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Whatsapp For many ethicists, it's not too early to consider some of the moral and ethical implications of sending tourists into space.

A new space race is on in earnest but unlike the original one, this one is supercharged with private equity, with the masses in mind. It may only be a matter of time until we all know someone who’s been into space but wherever we go our foibles follow, writes Joe Gelonesi.

At this year’s Warren Centre Innovation Lecture, Australian engineer Enrico Palermo laid out his vision of the very near future in clear and concise terms.

There are risks there for us and for the potential extra terrestrials. We need to think about the vulnerability of those alien societies, as odd as that sounds.

‘I believe we’re at a pivotal point in our human history. Humankind’s presence in space is going to grow rapidly, grow exponentially and, importantly, grow permanently.’

His lecture was delivered just two months before the Virgin Galactic tragedy above the Mojave Desert, in which one pilot lost his life and another was critically injured.

Palermo’s firm The Spaceship Company is owned by Virgin Galactic, and is currently building a second spacecraft for Richard Branson’s commercial enterprise.

It’s not yet known how the latest mishap will affect operations, but the company has been aiming to build an entire fleet. The accident has focused serious attention on the new space race.

The stop-start, state-funded military missions of the 1950s and 1960s have made way for turbocharged capitalism, which aims to create a new mass market of galactic tourism.

The idea of leaving the planet has a certain appeal in these complex times. The Mars One initiative, which spruiks settlement on the red planet, claims to have more than 200,000 people signed up to blast off in 2016.

How soothing a thought, to start afresh somewhere very far away. The reality of this quest is more brutish—wherever we go our woes will follow.

The age-old question of how to live with one another has universal application—literally. What’s worse, new terrain will bring fresh iterations of old questions: do we extend our hand of friendship to other civilisations, or do we first review our dismal record of colonial contact back here on Earth?

The chain of ethical gaffes we can make starts on the ground and launches into space. Look up, and look out.

The time is right for an ethical audit, and a Sydney based ethicist is doing just that. Jai Galliot calls himself the military philosopher. His PhD is in the ethics and politics of drone use in the armed forces. Galliot is no stranger to uniforms, having served in the military and worked as a fire fighter.

Related: Space tourism

In his research, Galliot has been closely interrogating the rise of autonomous technology, in particular where moral responsibility might fall in situations where the prime actor is difficult to ascertain.

Drones offer the most pointed example, especially when they’re employed in a military context. From there, it’s not much of a stretch to the kinds of issues that are thrown up by space exploration.

Galliot has received submissions from philosophers and ethicists around the globe who are keen to contribute to his soon-to-be published volume on commercial space exploration.

When he called for submissions last year, he was astounded by the level and range of interest, on topics which range from the moral philosophy of space travel to the ethics of terraforming.

Melbourne bioethicist Robert Sparrow contributed to Galliot’s forthcoming publication, and has been thinking through the eventual rise of killer robots and the moral weight that will fall on our too-human shoulders when that day comes.

Sparrow, like Galliot, is determined to remind us that actions do have moral agents behind them. Much of Sparrow’s work on space ethics is principally about the relationship between humans and the environment.

‘A lot of environmental ethics is focused on the rights of specific animals or perhaps the welfare of species’,' says Sparrow. ‘But there are interesting questions when you think about mountain ranges or DNA itself, not as a living system but as a chemical system—what are our obligations to preserve these things for future generations?’

Sparrow’s work on terraforming looks closely at the ethics of physically interfering with an environment—whether it’s mining on Mars or unsustainable tourism at Uluru.

In space it takes a special dimension, as the territories we encounter will inevitably be touched for the first time.

‘What would it say about us if we were to draw a big picture of a penis on Mars?' he asks. 'In theory the people driving the Mars Curiosity Rover could for a bit of lark write their names on the surface of another planet. What would that say about us?’

It would reveal that the same base impulses we have back here on Earth work just as well in a colder climate. What Sparrow points to is the fact that bad behaviour knows no gravitational barriers, and poor impulse control is a struggle on a cosmological scale.

