass they never have been amended if you passed an amendment Not every nation would agree to it But only nations that did would would that change be affected for so I mean it would create a mess at the moment And I think we're we're better off dealing with the vagueness but with some good ideals to at least work toward And then try to implement reasonable solutions in for today's world Thank you both for excellently recapping that uh, anthony. What's our time? Okay, uh, I'd like to take this opportunity to open up to questions So we have a question here if you could just wait for the microphone and then introduce yourself Hello Nelson Jacobson with the help earth foundation The problem that's striking me the most right now is our current administration has refused to sign the outer space treaty Yeah, look at I had tweeted it. It's on my timeline. Um On top of that We have a bill going through congress to defund and de charter america out of the un So outside of this existing outer space treaty, which we desperately need We need to make sure that america would stay in it because the issue is If people are going up to space one of the other things I haven't heard talked about is They could bring something back to space and that's why I've always thought that the governmental side has been there because Think of the valdez Something happens in a private company. Well, someone goes and minds something they bring it back an outer space contamination You know, we don't have any of these things even remotely being set up yet. So we we in a sense We socialize the cost of going to space and now we want people to privatize some of the wealth extraction And but we'll need a treaty of how it's going to happen, right? We ratified the other There's no renewal on that There's a hand raised right behind this gentleman. Oh, but let me let me yeah, no problem Senator cruz called a hearing in the senate as to whether we should withdraw from the treaty number of lawyers testified the Answer was unanimously No, both both on both sides conservative liberal and so on And that has been put to sleep as well as a possibility so that we are Uh, we do abide by our treaty obligations. There are actually five space treaties on the board four of them The outer space treaty the agreement on rescue and return of astronauts the liability convention the registration convention We are original parties too. The only one we haven't ratified is the moon agreement nor have many other nations It's only been ratified by 20 ratified or signed by about 20 21 nations And none of the mate well There are there are a couple exceptions that but uh, it is really a failed treat that moon agreement is a failed treaty The others are not Let's just get to the next question Hi part of the frame. I'm a planetary scientist. Um, this is great So this is kind of related to amanda's point about who the law is for but I'd be curious to hear all four of your thoughts on Who do you think should be making these laws? How much of role do you think different? Actors should have should it be mostly up to the scientists? Should it be uh, should companies or countries that have space exploration capabilities right now have more of it? If space belongs to all of us should all of us in some way have a voice in that That's a great question. I'll start off the answer which is uh, not from a legal background at all, which is that in general I think that as many Parties as possible shouldn't be involved in all of these discussions That includes countries that don't have the capability to go to space that includes people who have no interest in traveling to space If we're gonna expand our civilization beyond the earth, we should have input from all of our civilizations There's a group called copalus committee on peaceful use as a voucher space It's a un It's part of the united nations it meets uh had several subcommittee a couple subcommittees It meets three times a year In vienna. I just came back from a meeting of the plenary group there in late june That's the group dressed drafted the first treaty the treaties At that time in the 60s there were 18 nations members of it Today there are 92 nations And they do meet and talk about these problems I said we're not in the treaty signing mode these days But we have agreed on a number of what we call soft law non-binding guidelines both for orbital debris guidelines for long term sustainability in space To to try to maintain the orbits So that everybody can benefit and use from them for the scientists. There's a group called cospar A long time ago. They wrote a number of rules on planetary protection the contamination issue And we do try to follow those but they are not hard law. They are not treaty law I see uh, I see jesse kate sitting in the audience And it's reminding me of the workshop that we were at a few weeks ago on ellenor ostrom and the commons And I think that you know speaking about what we can bring in from our experience here on earth to outer space You know ostrom speaks about a polycentric approach to governing space and Uh, you know to your point. I think that there need to be as many People at the table when we're deciding how to govern this new realm as possible Uh, you know for the practical reason that there are so many different interests Implicative, of course, we need the governments at the table and of course we need Intergovernmental organizations at the table But we also need private companies at the table because you know, that's going to be who is going to be driving a lot of the exploration And exploitation In space But we also need simple society at the table to prevent exactly the type of nightmare scenario That was kind of debated during the first panel But it still is a commons that could be a tragedy And when you're talking about oral rule debris, um, we're talking about What countries? Oh to one another, especially countries that have already have developed space programs versus countries who are starting to have their own space programs. Um, I think it's uh Really important to have everyone at the table Again take a slightly different point on this Space is really not one thing it is not a commons And there are parts of space we may want to treat that way But in general, saying space is a global commons. I think is misleading Very misleading statement and, uh In the treaties we talk about common interests We talk about common solving common problems But that's different And, uh, ostrom's examples are all very very small examples Like water in a certain region in california And the problem is enforcement I don't even like the word governance I prefer managing because the governance implies somebody is out there and is going to come after you We don't have that international Uh situation in space at this point in time I don't think we're going to have it for a while But that doesn't mean we can't come to agreements with other nations about how to handle problems And I think we will do that The treaties only call for diplomatic negotiations That's insufficient to solve problems, particularly as we move to corporate And, uh, uh Possible issues with involving companies Two satellites collide if they're government satellites, we can negotiate it If they're private ones, we need a different system And we don't have that in place right now And I think we need not only the incentives that we're giving but also Some form of enforceable Enforceable arbitration or court decisions on international issues in space and space is global I