The Future of Martian & Interplanetary Societies w/ Samo Burja

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're airing a conversation between Samo Burja and I on humanity's future as a multi-planetary species. We discuss the economic, political, and surprising cultural implications of colonizing Mars, as well as the Moon. We also talk about space treaties and the potential divergence of Martian and Earth societies. Please enjoy, and check out Samo's podcast Live Players from Turpentine. Hey, great to see you.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing great.

We could have fun conversation, uh, about like what Martian societies are actually going to be like. Does that sound fun?

Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, let's do that. What got Martians on your mind?

I think that it's a very interesting question of what human civilization looks like. If we actually become multiplanetary, as Elon Musk puts it. And the question has become a practical reality in this century. I think Starship has been a genuine massive cost improvement. And together with the massive demand for mass in orbit of mega constellations of satellites, that is thousands and thousands of satellites, there's finally a reason, an economic reason to launch enough rockets to make the individual rockets cheap. Now, of course, reusability is a big deal. And in a way, the challenge of still getting a lot of settlers onto another planet like Mars, or honestly our own moon, is still a ways off. But the mere economic barriers to it are gone. And I think that eventually organizations and governments will be motivated enough by the prospect of basically new and completely unclaimed land that this will be, this will be settled. So this brings me sort of to my first commentary. I think the international treaties on space, that is that space is the common heritage of all mankind. I don't think those will last. So I think very quickly countries will choose to pursue sovereign territory. And it actually might be the U.S. that is first to go down that path. Listeners and viewers might not be familiar with various treaties on the government of outer space. They basically declared it to be a territory where no one is making territorial claims. It could be analogized to say Antarctica. But, you know, even the Antarctic Treaty is up for renewal in the middle of the century, and I'm not sure it'll actually be renewed. It might. We might see a scramble for Antarctica, a race between the United States and China, and honestly, even surprising places like Argentina that have preexisting claims that predate that treaty. And the reason for that will be, you know, minerals, resources, and so on. Space is trickier because essentially there is a military reason to have control of the Earth's moon. The straightforward military reason is that it is the cheapest place from which to launch things into Earth orbit. As amazing as Starship is, as much mass as it can lift, it can't compare to a so-called mass driver, which is basically, you know, let's call it to simplify, an electromagnetic gun that can launch things from the surface of the moon into basically not just lunar orbit, but it could launch them into high Earth orbit without the use of any fuels. Now, the reason this is possible on the moon And not the Earth, it's twofold. First, the moon's gravity is much lower. So if you mine some aluminum there to lift it, actually doesn't take as much fuel. You still need to, you know, to get it to a lower orbit would potentially still require the same amount of fuel, but you can use interesting tricks like ion engines that don't require a lot of mass, but require just a constant stream of electricity from something like solar power. The other reason, the more important one for why a mass driver works on the moon, so you have a particle be, or cargo be accelerated by magnets very, very rapidly and shoot out in a sort of space gun type railgun, is that there's no atmosphere on the moon or that the atmosphere on the moon to be precise is extremely, extremely thin, like just very small amounts of like hydrogen, helium, and so on. So why does it matter who has the cheapest mass in Earth orbit? Well, it matters for a whole variety of concepts. First, I think having control of a global communications network that provides internet and instant communication. So in other words, something equivalent to Starlink, that pretty much explains itself, especially if you can encrypt it. That's like a crushing advantage on the battlefield. If you can deny that to your enemy, So like destroying thousands of their satellites with your anti-satellite weapons. Well, that's a crushing advantage. Even something more basic, like geostationary satellites and GPS, it had been a U.S. advantage in the 1990s, the 2000s, even today, to have a better GPS system than any other government. Like the Russians don't get to use GPS when piloting their drones, the Ukrainians I think get to use GPS when piloting their drones. Now the Russians have their own satellites, but Russian launch costs are more expensive. So currently, I think we will see in the next 20 years, state-led effort, first by China, but eventually by other rivals such as Russia, to replicate the cost efficiency of vehicles like Starship or even less ambitiously, you know, just vehicles like the Falcon 9. The U.S. has sort of gained a unique advantage because of SpaceX's innovation. This is not to the credit of, say, the United Launch Alliance or Boeing or Lockheed Martin or any of these old lumbering corporations that basically had the same sort of price point that their foreign competitors did. Actually, they were beaten on price by the Russians for most of the early 2000s. So because of the strategic necessity, they'll go to Starship. But what's after Starship? Well, after Starship is mining and manufacturing stuff on the moon. And if you're mining and manufacturing stuff on the moon, the various weapons concepts, including orbital bombardment, become viable. And bam, there we are. High frontier is a national security necessity. Nations will try to claim as much of the moon as possible. You know, there's the, was it written by Mike Solana or just published in Pirate Wires? The Moon Should Be a State.

