1The idea of expanding the human habitat beyond the Earth has always been slightly mad – only slightly less mad than the belief in the predictability of the future, which is perhaps why the future (at least over the last century) has so often been projected into outer space.

The moral case for space expansionism

3The New Futurist plea for space expansionism, what MacAskill calls the “moral case for space settlement,” runs as follows. It is derived from utilitarian reasoning predicated on maximizing the quantity and duration of life, which is taken as a primary good, and on the claim that there would be much more life if we were able to expand beyond the Earth. As MacAskill argues:

Though Earth-based civilisation could last for hundreds of millions of years, the stars will still be shining in trillions of years’ time, and a civilisation that is spread out across many solar systems could last at least this long. And civilisation could be expansive as well as long. Our sun is just one of one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; the Milky Way is one of just twenty billion galaxies in the affectable universe. The future of civilisation could be literally astronomical in scale, and if we will achieve a thriving, flourishing society, then it would be of enormous importance to make it so. (2022: 247).

5There is a statistically overwhelming utilitarian case for going to space. Where this argument goes mad, however, is where this purely quantitative case, when extended outwards to astronomical temporal and spatial scales, crosses with quality. Given the astronomical numbers involved, this case would still hold even if all those future people lived the worst lives imaginable, and if making their lives possible implied that we and all immediate descendants should live the worst lives endurable. The philosopher Derek Parfit (1984) called this the “Repugnant Conclusion,” and devoted his late work trying to think utilitarian theory out of it. But the New Futurists lean into this repugnant logic. In fact, MacAskill, who was a student of Parfit’s, thinks we have reasons to believe that the Repugnant Conclusion “is not quite so repugnant as it first seems” (2022: 240).

6So how do the New Futurists make this argument sound compelling? A significant aspect of their argumentation depends on us making us feel as if our present is already unspeakably bad, and that the statistically most likely future enabled by inaction is going to be not only worse, but literally non-existent. For example, Elon Musk (space entrepreneur, friend of MacAskill’s, and the richest man on the planet) prognosticates:

I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go. (2017: 47)

7This argument is statistically valid. As Oxford existential risk theorist Toby Ord explains: “[I]f there were a growing number of locations which all need to be destroyed for humanity to fail, and if the chance of each suffering a catastrophe is independent of whether the others do too, then there is a good chance humanity could survive indefinitely” (2020: 194). Diversifying our habitat portfolio improves our odds of surviving possible existential risk events – climate change, nuclear war, misaligned AI, a pandemic, what have you – by decorrelating the risk of our collective extinction from the occurrence of any of these events. Expansionism increases the hypothetical availability of future lifetimes, and this significantly affects our future-oriented utility calculations. But missing is any comparison of the future lives lived in the meantime.

8There is also a spatial version of this argument. At least since the 1960s, humankind has been living in what Alexander Geppert (2018) has called “the Age of Limits.” As Vaclav Smil (2020) has made clear, the planet imposes strict limits on future growth – even if it is “dematerialized.” Yet at least since the publication of Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier (1982), Astrofuturists have insisted that there are abundant horizons and resources off planet. Jeff Bezos (space entrepreneur and world’s second richest man) makes the New Futurist case as follows:

A very fundamental long-range problem is that we will run out of energy on Earth. This is just arithmetic. It’s going to happen. …We don’t want to stop using energy. But our use levels are unsustainable. …There’s good news: if we move out into the solar system, we will have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources. … We could have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization. (2020: 246-247)

9Settling space would not only free us from our current concern with catastrophes being courted by overstepping the limits of the planet, but it would also yield a hypothetical population explosion which would shift us towards a post-scarcity paradigm. Once again, there is no question of quality of life here, only a simple logic of more = more.

10But what really would become abundant? The non-repugnancy of the “Repugnant Conclusion” depends on how great that future in space might be. Science fiction stories – even dystopian ones – tend to incline us to believe that a future off planet would be cool. The Rocket Billionaires (Fernholz 2018) say the future that they are making is “fantastic” and “incredible.” But is this just false advertising, a cynical way of cashing in on the cultural capital accrued by acting in accordance with the doctrines of the New Futurist moralists?