think we have time for one more question There's one in the back deck Hi, Zachary Kardashian, Super Security and Conflict Studies The treaty is designed, as you said, to address the threat of nuclear conflict But today's conflicts are much less likely to be nuclear in nature, especially as they regard the space domain So much of our infrastructure and critical Communications technologies and so on are in space so In terms of the likelihood of seeing conflict that relates to space Between, say, uh, great, you know, great nations and so on, great power competition How do you see that playing out vis-a-vis or preventing that via a treaty or some other vehicle? Space assets could be involved in any Contested environment we may have But when we're talking, we're not really talking about fighting wars in space The wars are here. The differences are among nations here Space assets, as I said, could be involved I want to make one other thing clear When in the treaty They were written carefully in those years As you can imagine, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union Was going to sign an agreement That wouldn't let them launch a nuclear weapon Into outer space And come back down and destroy something in one or the other nations That's not outlawed in the outer space treaty The only thing that is is placing nuclear weapons in orbit or on a celestial body So it's it's not really warfare in space that we're talking about I'd like to mention that Once we're a civilization that has expanded to other bodies and is much more adept at Moving around in space and moving other things in space. We don't really need nukes anymore to hurt each other It's as easy as dropping a rock That may be brought in for mining onto the earth to do a lot of damage And in particular if you're talking about Conflict violent conflict at space settlements space settlements for some time will be extremely fragile You just have to let the air out to kill everybody So I think that while at the moment, maybe it seems like we have more Cyber conflict than violent conflict. I would say Number one, that's maybe not true. We're still pretty good at violence and and number two I think that that might change as we move to different environments Um, I think we're going to wrap it up. I'd like to thank my panelists Thank you very much And now we're going to move To the third and last panel of the day I now have the honor of This body is not capable of action. I suggest new leadership is needed Lucien is a astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and recently served a year as the astrobiology chair at the Library of Congress, which is where we met at a conference an Unconference that Lucien organized called decolonizing mars and after that we co-founded this organization the just space alliance which Andres Helpfully read our our mission statement out earlier Which saves me from having to recite it again But our our goal is to have more conversations like this and to encourage more conversation between the Space experts that are talking about engineering and science and their rocket ships and people who are experts in Sociology and history and how to not hurt each other quite so much So I hope that you've enjoyed the conversation that we've been having so far and that we can continue it So for our third panel, we'll be talking about what do community and the social landscape look like in space We're going to start off with a talk by Craig Calhoun who is a professor of social sciences At arizona state university and the former director of the london school of economics and political science Will also be joined by Fred shaman who's an associate professor At morgan state university in the school of architecture and planning and has a book out this week called space settlements That hopefully he'll talk about and alex mcdonald alex mcdonald Who's a program director for emerging space at the nasa office of chief technology? Not anymore. He's now a senior economic advisor at nasa. I caught up eventually But craig will start us off so in the spirit of provocations and I'm not going to bother to repeat all of the disclaimers about how little we know All of us no matter what we're experts in know too little about this subject Anticipations of human settlement space though are are galvanized by utopian visions on the one hand and by dystopian views of this world on the other hand It's important to keep both in mind because they are projections in addition to being the continuation of processes Of settlement and the expansion of human society that may going on for a very long time They are projections of issues. We have with that So we have our hopes that may be realized and i'm going to talk a little bit about how much is invested in the word community these hopes And we also have the idea that there are a variety of problems with an overpopulated and ecologically damaged earth That may be rectified by space settlement It's interesting if you go back and and reread uh jihio neal in the 1970s You get a very familiar list of the earth's problems that are going to be remedied at least mitigated by space settlement So the driver there of solving problems on this earth is real Common to both utopians and those who are reacting to this worldly dystopia Is a vision of space settlements as idealized communities None of this applies to frags i haven't read his book because i just saw it for the first time right here And i'm sure he's exempt from anything i say critical But he has already said anything i said positively here But there is a tendency an enormous tendency in the world of advocacy and in the world of Futurism projection to think of space settlements as idealized communities I don't just mean the assumption that peace will win out over conflict or inequality will be minimized These assumptions are indeed common Among many advocates for space settlement But there are plenty of science fiction accounts of future space wars to counterbalance this So that isn't really the issue i'm after i mean rather that the unit of imagined space settlement Is very disproportionately something called the community and what we might mean by that as a question Now from here on out i am going to be taking a major legal risk because a firm Kailas partners has been claiming trademark status for the phrase community in space sub tm right Now note what a trademark is it's an effort to claim property rights All right, the idea that the very long used phrase community in space could become private property Reveals a significant set of issues and potentially a contradiction Now i don't want to take up all of this and i have no idea who's behind kailas partners and what they're up to with their attempt to Trademark community in space so they can become i think the predominant consultants on the subject But i think that the contradiction is interesting As property claims trademarks are enforceable through laws made by states Right not the informal relationships of communities So there's this tension between saying we're all about community We're all about self governing informal relationships with almost no intrusive actions of government And we're going to trademark this so that we have recourse in the legal apparatus run by states To defend our property rights more over the agenda of kailas partners is explicitly the commercialization of space Which is also not precisely community Communitarian visions of social life in short are importantly incomplete It's not that they're all wrong