Head in the Stars, Feet on the Ground
How thinking about space can help us solve problems on Earth
We are one week away from the release of my first book, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space, and I am tired. Between the podcast appearances, newspaper interviews, op-ed pitches, and a lot of other fun marketing work, I feel like I’ve spent more time thinking about this book (and why I wrote it) in these past couple of weeks than I did while I was writing it.
When my brain gets tired and wants to squirm out of having to do all this hard work, one thing I occasionally find myself thinking is: “Why am I worrying about improving the lives of people in space settlements when I don’t even expect permanent space habitation to exist in my lifetime? Aren’t there easier and/or more important things I could be thinking about?”
I have a few different answers to this question (including “You’re tired, brain, have a snack and a nap and you’ll feel better”). For one thing, there’s the old adage that “society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit,” which appeals to both our admiration of intergenerational projects and our distaste for ending proverbs in a preposition. There’s also an argument to be made for the value of spending at least a portion of our efforts and energies on imaging better futures, rather than simply trying to survive the day-to-day slog of the present.
But there’s also a practical reason why thinking about the potential human rights challenges of living in space is useful today: These challenges already exist here on Earth. In fact, in researching Off-Earth, I learned a lot more about not only historical struggles for justice on Earth, but also the current activist movements happening right now. Writing this book has taught me about the labor rights abuses occurring in isolated, unmonitored workplaces like fishing boats; about the ethical conundrums posed by medical research involving pregnant people and fetuses; about the violence and cruelty built into our prison system.
Of course, I could have just skipped the part where I got curious about life in a space settlement and that led me to learn more about injustices on Earth, by just choosing to directly pay better attention to these issues in our terrestrial societies. But there’s an additional benefit to thinking about ethical problems in the context of space: it lets us imagine more radical solutions than we would ever consider feasible here on the ground.
This is a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed within myself as I’ve done this research. Something about the “sci-fi” setting of a space settlement provides a kind of psychological flexibility when tangling with these thorny sociological issues. Instead of thinking, “Sure, it would be nice to live in a society without a prison system, but I just can’t see how we’d get there from here in our current U.S. carceral system, so why bother,” I instead get to think, “If I were helping to start a community from scratch in space, how would I design a system for handling violent or dangerous behavior?”
It’s not a cheat code for finding magical solutions to society’s problems today, of course. Even when the exercise of thinking about space suggests practices that would improve life on Earth, we’re still left with the question of “How do we get there from here?” But it’s freeing, in a way, to expand the boundaries of “what’s possible” in these thought experiments. I hope my readers have the same experience I’ve had, of shaking off the burdens of social inertia and the status quo along with the weight of gravity, as they imagine different, better ways of living in the future, both in space and on Earth.
Other News
Speaking of podcast appearances, I had a fantastic conversation with Britt Duffy Adkins on the Celestial Citizen podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
I’m also excited to announce that I’ll be participating in a live virtual author Q&A on March 16 at 8pm EDT, co-hosted by the JustSpace Alliance and Celestial Citizen. The event is free for anyone who preorders Off-Earth before the publication date on March 7 (so you have a week left to preorder and get access to the Q&A!). To reserve a spot, just fill out this registration form and provide a screenshot of your preorder receipt.
If you preorder Off-Earth directly from Penguin Random House, you can get 15% off by using the preorder code PREORDER15. And now you’re probably thinking “I bet there are terms and conditions for using that discount code.” And indeed you’re right, my clever friend, and here they are.
Hello Erica — I'm looking forward to reading "Off Earth," but I did want to say that your blog title "Head in the Stars, Feet on the Ground" reminded me of the slogan I coined in the 1980s — "Caring for the Earth, Reaching for the Stars" — for a pro-space / anti-militarization publication, "Space For All People." You can see it in one of the four images here: https://twitter.com/Jon_Alexandr/status/1638644838219522050