Repugnant anticipations

11Let us look closer, trying to differentiate the science fiction from the science fantasy. It is probably no exaggeration to claim the history of space exploration has also been a history of downgrading the expected quality of life available to normal human beings in space. At the beginning of the space age, there was a persistent myth disseminated by both NASA and Ruskosmos that the fittest specimens of humanity were such “supermen” that they would be able to conquer space (Maher 2017: 144). But now, seventy years later, no one really seems to believe that fitness alone will be enough. A standout piece of recent evidence comes from the study of the identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly. Scott spent a year abord the International Space Station, and a team of scientists analyzed the changes undergone by his body upon his return. He didn’t die, but the verdict of Christopher Mason, one of the NASA doctors charged with studying him to establish the probable physiological effects of long-term space travel, and a New Futurist himself, is telling. In Mason’s opinion, even surviving a voyage to Mars will require us to engineer ourselves in the same way that we engineer our “rockets and ships,” namely by installing “protections on the inside, within the astronauts themselves.” New Futurists see nothing wrong with this: giving up our bodies is “humanity’s innate duty, needed to ensure the survival of life” (Mason 2021: 12) But we need to be honest. If this is right, then the 10⁵⁸ lives, which we can now qualify as disembodied lives, suddenly don’t have quite the same value. I accept that this argument is limited: maybe we will develop better technologies so that we can have our bodies and go to space too. But I don’t think that I need to show anything about our future bodies. I only want to show that the futures that the New Futurists think that we ought to work towards are ones that only people who confuse ethics with misanthropy could desire.

13Presumably our subjective experience of being selves would not be that of dots floating in the void, but something rather akin to the experience of being in the Metaverse as it was depicted by cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, only with more computing power. Depending on how we were programmed, we either could or couldn’t know the difference. We might, for example, have chosen to configure our future selves to live in what philosopher David Chalmers (2022) has called “Reality+”: a hypothetical virtual world that will have attained a level of granular detail such as to be indistinguishable from what we now call reality. But that would only be in the case in which we imagine Reality+ as integral reality, and that could only happen if the past was wiped, and our descendants were programmed to be unable to see the true condition, or to compare it to our current one. That said, it should be unsurprising that many New Futurists, for example MIT computer scientist Rizwan Virk (2019), quite simply believe that we are already living in a simulation.

14New Futurists are not totally insensible to the idea that this is repugnant. Some of them have tried to find the bright side. Nick Bostrom thinks it will be pretty good to off ourselves. He claims that our massively enhanced future cognitive capacities will offer us enhanced senses of “aesthetic appreciation, narration, humor, eroticism, spirituality,” and new depths of what he calls “subjective wellbeing,” including greater intensities of “joy, comfort, sensual pleasures, fun, positive interest and excitement” (2014: 9, 11). Eliezer Yudkowsky (2015: 205) anticipates enjoying a deeper integration of “the lessons of probability theory” and a happiness emergent from being a more “perfect Bayesian” capable of reasoning “in the face of uncertainty” in a nearly ideal manner. One is tempted here to start considering scenarios such as those explored in Greg Egan’s Quarantine (2014), cases in which our consciousness itself is hacked, and so dissatisfaction in any case can’t be registered, but getting into that will distract us back onto the terrain of comparing alternate counterfactuals. Let us leave it at the claim that the experiences of the options are literally unthinkable.

16To sum it all up, the future that is anticipated and endorsed by the advocates of the “Repugnant Conclusion” might be judged better than our own future either if we think we already live in the worst of possible worlds, or if we think that deluding everyone all the time is acceptable, or if we believe some horrible catastrophe is immediately on the horizon, or if we think it would be epistemically consoling to know for sure that we were brains in vats (Putnam 1981). I find it difficult to believe that anyone – including the New Futurists – believes that a future in which we are ghosts in a nano-swarm, duped or not, is really, all things being equal, a desirable future. I doubt strongly that this civilization is one which we would feel proud to have created, though I am open to acknowledging that some might, in their darkest existential moods, feel that such a civilization has more going for it than our own. But the more critical point is this: it is morally repugnant to make arguments claiming that we should get to work at once towards remaking our world into one that we all believe will be worse for everyone. Which is to say that it seems to me that we should take some time to reflect on how and why apparently solid moral reasoning is leading us in this unpalatable direction.