that nothing's being said reasonably about community But the idea that descriptions of communities would be adequate to give an account of the whole of space settlement Is very problematic space communities can only be parts of larger systems Now i've already suggested i'm going to just gloss over something that's come up in the previous panels But it's important the narrative of future space settlement Really is an extension in many ways of the narrative of expanding society on the surface of the earth It's not a radical departure. We haven't yet made any radical departure There are radical departures required in the technologies to be able to achieve Transport at cost effectiveness and to sustain life in space But the narrative of expansion is largely continuous with prior expansions merchants and kings backed voyages of exploration The great dutch east and west india companies which we heard about and the british east india company were pioneers Not just in expanding settlement, but in inventing business corporations And in they behaved also like states in many ways they employed armies to enforce their property claims They depended on states for additional security not least against pirates or privateers who sought to intercept their ships and Cargos though these might in fact be sponsored by rival states. So it's a complicated world Right and the importance of this i could go on about the story Is that we remember that some of the issues have very long histories of contending with these issues There are similar proposals today to base community and space on large scale property rights Given to those who will fund building the settlements exactly what we heard about in the case of the dutch east india company I quote one of these we have the power to create a pot of gold waiting on the moon To attract and reward whatever companies can be the first to assemble and risk enough capital and talent To establish an airline like earth moon space line and lunar settlement How by making it possible for a settlement to claim and own and resell back to those back home on earth The product that has always rewarded those who paid for human expansion land ownership Now there's a lot of you know issues here This isn't a reality of legal framework advocates are proposing the u.s. Congress passed bills guaranteeing recognition for land claims This hasn't happened yet But a couple of quick observations on this one land is usually not thought of as a product in the same sense But as a pre-existing endowment, but to write this is a proposal For preemptive deployment of property claims In space There are a set of arguments about the treaty that I want to go into that claim that while national sovereignty Is excluded private ownership is not I think this is a sort of dubious argument of false debate My point is the imaginary the kind of motivation people have what they think they're up to not whether they can actually defend it in a court of law And there's a reason this debate is taking this form by comparison to 1967 In 1967 it was pretty clear that governments had the resources If any earth bound entities had the resources To launch into space and it's pretty clear now that corporations have the resources not governments So that we have to recognize behind a lot of this argument a dramatic shift In resources the extent to which there's been a concentration of wealth in private hands Which has been aided by tax cuts. It's been aided by tax evasion But it also has been simply a product Right of a variety of different forces that I can't go into in any detail Although some of those forces have a direct relation to space because they are The products of government invention in space export a government investment space exploration in the 1960s Which the government allowed to be commercialized by others without retaining property rights So that a good deal of what we think of is the post 1970s expansion of microelectronics and a range of other technologies Has roots in large-scale government investment Some of it from the space program others for defense purposes others for health purposes Right, but it has led to a shift in who has the resources and this then leads to different proposals and different concrete Projects Elon Musk or whomever about how to go into space and different challenges Now all of this still plays out against a background of this idea of community I would mean by community a relatively discrete population Linked by dense networks of interpersonal ties where individuals are sort of knowable and recognizable Where the organization is largely informal And where the whole is more or less readily Surveillance so that you can as a member of a community a neighborhood a small town Sort of see how the whole works. Well, that is almost by definition different than how global systems work Organized in terms of infrastructure the global transportation system the global communication system the global market And extending beyond the globe into space We have a tension between an idealization of something like a quote local community Islands in space as the phrase has been ever since GK GK O'Neill and before Small settlements which people can know in a certain way and the larger systems Which are more opaque to that kind of personal experiential vision Which you have to know in other ways through engineering through statistics through whatever Community in other words is different from nation states far flung markets multinational corporations And throughout the whole modern era This very difference has been thematized in a sort of nostalgic value on community the world that we are losing The world we could really know and understand Versus this other more complicated world and that plays out in the space discussion too, which has its own varieties of Unrealistic nostalgia in evoking communities and I won't say much about this But just the island trope is a good example of this It has been a part of the discussion of community and idealized communities Since the early modern era Right in which pacific islands became exemplars And the imagined self contained island settlement sets up innumerable utopias Which are imagined in that context Inspires rousseau right inspires a variety of accounts of what life could be like in another way That are remarkably like accounts of space settlements In which there will be freedom from what there will be communal sharing There will not be the need for an intrusive government and so forth and so on So we have something remarkably like a 17th century account from explorers of what they at least imagined they saw And a Modern even future settlement. Let me quote. O'Neill on this all right. O'Neill imagined Islands again as I suggested in this self contained Settlements of a moderate scale bigger than space stations bigger than starships, but smaller than planets He wrote the self sufficiency of space communities Probably has a strong effect on government a community of 200 000 people eager to preserve its own culture and language Can even choose to remain largely isolated Free diverse social experimentation could thrive in such a protected self sufficient environment now that's Not borne out particularly by the history of what happened to small societies On earth and we have to ask why we think it would happen there And it's only by sort of willfully disregarding the larger systemic qualities that would be necessary to sustain space settlement That we can imagine each of these settlements discreet self