From Your Martian Overlords

The Future is for all of us

Have you given thought to what life would be like in a Mars colony run by GamerGate? Martin Robbins at the Guardian thinks preventing this is something we should take action on right away. Or maybe he’s just gamedropping (making irrelevant references to GamerGate to force artificial controversy). It still gives a useful segue to talk about actual issues in the intersection of spaceflight and minority representation.

This is an example of white culture.

When someone says that space is inherently white, it’s not because only white people are involved. African-American NASA administrator Charlie Bolden can certainly attest to this, not to mention how the whiteness narrative glosses over the significant accomplishments of China and India’s space programs. For those out of touch with the current geopolitical situation, those are places with a few billion People of Color. Scientific progress is not the indigenous only to Europe and North America.

This is not an example of white culture.

China landed a rover on the moon in 2013 and have plans for more. It’s quite possible they will be the first to put people on the moon in my lifetime, which would be awesome because it would be people on the moon. Not everyone may be aware of India’s successful lunar and Martian orbiters, or crewed capsule under development. There have been internal debates in these countries about the value of a space program, and the answers there are the same as for NASA or ESA: it’s worth it. Even the short term tangible value of spaceflight to ordinary people is strongly competitive with spending comparable sums on earthbound projects. In a less tangible sense, many astronauts report experiencing the “overview effect”: when seeing the earth from a new perspective, the importance of borders and other arbitrary divisions diminishes.

Even in the time of the Apollo program, as difficult as it was for African-Americans, space went hand-in-hand with the leading edge of racial progress. Race was more politicized at NASA in the 1970’s (pdf link), but minority hiring since then has been as aggressive as the country’s educational pipelines can support.

Rather than being about an actual racial imbalance in space, this claim that space is white is a new front in the controversy of minorities “acting white”. It seemed President Obama had put to rest the notion that a black child with a book is acting white, but apparently it’s not yet so for an African-American boarding a rocket. In the context of education, research is clear: Hostility against “acting white” is highest in schools that are the most socially integrated. It’s crab mentality. Studies have found individuals who devalue meritocracy have higher affect after perceiving racial discrimination and lower affect if things seem fair. This, my friends, is the commentariat in a nutshell. The language of progress is to them an excuse to take comfort in their filter bubbles. Nothing seems different about this where rockets are involved.

The stakes are higher than video games, rockets, or even oppression. I subscribe to the idea, put forth by Carl Sagan, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” This is a unique purpose only humans can fulfill, and it’s inherent in our very nature rather than culture. If we fail to know the universe accurately, we do a disservice to ourselves. We need to go into space both to further our knowledge and ensure our survival. Such ideas are likely still too mystical for some to stomach. It would be hard to give a damn about knowing the universe if you cannot meet basic needs for food, safety, or social acceptance — in other words, the cosmos’ is a privileged perspective. Here is where we get to the crux of the matter. Privilege is an ingredient in unlocking our fullest potential as human beings. Privilege makes it easier to act in an ethical manner. Privilege is good. The problem is not that some people have too much, but that others have too little. They don’t have enough to fulfill their potential.

Neil deGrasse Tyson also sees this as the root of minority under-representation in the sciences. He recounts that as a black youth he faced skepticism about his choice, but as for the main reason he saw so few others in his cohort,

The simplest way I can understand that is that the community at that time did not yet have the luxury of using that education for that purpose. And so, what that means is, if you’re the first to go to college or the first to go to a selective school where there’s a high expectation of opportunity, is the first thing you’re thinking of, “Oh, let me study science?” No, you’re going to sort of build capital. You’re going to choose a job where income is guaranteed and high.

In other words, it takes privilege, and it takes generational wealth. The prospects are dim and the sacrifices deep for anyone wanting to become an academic scientist right now. There are many forms of work that are not economically rewarded in proportion to their value to society. So-called “women’s work” is one, and basic science is another. That’s something we need to fix for everyone. To solve it, we don’t need to ponder intersectionality; what we need is unconditional basic income.

Space belongs to the Green

When we can identify a specific injustice, we can respond with a specific solution. The result of simply “raising awareness” about issues is to reinforce group allegiances. Allegiance to a race or gender is regressive, whether or not that group was historically oppressed. That is why when people worry about whether their favorite races will be represented in a future space colony, I worry that any races will be represented. We can do better than that. It’s baggage we don’t need to bring with us.

For starters, the minimum viable population will be smaller if the genetic lineages come already outbred. More importantly, the idea has already been around a long time that race as an idea we operate with in daily life is a social construct. Assumptions about whether groups like “Irish”, “Jews”, or “Hispanics” constitute a races shifts rapidly on historical timescales. Skin color will be with us for as long as there’s skin, but race is something we can opt out of entirely. A lot of people began to ask if we were living in a post-racial society when Obama was elected, and that was absurdly naive. However, as a post-racial society starts to look more and more achievable, the social justice movement somehow becomes proportionately hostile to the idea. This comes from that anti-meritocratic resentment of those who begin to “act white”, which is to say act post-racial.

It’s my hope that the first person on Mars will have black skin, and that the only part of that people will care about is the part about being on Mars.

Callisto has much better prospects for colonization, though. If you take one thing from this essay, let it be that.