The sense of an ending

18Looking at this historically won’t accomplish a moral revolution which will put rationality aright. I think that with respect to the “Repugnant Conclusion,” or maybe even, more properly, with respect to the sublime spatial and temporal prospects opened by space colonization, moral theorizing encounters something like a singularity: a paradoxical zone in which normally reliable heuristics become unreliable. Rather than trying to solve this problem, let’s try to understand it. Aristotle, in the Politics, claims that there is something about the kind of infinite perspective generated by chrematistic accumulation – the accumulation of monetary wealth – that is unnatural, for there is no limit to the amount of money that one could acquire, gold being imperishable, whereas there are limits on the quantity of any commodity that one might individually be capable of consuming. While “natural” is a hotly contested term, there is one thing that is clearly unnatural or unlimited about the future imagined by the New Futurists, and that is the refusal of death. Although the arguments that I have rehearsed above never specifically discuss longevity enhancement, most New Futurists want eternal life both for themselves and for the species. Their maximalist accounts of the future never factor in the idea that there could be a natural (i.e. a desirable) future end to civilization, but rather treat all ideal futures as ones in which there is ever more life to be had. It is obviously hard to say that dying is good, much less to claim that our descendants ought to die, that there should be a moment when the Earth and all members of its ecosystem come to an end. But it is equally true that dying has often been taken as the perspective from which one measures the value of a life, the perspective from which one differentiates qualitatively the mere fact of having lived from the ethical state of having lived well. As Heidegger (1977 [1927]: 234) puts it, death “delimits and determines the possible totality of existence,” allowing us to make sense of being in time. The same is probably true from the perspective of civilizations, and even for living planetary collectives. Perhaps that which is good for being acquired infinitely is in effect good for nothing at all, in practice or in ethics.

19Ethical thinking may need to include death. It may be that what is wrong with our nanodescendants is that they never live, in part because their civilization has little meaningful prospect of coming to an end. They only experience the illusion of living, a simulacrum of life en masse and for all eternity. Maybe the futures we ought to act towards are always ones in which we might imagine our future descendants as willing to die, or perhaps not only them, but their entire community of ecologically entangled others. This sounds paradoxical. I am not suggesting that we should ourselves live towards our own deaths, or in acceptance of the death of all Earthlings today. Maybe I am trying to say something akin to what poet Jorie Graham (2022) is saying when she writes: “[To] the last [be] human.” I am talking about being human in the way we imagine our descendants imagining their ends as good, as human. It does not seem that this entails acting to bring about the end of our civilization, only acting in such a way as to imagine that if all Earthlings came to an end, at that point one could imagine that the planet would not have existed in vain, would not have had a life without really living. With respect to the unthinkability of this idea, expressed by Graham in the bracketing of “[being],” I think that we are somewhat like the nanobots already: I cannot imagine wanting my civilization to end now, because I want to believe that future Earthlings will be able to live better on the planet than we have been capable of doing – which is to say that I actually see our civilization as currently but wrongly prompting us to want to become aliens, precisely because we want to buy time for our children, in some fantasy future, to actually live as humans.

20Imagining a human future may be an impossible injunction. Avid readers of Ursula K. Le Guin feel that at the core of every dystopia there is a utopia, and vice versa, which is to say that virtually every imagined future falls short of giving us reasons to feel that it is the one towards which our rationality should non-dialectically incline. But I am less concerned with this falling short than with refusing to assent to the claim that the “Repugnant Conclusion” is an expression of right reason. It would be better if our dreams of the future in space were the wild and highly improbable folies of Afrofuturism chronicled by Frédéric Neyrat in his L’Ange noir de l’histoire (2021) than ones whose numbers add up, but which sacrifice all humanity in the name of becoming a sublime swarm of monstrously alienated aliens.