contained free and entirely self governing In this way. This is also reinforced by the genre requirements of novels and film Where narration gives a premium to having identifiable heroes Identifiable characters who can see what's going on who can recurrently meet each other and know each other Who can be recognized as individuals Something that's possible in certain scales, but hard to imagine on the scale of many many millions of people Right. Um, you bump into people, you know Downtown in a small town You don't bump into people you know with anywhere near the same frequency In very large scale societies unless You are in a very restricted group within that large scale society restricted by class or by occupation or something else There's more that comes from this and i want to wind up quickly an image of empty space It's worth recalling how much the image of empty space informed european imaginings of the rest of the world They weren't empty exactly as we heard in the first sessions. Of course, there were indigenous peoples And the indigenous peoples that we call indians, but indigenous peoples in africa and indigenous peoples In asia indigenous peoples elsewhere, right? So this idea of emptiness was odd John lach began the second treatise on government with the line in the beginning all the world was america And went on to say that what that meant was it was empty underdeveloped and unexploited Right, but these are exactly the terms of use in space Now let me just give one twist to the conversation that we began earlier about indigenous peoples Europeans did unthinkable things to indigenous peoples They also did unthinkable things to slaves whom they brought in from elsewhere And so it's kind of a red herring to say space is emptied Therefore there won't be any of the kind of issues of domination and power and exploitation With which europeans dealt with indigenous peoples because europeans are fully capable of bringing in slaves and indentured labor In a variety of different forms. There's a lot of power that goes into who goes into those settlements not just attracting adventurers Right, but forcing people into situations And the same thing can happen again analogously in space now It doesn't have to and this is the sort of thing we could act to try to head off But it could in that sense The emptiness of space is at most transitory Right potentials for forced migration And forced labor are large and then think about the Again the extent to which the dystopias on earth matter Is space or space communities to be modeled on Idealized small towns and jimmy stewart movies Are they to be modeled on the resettlement camps? In which refugees find themselves Are they to be modeled on a variety of other things? What are the models? How about mining camps? Where overwhelmingly male populations Work under difficult labor conditions In mines is that the model for space community? What doesn't sound like community exactly? Right, how do you get by what path do you get from the mine? To the eventual community of a different kind Is this an invitation to sex trafficking as indeed mine communities have been almost universally On earth right or is the model something more like the military base? Right because for the foreseeable future They're going to be pretty stringent life conditions in any space settlements that are created They are not likely as you say suck the air out. There's a an issue of a potential attack Right. These are going to be potentially constrained if not extremely harsh living conditions for some time into the future So they may be more like military camels or scientific outposts at the poles Research stations that work under difficult conditions for long periods of time We need to look at this wider range of models not leap to an assumption about community On the theme of slavery before I leave it We need to note that while the states were Complicit in slavery in many cases It was also largely an illegal enterprise and in our imagining of space settlement We need to pay attention to the possibility that treaties and laws will be ignored Right something like a third of global capitalism is illicit today in at least some part of the circuit of the money involved There's no reason to think that all of the capitalist engagement in space exploration will remain entirely legal at every step of the journeys involved So we have to put the illicit into the picture at the same time Nonetheless the scale of investment required simply to solve the problem of initial transportation and construction Guarantees that either states or large corporations will be essential to establishing communities in space We can value communities for what the idea of community means to us But if we do value communities We need to then ask what conditions are required for community kinds of social organization to thrive In these large-scale systems of capitalist markets or of corporations or of state power Because those are not communal and they are not intrinsically friendly to community So community requires some sort of defensive counterweight if it's to be The model in this sense. Well, I've probably talked too long And I hope I've been at least somewhat provocative in all of this But we have a variety of questions to ask and the questions that say settlements have to include questions about Who's putting them up there? Who's paying for them? What their motives and business plans and models and agendas are and then questions about who will get recruited to them on that basis Is it more the indentured label model or is it more the adventurer model? Or is it very much an open job market in a modern economy? All of these are possible Right, but we can't think that it's guaranteed to be the sort of happy model of community Thanks for that Craig Um, so so Craig was not the first person today to drop Jerry O'Neill's name Um, and this came up in a conversation that uh, you guys were having during the email thread prior to this conversation prior to the conference Um, Alex, let me start with you. Um Can you talk a little bit about how the early discussions of space settlement from I think you mentioned the pre apollo era In your email, but also the 1970s when a lot of this was going Conversation is going on how that affects the conversation today, and I'm hoping that fred at some point will have some contribution to this as well Yeah, I mean the idea of how we're going to live in space has at least 150 years of history uh, the first story of how we would live in space that that I kind of can point to is a story called the brick move by Edward Everett Hale And Edward Everett Hale himself is an amazing figure of history He ends his life as I understand it as the chaplain of the us senate He uh, participated in fundraising for gun running to kansas in the effort in the mid 19th century to keep kansas a free state And he was a minister But he also wrote the very first story Of people who live in space and we were talking about this, uh kind of in the back room there That he essentially comes up with a story for people who are building a gps system Uh for visual navigation to solve the longitude problem An id actually came up with as a teenager and at harvard with his siblings And they go about building this contraption by accident people get put into it and then it gets launched into space What's interesting is that once they're up there, they don't have a way to come down And so he goes into significant discussion of the type of community that they form now It's