This week, I’ve been thinking about spinoff technologies— technologies that were developed for space but are useful here on Earth. Proponents of public funding for space exploration often point to spinoffs as a public benefit that even us non-astronauts can enjoy as a result of space-motivated research and development.
NASA, in particular, likes to advertise its spinoff technologies: they have a publication (and now website) called Spinoff that’s been doing just that since 1976. Which is where I learned that NASA was not responsible for Tang, Teflon, or Velcro (which were developed by various companies but were prominently used by NASA). However, NASA did help to develop technologies that many of us use every day, like digital camera sensors, GPS, and memory foam.
In my work, I often argue that thinking about the potential ethical and human rights challenges that we’d face in a space settlement can benefit us here on Earth today. Lately, I’ve been wondering whether the solutions we develop for these problems could be viewed as a kind of social spinoff technology.
G. K. O’Neill and others have argued that we could use space settlements as “independent social laboratories” where we could experiment with different political and social structures to see which ones work best. I don’t love this particular framework, because people will have to live in these laboratories, and the failed experiments, while potentially enlightening, would lead to a lot of suffering for the human guinea pigs.
But I like the idea of space as a testbed of our best ideas about how to organize ourselves, informed by research and expertise here on Earth— like the technological spinoffs that were motivated by the particular needs of space but were later adapted for more widespread use on Earth after success in space.
Communities in space may develop new cultural perspectives or value systems shaped by their extreme and alien environment. They’ll be more dependent on each other and on their technological infrastructure than anyone who’s spent their lives here on our ultra-habitable home planet. How might this shape their approach to things like inequality, social welfare, sustainability, and the balance between individual interests and the needs of the community? What social systems will they put into place to maintain their precarious bubble of life in a vacuum?
We likely won’t even have to wait for the slow evolution of culture across multiple generations living in space to start seeing answers to these questions. People living in early, semi-permanent outposts in space like scientific research sites or mining platforms might develop new, better approaches to things like labor management, resource us, medical triage, or conflict resolution, not to mention all the unique social solutions that I can’t even imagine because I live on Earth. (People also might make worse decisions in space, of course. See, for example, my book plus most of modern science fiction. That’s why we have to think about these problems and potential solutions ahead of time.)
Future space residents will also likely apply, and thus popularize, terrestrial social solutions developed here on Earth to their extraterrestrial problems, like how Teflon and Tang were developed by companies unrelated to space exploration but their use in space by NASA made them household names. What will be the social-science Tang of the future? I look forward to finding out.
Other News
I’ll be at Space Week in Boston on April 17-21. Come say hi, watch some panels, and get your copy of Off-Earth signed!
Also, I chatted with Ramin Skibba of WIRED this week about time zones on the Moon.