‘Whenever we encounter new territory, one of the things we’re exploring is ourselves. We’re offered an opportunity to reveal our character, to say what sort of creatures human beings are as they start to move off the planet and into space.’

‘My worry is that with the involvement of private enterprise what we may reveal is going to be quite unpleasant. We might reveal ourselves as greedy attention-seeking creatures of venal motives.’

Related: Animals in space

For Sparrow, the important message from this thought experiment of schoolyard prankery is that we can right ourselves before we tilt the wrong way.

‘One can hope that by considering these sorts of question about what and who we are and how we appear on the broader scale of things, we might actually elevate ourselves in the process.’

In this contemplation, Sparrow pins his hopes on a traditional school of ancient thought.

‘The approach I’ve taken in a paper I’ve written on terraforming on Mars—that is, trying to turn Mars into an earth-like habitable planet—is to consider the possibility that there was no life on Mars. That’s likely, and therefore we have no reason to behave one way or another out of concern for living things there.’

‘So the only question then is—what are our obligations to complex, non-living systems? It’s quite hard to come up with any ethical considerations. What I looked to was an Aristotelian tradition which says, “think about what kind of person would do that and what it reveals.”’

‘That is the foundation of an Aristotelian virtue ethics.’

Still, the dream of tabula rasa in the heavens is hard to dislodge from human yearning. However, as Jai Galliot reminds us, dreams of solitude might dissolve as soon as we bump into our first galactic neighbour.

‘In some ways we’re starting anew with others. Think about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life—SETI. One of the side-effects of private space venture is that the potential for making contact with extra-terrestrial life would obviously increase.’

‘There are risks there for us and for the potential ETs. We need to think about the vulnerability of those alien societies, as odd as that sounds. They would have their own cultural heritage we need to preserve.’

Philadelphia-based philosopher Brent Franklin, another contributor to Galliot’s collection, is taking this question seriously, and in his reckoning there’s no time to waste, even if the chances of bumping into an alien are at long odds.

‘I do think this issue is an important one to address, regardless of whether there’s direct evidence of extraterrestrial life,' says Franklin.

‘It’s never too soon to discuss potential ethical issues that could arise. If we do receive a signal or if we detect evidence of alien life somewhere else it would be better to have begun these conversations earlier rather than start them at that point.’

Franklin’s focus on the ethics of alien first contact arises from his longstanding interest in the idea of non-human space life. It helps that he’s a fan of the famed television sci-fi series Star Trek. One concept in particular gave him food for thought.

‘Star Trek runs a great thought experiment on this very topic, with the idea of the prime directive, which is the highest guiding moral principle that the protagonists of the series have to follow.’

‘This policy says they can’t initiate contact with any alien civilisations until those civilisations have reached a certain point of technical development.’

In a nice twist, some believe the prime directive is in fact the key to understanding why we feel alone in the universe. The Zoo Hypothesis, as it is known, posits that more advanced civilisations have left us alone until we reach their level of development.

The same ethical principle could guide us, says Franklin, in working through whether it is permissible to make contact with alien life. The original idea belongs to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a member of an intriguing Russian school of existential thought known as cosmism.

Franklin’s working through of the question of permissibility all boils down to cultural development, survival and more importantly, who has the power over these factors.

A space mess Listen to the full segment on The Philosopher's Zone.

We’ve been here before. The colonial displacement of native cultures has raised myriad ethical issues and moral crises. There’s much to be learned, and perhaps applied in a distant encounter, but it can also be retrofitted to current concerns.

Underlying Franklin’s assessment are the same sorts of considerations running through the multicultural debate in western polities: how does a unique culture retain control within a larger system dominated by other cultures?

For the record, Franklin’s analysis leads him to the galactic case for the affirmative.

‘As long as contact doesn’t interfere with autonomy to make decisions about their own futures, then it is permissible to make contact.’

It doesn’t, of course, discount any unintended consequences but at least it gets us to an ethical first base, sadly not a feature of human frontiersmanship to date.

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.