essentially a few families that are living up there And they ultimately form what he considers a spiritual community obviously a minister That's an issue of significant interest to him and and why he thinks about living in one of these islands in the sky And this was written in 1818 60s 1869 it's published And so that's kind of the first example of that and we have other examples In the 19th century that actually by even the 1890s you have examples of really thinking about an america that extends Throughout the solar system Even before the turn of the century And then of course in the 1920s and 30s you start to see societies develop groups all across the country who are rocket societies or space societies That talk about well, you know, let's develop this capability to to go into space somehow at the time Of course, there was no reason for the government to invest in it, right? That of course changes with with the association between the rocketry required for spaceflight and the rocketry required for Not really so required but used for military purposes Those two forces then become significantly allied Through the 30s 40s 50s and then in the 60s you have of course a civil space program for space exploration And then what's really interesting about the onelian piece that that comes in and I think afraid can speak better to this But it comes out specifically for I think similar reasons to why we're seeing a resurgence in the discussion today Which is that there was at that time an expectation that The space shuttle would provide truly cheap truly reusable regular access to space Where you're talking about a launch to orbit at hundreds of dollars per kilogram And Those promises are again being made by various commercial companies today Although I'll note that companies like SpaceX are still predominantly reliant on u.s. Government funding for their operations Um But there's that that that interest again based on on it and hope for advances in reusable rocketry To reduce the cost and once you can reduce the cost very very very significantly People start to think that they have ways to to figure out how to fund living in space for indefinite periods of time And so that was the kind of the the first beginning of that in only in community And I suspect freds got kind of a more interesting history of uh exactly what that does to the community than I do Well, no, it's it's it's a really fascinating set of uh set of issues and and there's more there's so much to be learned from Like you call it in your book the long space age, right? Um, and I'm I'm really glad that craig you brought up the the idea that a community is always part of a system that we sometimes Can or cannot see or recognize And in gerardo neale's proposals for these islands in space Those communities did they they were supposed to form a very specific function in a larger system They were supposed to be experiments. So this is in the 1970s when um, of course the oil crisis had just hit And one of the things that we're supposed to be doing was mining the moon and mining asteroids to build these large power satellites So it was in some ways a mining camp like you say But um, also was there was a sense in and o'neill's writing and the writing of carl sagan and stewart brand who wrote about o'neill's project That that this would renew the american project because just like the brick moon There would be so many opportunities for these individualized small communities to try new stuff stewart brand writes about If you can try stuff do it try anything try everything so the function in the larger system was to be this kind of uh, social Darwinism almost where communities could build experimental societies and Gerardo neale is really specific about it and so is uh, so is carl sagan in a few places some will fail The failure means the collapse of an entire miniature world 200,000 or 10,000 or even 100 people So the the function is to sort of produce the new or to fail And what that would do at best is create new that was a kind of mining too in its own way because It would produce new social models that and brandon and even carl sagan are explicit about this That could then be re-imported back to earth As a lot of the other panelists today were talking about and changed the way we thought about how social and political life could exist on earth Just as a foot out of that these are at times So the brick moon story is in the middle of the 19th century of time On the heels of the big wave of the founding of utopian communal settlements of four-year-est communes overnight communes around the religious communes of various kinds around the united states and the O'Neill story picked up by people like stewart brand very much a part of The communal experiments on earth. We're going to go off to the woods in oregon We're going to try a different kind of community. We're going to see some work Some won't the consequences of failure may not be as immediately severe though. I don't know jones town looked kind of the same story But if you could escape from jones town, at least you still had air you still had gravity So there there's a there's a really weird contradiction there and that failure is kind of genocide In advance. So it is also it is also very much a colonial kind of project because it's a colonial worldview It's the production of new economic realities or death But I would say that that's part of the kind of the the narrative of people who think about the social impacts of it and then of course there's the real space program and You know the reality of what we've been doing over the past At this point, you know 30 some years depending how you want to think about it building the international space station Is very different than any of this right? I think henry actually did a great job of of discussing You know what the the community is and that put you know scare quotes around that in the case of the international space station But it's a community of nations right and and it's due to international agreements Nation-states and you know people through the representatives and government came to agreements where they had to pass laws In their respective governments to create a shared effort to live in space And today we're on the 60th expedition of crew to the national space station The next crew is launching on july 20th And it is effectively an effort to learn how to live in space You know corporations are contractors who supply logistics right? We are currently experimenting with policies to think about you know, what more commercial activity could there be? But the the 98 percentage Of of what is current and expected is coming from government taxpayer dollars And therefore it's there to serve public ends and in this case the public ends include scientific investigation Preparation for exploration missions as well as international partnership, which has a goal above other objectives. Absolutely, but what it means is Getting back to the sense committee the internal organization of social life and space station is centered on work roles That people have groups have so different crews or have a set of missions that they're to carry out Individuals have roles within that and so we have one kind of Organizations try to avoid the word community That is formally organized Highly structured by work roles And we have something different that is an imagined life together right the the commune in oregon isn't that right? And the and these two senses of how things are organized are in a real tension