The Astrobiology of Lockean Liberty on Mars

                               

                             

                               Elon Musk, "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species," 2016

                                            Elon Musk, "Starship Update," February 10, 2022

December 14th was the 50th anniversary of the last time that NASA astronauts walked on the Moon in 1972.  This is surprising--that over the past 50 years, there has been no manned exploration of the Moon.  Equally surprising is that no human being has ever walked on Mars or any other planet beyond the Earth.  And yet both NASA and the European Space Agency say that their ultimate goal is to land humans on Mars and then establish human settlements.  But for now, there is no well-funded program to do that.  So far, only robotic landers and rovers have been on Mars.  

Elon Musk has predicted that his SpaceX program will fly human beings to Mars within ten years.  Ultimately, Musk wants to have a colony on Mars with a population of one million people.

If we assume that human colonies on the Moon and Mars and perhaps even other moons and planets are inevitable, then we have to wonder what kind of social and political orders are likely to arise in those extraterrestrial human communities.  Will they incline towards tyranny or liberty?  Could they secure the sort of liberty promoted by classical liberals like John Locke?  Or is Lockean liberty an evolutionary adaptation to the Earth's biosphere, and thus so bound to the Earth that it cannot be achieved beyond the Earth?  Is liberty found on the Earth but nowhere else in the universe?  Or does our technology of artificial life support allow human beings to travel beyond the Earth and establish permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars where they can live in free societies?  Or does our technology of bioengineering and artificial intelligence allow us to engineer new forms of intelligent beings who are adapted for living in free societies beyond the Earth?  Is it possible that of the billions of planets beyond the Solar System, there are some with biospheres similar to the Earth's where intelligent life has evolved to live in free societies?  Or if the Earth really is unique in the universe as the only place where intelligent life and liberty have arisen, is that the miraculous product of God's creation that can be known to us only by divine revelation?  Or can we explain this as the natural product of evolutionary causes that can be known to us by natural reason?

To help us think about these questions, we can turn to astrobiology--the multidisciplinary science that studies the origins, development, distribution, and future of life in the cosmos.  As the word itself suggests, astrobiology combines astronomy and biology.  But it is actually broader than that because to understand the place of life in the cosmos, astrobiology must combine astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, the humanities, planetary sciences, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences.  Although astrobiology is commonly identified as the search for life beyond Earth, astrobiology in its wide sense is the study of life in its cosmic context in general, including the history of life on Earth.

One of the most helpful astrobiologists for pondering the questions I have raised is Charles Cockell, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is the author or editor of a series of books on astrobiology and on the possibility of "extraterrestrial liberty."

Cockell identifies himself as a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek.  He worries that the extreme conditions in the universe beyond the Earth's biosphere--especially, the lack of oxygen in a breathable atmosphere--will tend to promote tyranny, because those who control the technology for supplying oxygen and the other basic commodities necessary for life (such as water and food) will have tyrannical power over those dependent on this technology of life support.  To counter this tendency to extraterrestrial tyranny, he lays out proposals for how the liberal institutions for promoting liberty on Earth could be applied to the design of human settlements in space, particularly on Mars, the one planet most like the Earth.  As is characteristic of classical liberalism, he looks for ways to limit, divide, and decentralize power to protect liberty and avoid tyranny.

I find most of his reasoning persuasive, but I do see at least six problems.  

The first problem is that Cockell assumes the truth of classical liberalism without justifying this moral commitment.  He does not consider the possibility that a Darwinian evolutionary psychology could support Lockean liberalism by identifying Locke's state of nature as corresponding to the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) in which human nature was shaped on Earth during the Pleistocene Epoch, and in which human beings enforced a law of nature that secured their natural rights.  Cockell does not see how all of his reasoning assumes a universal human nature as originally shaped in the state of nature or EEA of Earth.  If liberal institutions developed on Earth can succeed on Mars, it's only because the human settlers on Mars have the same evolved human nature as human beings on Earth; and they have artificially created an Earth-like biosphere that can support life.

Cockell's argument for how "we can engineer freedom into an extraterrestrial settlement" (Interplanetary Liberty, 239) depends on the claim that the structure of human life and liberty as human evolutionary adaptations for the environment of the Earth during the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs is universally applicable across the Universe beyond the Earth.  He writes: 

"The assumption that underpins this work is that the human personality remains largely invariant, and the same emotions and basic characteristics that shape human societies on Earth will express themselves in space.  Therefore, when we think about freedom in space, we are not dealing with an entirely blank canvas, but with material that behaves in certain ways and which has been observed already for millennia, albeit under terrestrial conditions.  As Christakis simply observed: 'But human societies do not come from somewhere else.  They come from within us'" (7).

