Storytelling & Space: The Expanse

What if we just keep making the same mistakes?

Image credit: Erika Nesvold

Back when I was first making my podcast (which later turned into a book) on the ethics of space settlement, the guests I was interviewing often referenced popular science fiction shows, films, and books. Now, I consider myself to be very familiar with the major canon of science fiction, so I could easily hold my own in these conversations... for the most part. But practically every other interviewee brought up a particular series that I’d heard of but hadn’t gotten around to watching yet: The Expanse. My lack of experience with this particular sci-fi story was obviously embarrassing for nerd reasons, but I also worried that I was missing out on a significant cultural touchstone related to space ethics. So while writing my book, I watched the TV adaptation of The Expanse and then immediately followed that up by reading the original book series.

This was a good decision! The Expanse is an excellent and highly enjoyable story in its own right, with wonderful character dynamics and theme-driven plots. But it’s also full of the same questions I was asking in my podcast and book, and it explores them by dropping realistic characters right into the middle of the struggle for answers.

The book series includes nine novels (starting with Leviathan Wakes) and at least nine short stories, while the TV adaptation enjoyed six seasons, so be prepared: this is a long one. Oh, and be warned: there will be spoilers below.

The Expanse: Space Ethics 101

Set a couple centuries in the future, The Expanse portrays a Solar System colonized by humanity, with significant populations living on Earth, Mars, the Moon, and the major moons of Saturn and Jupiter, as well as smaller settlements inside dwarf planets, space stations, and spaceships. The novels, written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S. A. Corey, extend the story a bit past the TV series, but the show is one of the best television adaptations I’ve even seen.

The story follows a ragtag spaceship crew that comes together (and finds a ship) by chance, and must survive interplanetary political conflicts, war, and a looming exobiological threat. While there’s a lot to say about that last plotline— and this universe’s need for better planetary protection protocols— I’m going to set it aside for this post and focus on the parts of the story more grounded in known technology and science. As in The Martian, the future humans of The Expanse make do without many of the magical technologies seen in other science fiction— there’s no artificial gravity, transporters, or (initially) faster-than-light travel. Characters have to put up with long travel times, source their food from agricultural hubs on Earth and Ganymede, and struggle to protect their bodies from the harmful effects of microgravity, radiation, and extreme acceleration. These realistic physical challenges fuel many of the story’s conflicts right from the start, as they will for early space settlers in real life. But the large-scale conflicts affecting people across the Solar System can also be traced back to patterns of exploitation, prejudice, and greed that arose back on Earth before humans escaped their home planet— in The Expanse’s past, the real world of today.

How will living in space change us?

One of my favorite aspects of the world of The Expanse is how it illustrates the ways that building societies in dramatically different environments can shape the cultures of those societies, driving conflicts between them. At the beginning of the series, Earth is an aging superpower, overcrowded and suffering from widespread poverty but still believing themselves the center of the human species. The community on Mars is well-established but still living underground, in the middle of a multi-generational terraforming process requiring Martians to embrace their collective goal in order to survive. A third major population is the Belters— humans raised in zero-g throughout the asteroid belt and beyond, contributing raw materials to the systemwide economy but fighting prejudice and oppression from the wealthier human communities built on solid ground. As you can tell if you read my post on The Lady Astronaut series, I love speculation about how the space environment will shape our cultural practices. Both the book and TV series of The Expanse lean hard into these questions for the Belters in particular, who speak a creole cobbled together from different Earth languages and wear tattoos patterned after the scars left by cheap, faulty spacesuits.

These environments shape the characters physically, as well. Martian characters traveling to Earth for the first time must protect their eyes from the bright daylight, something they’ve never experienced in their underground home. Belters, born and raised outside of a gravity well, are easily recognized by their long, slender frames, and struggle to walk or even breathe if they attempt to visit the surface of the Earth. This effect naturally segregates the population and inspires anti-Belter slurs like “Skinnies.”

Humans always seem to have a knack for using physical differences to exclude and oppress other groups of humans, but this hypothetical result of raising children in space suggests a broader ethical concern explored in both The Expanse and my book Off-Earth: if we intentionally create new humans who cannot, physically, survive a return to the planet we evolved on, are we somehow stealing their birthright from them? Many of the Belters in The Expanse express disdain for the worlds of the inner Solar System and prefer their homes in open space, but the fact remains that they don’t have a choice: Earthlings and Martians can safely visit anywhere in the Solar System, while Belters are confined to only one type of environment, excluded from experiencing ocean vistas or blue skies without significant medical intervention and pain. This is not an ethical issue that we have an obvious parallel for in human history, but we may have to face it soon after we start attempting human reproduction in space.

Labor Rights and Colonization

The exploitation of the Belters is the most common reason that I’ve seen people bring up The Expanse in conversations about space settlement and human rights.

While today’s space settlement advocates and space mining companies argue that the wealth of valuable resources waiting for us beyond Earth’s orbit should motivate increased investment in human space exploration, the truth is that while space itself may be infinite, the resources we can actually reach and extract are not only finite, but concentrated in certain places in the Solar System. This is a recipe for conflict, even in our current international legal framework for space that says that no country can claim territory in space. Sure, China or the U.S. can’t claim to own the patches of the Moon’s surface where water ice could be mined, but what if a private space mining company sets up their mining operations there first? Latecomers may find that the rules against “harmful interference” mean they can no longer access these resources.

This source of conflict runs throughout The Expanse. The raw materials mined from the asteroid belt are extremely valuable, but the Belters who live in the belt and actually perform the dangerous work of extracting and hauling these resources benefit the least. The governments of Earth and Mars exploit the Belters’ labor to gain access to these resources by leveraging their own military superiority and wealth, and by limiting the Belters’ access to biological resources (food, medicine, water) and keeping them on the edge of poverty.

While the story is set long after the initial colonization of the Solar System, the fourth novel (and the fourth season of the TV series) revisits the idea of this early phase of expansion. Humanity gains access to interstellar travel, and the main characters find themselves in the middle of a conflict between the first group of human settlers on the exoplanet Ilus (refugees from an earlier war) and a private company hoping to exploit the planet’s rare lithium resources. This particular chapter of the story has a strong Western theme, exploring the potentially catastrophic consequences of a gold-rush approach to space settlement.

Labor exploitation, the oppression of local workers, and resource conflicts between superpowers— these themes were clearly inspired by countless similar scenarios from Earth’s real-world history. And we risk seeing them again in our actual future in space, if we decide to use the same political and economic models in space that we currently use on Earth, and if we continue to approach space with a mindset of colonization.

There’s so much more to dig into in The Expanse— its illustration of how tragically easy warfare will be in space, when you can simply drop rocks onto the surface of a planet; the way it counters the common talking point that space settlement will relieve population pressure on Earth. But this post is long enough, and you could be spending this time enjoying The Expanse for yourself! If you’re interested in more analyses of The Expanse through the lens of ethics, I also recommend an anthology published a few years ago (while the series was still in progress) called The Expanse and Philosophy: So Far Out into the Darkness. And check out the rest of my ongoing series on Storytelling & Space Settlement.