through this It's almost in rebellion against formal organization that we have the informal model But we also have questions about what's the future of work? What are the work roles if we were to Launch the cylindrical orbiting of o'neill islands now Right, what would be the work roles that 200 000 people would have in that setting or would this be Work that is very secondary and o'neill himself does try to grapple with what are the kinds of roles they'd have Well, we won't need many people to do agriculture We can automate construction Right people will do other kinds of things they'll design they will do that But it's a a basic question We're facing here on earth But we would face it any space settlement too if we weren't organizing it around workplace roles So, um, I want to go back to a comment that you made craig about uh, what were the sorry, there's a mosquito No mosquitoes in space Pure pure honor You were talking about what what do we what kind of communities do we want to model our future space communities and you you mentioned the jimmy stewart small town and and when I think of that particular Idealized model. It's usually that sort of 1950s. Happy small town is extremely exclusionary and and very Right, um, and and this made me think of something fred was talking about over email, which is the way that design Can be exclusionary and in particular when we when we design for space we have to design So many specific parts of the environment More than here on earth where we can just sort of add live a lot of the work And so i'm curious, um, if you could talk a little bit about ways that design Can exclude groups in in fact, I I can see an example right now in this room Which is this stage, uh, which has been designed by someone and you can if you think about it for a second Notice that it designs a certain type of person, which is someone who can't step up onto it There's no ramp for it. So can you maybe give us examples? Of those sorts of pitfalls we could run into in space in our communities Here start with fred my favorite example is ashray standard 54 Which is ashray standard 54. I hear some other architects in the audience laughing Is that is the standard which sets the parameters of the air that we're occupying right now? So it is the design of the air itself and that Brings in to play a lot of different things the rate at which the air is moving Is one of the factors that the temperature is a factor certainly, but also the humidity So is the the kind of expected metabolism rate of the individuals who are within the room And this this set of assumptions had been on question until 2015 when a group of researchers went back and sort of dissected the science that had gone into ashray standard 54 and it included Research in the 1960s that took for granted that most of the occupants of something like An office space would be men wearing business suits So when that's why it's too cold in here exactly when when groups feel excluded from a space because the air is designed To include someone else that represents a set of very real choices made by real humans at points in time They design the air to exclude you so In of course in outer space all these parameters that we take for granted become totally explicit the light levels The if it's a rotating free floating habitat, even the gravity You know can't be taken for granted. Certainly the design of the ground as a product is something that comes into play so I wonder about that I don't know what the answer is to that because it brings into question certain utopian possibilities How do we truly design a space for all people? Um, but as someone in the design field, I know how difficult that really is Do either of you have comments? Well, let me tell you a quick comment that The design World is a dialectic between innovation standardization among other things And so is a lot of the economy and we at the moment are very wedded to a language of innovation And disruption and all the new that we're going to create and this affects also the way in which we talk about Space exploration in which we talk about New technology, right? So all innovation But in fact the success of these technological systems depends equally on standardization The success of globalization the global economy is a project of the international standards off of this project Yeah, exactly. I mean if the ability to get international agreements like the space station But all kinds of international agreements about railroad gauges or about electrical current or about, you know, all manner of things and um And this matters a lot in the context of space settlement too So the image of everybody freely creates the different is up against the need for spare parts Which is then the need for some kind of standardized measurement system for the spare parts and so forth And we're already dealing with that, right? So spacesuits on the international space station is a great example of this Spacesuits are not cheap the logistics of bringing up these bulky items is not trivial Um, and yet you have to have spacesuits for a very diverse astronaut core because we want a diverse astronaut core Um, and yet at the same time you have to balance the standardization elements because of the logistical complexity with it With that need for diversity and so just our engineers struggle with that all the time There's no this is one of those cases where there's no One answer to this It's simply a design problem with which we can continue to struggle and try to, you know, get better solutions different trade-offs, right? So it sounds like the the physical environment of space itself And its isolation is is going to cause this tension between Accommodating the outliers and trying to just work towards the standardized model just just for economy if nothing else Can can you think of any? Any other potential sources of conflict between maybe not in the physical sense, but Our our values our democratic freedoms for example versus the kind of controls you need to put in place to ensure safety. This is something you brought up I mean all right, but let me throw one out just that's directly design related the design quality That the well-off get is very different from the design quality that they not very well off get And it pervades community you get a lot of kind of civil society relative well-designed civil society spaces in prosperous suburban communities that you don't get in declining towns that have lost their factories, I mean that you know the and so the Inequality is pervasive in this. It's not just the starting point of how do you get motivated to go to space? It's things like will we introduce those kinds of inequalities? In the design experience of this into the new settings will we have? What we essentially have I mean, I think that the the kind of advocacy community It's not NASA. It is the advocacy community if I can call it a community The advocacy for a what amounts to a real estate development model of space Would yield exactly what we get in real estate developments On earth With the partial exception that we wouldn't get as much spontaneous settlement because it's hard to move spontaneously into space I think I mean you were talking about the international space station, and I think it's a great Uh, it's a great model for international corporate cooperation partly because of the way the spaces are organized It's almost all hallway It's almost all public space So there are chances for all these kinds of encountered and shared