Cockell does not see how Locke's state of nature supports this conception of a universal human nature shaped in the evolutionary state of nature, because he mistakenly assumes that Locke's state of nature was a purely imaginary condition in which human beings live as utterly solitary individuals, and so he does not see how Locke could see his social state of nature empirically confirmed by the life of hunter-gatherer bands in America. 

The second problem is that for Cockell to draw up plans about "freedom engineering" for extraterrestrial human settlements, he must appeal to the lessons learned from the political history of liberal democracies on Earth--particularly the United States.  But as he admits, "it is not clear that lessons on Earth can be transplanted without modification into space" (134).

The third problem is that while Cockell often seems to share Musk's enthusiasm for people travelling to Mars as tourists and then establishing permanent settlements there, Cockell also suggests that Mars would be such an awful place to live that most human beings would not want to live there, and that the Earth will seem like a paradise compared with Mars or other locations in space.  Does this indicate that human beings are so bound to the Earth by being naturally evolved for the Earth's biosphere that they will never be happy to live beyond the Earth?  Cockell does indicate, however, that Mars would be a wonderful place for scientists to study the early history of the planets, although even scientists would probably only want to stay there for short periods.  Does this mean that human travel through space is likely to be restricted mostly to scientific explorers?  And if so, will these scientific communities of space explorers be free and open societies that avoid tyranny?

The fourth problem is that it's not clear whether human beings can travel in extraterrestrial space for prolonged periods without suffering disabling and deadly damage to their bodies and brains.  Scott and Mark Kelly are retired astronauts, and they are also identical twins.  Mark Kelly is now the junior Senator from Arizona.  Scott was selected for a year-long mission to the International Space Station, which lasted for a full year (from March of 2015 to March of 2016), which set the record for length of time in space for any human being.  Since Scott and Mark are identical twins, this was a good experiment in which NASA scientists could study the physiological effects of Scott's year in space as compared with Mark's year on Earth.  The effects on Scott were disturbing.  He lost bone mass, his muscles atrophied, his blood circulation was disrupted in ways that shrank the walls of his heart, he suffered problems with his vision, and he was exposed to more than thirty times the radiation of a person on Earth, which caused genetic mutations.

Cockell indicates that there are at least three ways to solve this problem.  We could bioengineer human beings to be better adapted for living in space.  Or we could overcome the physiological limitations of the human body by replacing some biological organs and limbs with mechanical or electronic parts to create cyborgs that could live well in space.  Or we could create superhuman entities with artificial intelligence designed for life in space.  But then we might wonder whether this is technologically possible.  And if it is possible, could this engineering include engineering these beings for liberty?  Or would these bioengineered, cybernetic, or transhuman entities be inclined to tyranny?

The fifth problem is that in considering how the education of citizens could promote extraterrestrial liberty, Cockell casually dismisses religious education as unimportant, because he assumes that scientific reasoning easily proves that gods do not exist.  In doing this, he passes over the mystery of First Cause and the mystery of how the cosmic laws of nature seem fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life.  He thus takes the side of natural reason against supernatural revelation without considering the possibility that in the reason/revelation debate, neither side can demonstrably refute the other.  And he does not consider the possibility that some of the colonists on Mars will want to satisfy their natural desires for spiritual transcendence and religious understanding.

The fifth problem is related to the sixth problem suggested by Cockell--whether an astrobiological understanding of human life in the cosmos can give meaning to that life.  If human life is not the fulfillment of a cosmic purpose set by some divine or transcendent cause of the cosmos, does human life therefore have no meaning, and would that lack of meaning create a nihilistic despair that would prevent human beings from living a free and fulfilling life in the cosmos?  Or can human beings find their purpose inherent in human life itself--in pursuing their natural human desires--even though human life is only a momentary emergence in the history of a cosmos that has no eternal purpose?

I will be writing a series of posts on these questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial liberty.

REFERENCES

Cockell, Charles S.  2013.  Extraterrestrial Liberty: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Tyrannical Government beyond the Earth. Edinburg, UK: Shoving Leopard.

_______, ed.  2015.  The Meaning of Liberty Beyond Earth. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

_______.  2020.  Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

_______.  2022a.  Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_______.  2022b.  Interplanetary Liberty: Building Free Societies in the Cosmos.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_______, ed.  2023.  The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.