experiences and I um I I always I like to also juxtapose the kind of image of the Picture of 1950s city on mars, right as it would have been designed in the 1950s. It looks like a big dome, right? And the big dome is a is a social model. It's an image of democracy in public space in 2017 space x released this image of their vision of a space city on mars And it was a series of disconnected little capsules sort of sprawling across the landscape in a rough grid That's a very different Spatial architectural model, but it's also a very different social model a kind of every person for themselves If you get a puncture over there, I'm just sealing the tube and you're on your own buddy I'm here in my capsule and I'm good So the the configuration of the space itself how much public space is made and how much public space is represented I think also affects Our social values our sense of shared purpose and shared community Yeah, I mean I I don't think I can speak as well to the design elements, but as an economist I think one of the You know the central tensions and I think it's going to be a healthy tension is the tension between The public sources of support that are are are the current predominant source of support for human space flying but they also emergent and increasingly capable private sector sources of of both Spaceflight capabilities, but also funding In the book I wrote kind of that was one of the the the summary pieces Was basically recognizing that in the early 19th century I should say the mid 19th century late 19th century early 20th century the predominant funders of astronomical observatories And early liquid fuel rocketry development were private sources You know it was Carnegie and the Rockefeller fortunes that built Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories It was the Guggenheim family who provided Robert Goddard most of his funding But that was very small Compared to the amount of funding that came in from the public sector for both military purposes and then civil purposes in the 1960s and to today Today the vast majority of all funding for space exploration activities and human spaceflight still comes from the public sector And yet It's a good healthy dynamism that we're seeing new private capabilities emerge and that balance Of the priorities of private organizations and individuals with the balance of the public who's funding it Is not a new balancing problem. It is the balancing problem of social life And we are going to continue to have that and I think it's good and we think we need to be conscious of that Um, but that's one that is never going to end And there's no static solution partly because the economy goes through phases Where one or the other model grows I mean those of us in the academic world will remember times when public universities were ascendant You really wanted to be at Berkeley not stanford. Those times are gone But they could return right? I mean there's the you know shifts in which kind of model is uppermost Craig you brought up something the email that I thought was really interesting Which is that we've we've discussed now in this conversation today Communities that are these sort of closed steady-state systems these islands But we've also been talking repeatedly about growth and change And so I think you asked maybe maybe you can answer How do we balance those two things the idea that we're going to have to have a lot of closed cycles in space? For sustainability and survivability, but at the same time This is expansionist or constantly changing Right. I mean, I don't think I have an answer. I think the question is is well posed That was the question I was trying to get at I think it's one that we've had Throughout hundreds of years of modern history, right? I mean the whole of modernity of the era of capitalism the era of nation states all of that era has been an expansionist era It has yielded world wars. It has yielded peace movements It you know, it's yielded lots of different kinds of outcomes, but it has been relentlessly expansionist That's been a near constant and there have been various attempts to stabilize the expansion I think you could see nation states as an attempt to stabilize The expansion by contrast to empires and other sorts of things But the um, so there are there are various efforts to stabilize At the same time that there is an effort to make more money to reach farther In various ways and um If it becomes economically and technologically feasible to have large-scale space settlement in the near future This is another wave of expansion like going to america from europe or something and And there will be all sorts of people want to stabilize it now note stabilization is things like Yes, my ancestors are immigrants, but no more immigrants Right stabilization is often People who benefited from the last round of expansion declaring that the doors need to be closed What's our time Anthony? Look at that. Uh, we're gonna stop for questions Jesse Kate Schengler I wanted to go back to the the topic of how do we truly design for all people and uh, I think that Perhaps we don't have a sort of single design that's ever going to work for all people and I think that to also go back to to craig's initial provocation What defines a community is in fact in many cases it's the differences It's it is what is what what is the identity that we hold that is different from other folks And so I wonder in the context of space settlement, maybe what we need is not um A universal answer and maybe universality to go back to the original panel is actually the colonizing factor It's the the singular answer for all and so I just wonder if we could talk a little bit about what what plurality looks like Or what a what a non colonized non homogenous or non universal future looks like in space You want to say something that's very much the project of the people you're like So the during during the 1970s when he was responding to um, O'Neill's project the islands in space project that craig talked about um, Carl Sagan Hoped for he in a passage. He wrote to stewart brand. He said I don't like the word space colonies I prefer the word space cities And I think one of the things that Sagan was after is this is this notion that cities are Places that are cosmopolitan that that accept and absorb identity and difference and that the the implied subject of a Cosmopolitan citizen is very different than the implied subject of a colonizer That's out there on a frontier somewhere alone with an axe. So, um, you know, Sagan went on further to Kind of mess it up and say other problematic stuff Like it could be the America of the skies and he's writing in 1976 on the American bicentennial So there was this hope for there's always this hope to recapture that difference and use it to recuperate the American project As some kind of melting pot dynamics too. So so again that that push and pull between identity and difference is very much There in this project and even in the brick moon. It was a the brick moon was a separate community It was a secessionist kind of community. So it was a separatist project And there are many people who write about space settlement to hope for well People will get along a lot better when they all have their own bubble Floating off, you know, a million miles from the next nearest bubble and they won't get on their neighbor's nerves or try to Take over the other bubble I think communities aren't uniform But they tolerate certain differences and not others and what distinguishes one from another is sort of which Kinds of difference it tolerates accepts embraces and which ones it finds Intolerable even the term cosmopolitan Can be used completely coherently to refer to the polyglot difference of early Manhattan or the Relative standardization of global universalization. We're going to have a model of citizenship, which is the same I mean national citizenship is after all a highly uniformitarian Um universalistic notion everyone gets it the same way and that's what gives them the rights to then be different in other ways So I don't think we're going to resolve this in space, but we better constantly be aware of it as an issue On an optimistic note, um, one of my favorite parts of the international space treaty is the rescue and return provision because that that is a very kind of utopian Gesture towards no matter who you are if you're in trouble in space If we're enemies if we're friends, it doesn't matter I'm obligated as another person in space to rescue and return you and I think that's really beautiful Hi, uh, so eventually once there is hypothetically a settlement in space I'm sort of curious what you think the challenges that a local government there would face that would be unique to those That we have here on earth and what might be the same or similar to the ones that we're already seeing local governments face today Probably me one of the first big problems will be probably the fact that the people who live there didn't fund it themselves Yeah, I think I think what is going to be uniquely. Well, that's entirely new. That's been a problem It's not unique. Sorry, but distinctive. That's exactly right. So I think that's going to be a challenge There's been a lot of conversation within the space settlement kind of discussion world for decades that Don't you want them to have autonomy? And that is a wonderful ideal the challenges they have probably been put there sent there By some entity which has a purpose in sending them there And again, that's going to be attention but I think that's going to be a distinctive one for space element that may not be true for Another local trust development where you could imagine it much more easily people self funding their way And I had another one just a really Concrete one that I think about because I completely agree with that I was trying to point to it, you know, it's corporations or states or whomever The idea of local government is going to have to confront a degree of enclosure That is different and I think it's going to be interesting to see what is developed as mobility and migration Regimes among space settlements If they emerge we tend to think, you know, how do we get there? And then everyone will be there and what system would make them happy But I've never seen on earth any system that made everybody happy There's always somebody who wants to go somewhere else, you know, they're gay They want to go to san francisco or new york. They're an artist. They're there, you know There are the people who don't like to buke. I don't know how that's imaginable But the um, and I think that it needs to be considered that we're talking about relatively Challenging mobility among space settlements and most of the assumptions of the design of them is that you have a high degree of Unclosure and autonomy and the self-sufficiency And so a big question is going to be regimes for leaving Let's go up front here So my question has to do with how do you plan a society for A sense of adaptability in the sense of emerging technologies Being in another planet or wherever, how do you Keep it constantly updating for the technologies of tomorrow and keep in mind the government They plan something for 20 years, let's say a space city But in that amount of time technology could be totally Changed so how do you plan take that into account when playing a future? I think that's a great question, especially in terms of something. Henry brought it up a couple times today Which is that it's it's really hard to Come up with a legal system Which is what we were talking about when you don't know what things are going to look like when you're working so far ahead of time That you can't predict how things are going to go The one word that that is used a lot at NASA is modularity Right the international space station is built not as a monolith But by a number of different pieces that have come together Right individual habitation modules science modules And what that has meant is that now is we're considering Further potential commercial activity there's now the opportunity to add a another module Right, so I think that modularity element and of course in theory Since we had the wonderful science fiction Introduction to this panel If anyone has seen I forget the title of the movie exactly but valerian Right, how does valerian start? It effectively starts with the international space station growing modularly For hundreds of years until it is the size of a moon And then must be pushed out of orbit on its journey across the cosmos And that is a vision of a future that is Very diverse. It's almost infinitely diverse if you watch the movie And it's one that comes from perpetual modular growth over very very long periods of time I think as somebody who's interested in the ISS as a design object To I find it really fascinating that this is like you could call it the most expensive building ever made right And nobody knew what it was going to look like when it was done So there's there's another great takeaway there about faith in the future and expansibility through modularity And I would argue you don't yet know when it will be done. We still don't know That's right So I think this is interesting and there's a tension in the idea of planning for this I'm not a lawyer and so I defer to Henry and others thinking about legal systems But there's law that is enabling and there's law that is is regulatory or managing right and So there are laws like what are the rules for establishing a corporation? Which allow lots of corporations to be created eventually allow corporations to be created for completely different purposes that were not envisaged at the beginning So they're you know thinking of that kind of enabling law rather than always thinking of regulatory law or Law that is prescriptive in some sense I think um, maybe a clue as to how to do this because almost all organizations have huge amounts of entropy business corporations universities whatever they are even when they're devoted to scientific research and the new They tend to become devoted to their existing ways of doing things as well And and so it often involves creating new and different Organizations to spur the change not planning in The the method of change inside one of them Unfortunately, we have to end there. I think Andres is going to say a couple words about what happens next But let's thank my last panel here You did a wonderful job sitting in the search conversation for Whose name I think I mulled early on I was like corresponding with an editor right before the event and I got their their names mixed up But of course it's Lucien walk away So Lucien if you're watching sorry that I got your name wrong at the outset Please do if you're if you're free tomorrow and you want to think more about space Mars attacks is our movie Um at 6 30 at the east street and please stick around and have some beverages if you can and let's continue talking Thank you so much for coming and thanks to all the great speakers that we had today and yeah