Yeah, no, that's a Pirate Wires rallying cry, but also a serious proposal by them.

It is.

It is. And I honestly think, I honestly think it's, it's not a bad idea. It's just the other countries might not recognize the U.S. ownership of the entire moon. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like the English did not recognize the Spanish entire claim to the New World and just started making their own claims. So expect as soon as the U.S. does that, the space race is on and countries will speed up their efforts to claim the moon. In fact, the U.S. is probably already in a space race that its citizens and even its decision makers know nothing about. The Chinese, the Chinese have launched dozens of lunar probes and have planned dozens of lunar probes. No country is that interested in lunar geology. They're practicing soft landings on the lunar surface. Number one. Number 2, many people don't know the Chinese have their 2 manned space stations in orbit right now. There's the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station. The reason it's a Chinese space station is because we declined letting them join the International Space Station because we didn't want them stealing the technology. So they said, fine. And they developed their own technology. Or rather developed it on a basis sold to them by the Russians. The Chinese space station is modern. It works, but it is testing long-term astronaut habitation. They essentially are testing life support systems, return vehicles, and even heavy lift vehicles that for now are not reusable. So they're in a way obsolete, but they would be strong enough to bring astronauts to the moon. If the U.S. is not careful, you know, let's be real, Eric. I don't believe Artemis is going to work. I don't think SLS is going to work by 2027. So in other words, I don't think Artemis is going to return American astronauts to the moon in 2027, as is currently scheduled. I think there will be delays. Current statements by Xi. And others in China suggest that they are aiming to go to the moon around 2030. I do believe their statements. And the reason is, if you compare NASA and Boeing's track record of when they promise something happens by a certain year, because of budget cuts, delays, incompetence, graft, they always make it a few years later. It's been a very long time since you could promise we're going to the moon before the end of this decade and So we mean it, right? And I'm sure, I'm sure sort of the current administration wouldn't want to be beaten by China to the moon. So I expect there'll be a last minute rushed effort, just replaced SLS with Starship. Starship is already contracted, I think, to handle the landing part. There's just an unclear reason why the SLS system is supposed to launch astronauts to the Starship. In, I think, lunar orbit or to Lunar Gateway, kind of an unnecessary step, right? The lunar space station, I honestly think doesn't make sense.

Yeah.

So just, you know, just go to the moon directly, do what you need to do, maybe have a base on the surface, then go back to Earth directly. There's no reason to do all of this intermediate dancing. But still, you know, quibbling about mission architecture aside, I think that initial space race might be the start of a new era where, you know, the Chinese are just now getting around to replicating, uh, jumbo jets and they're basically catching up to companies like Boeing that we discussed on previous episodes and also eventually to more functional companies like Airbus. We'll see if eventually companies like Boom Supersonic get into the jumbo jet market. For now, they seem more interested in small planes and their arguments actually await smaller planes are better for supersonic flight. You know, but if we're eventually facing just full-on Chinese competition, I think that there's room for a new aerospace conglomerate that serves both civilian needs and military needs in the U.S. So I think Boeing itself is ripe for disruption. It is ripe for creative, a Schumpeterian gale. To replace it with a more lean, with a leaner company that is less captured by its internal division politics, that is less captured by distributed decision makers, that is less tied to quarterly reports that make money quarterly, but lose money on a decade timescale, right? So I think there's a lot of factors feeding into those unwise decisions. Still, you know, even if the Chinese are number 2 on the moon, Let alone if they're number one. I think this sets the stage for a Mars race. And, you know, at that point, if people are claiming territory on the moon, if people have landed on the moon, if people understand the moon is militarily valuable, they're probably going to focus on it quite a bit, but they will also focus on the prestige of Mars. And just because of that, I think people will start claiming territory. It's kind of funny, but in the 19th century, in the scramble for Africa, the Italians never actually made much money with their colonies. They just felt that they needed colonies to be a respectable European power. So in a, in a very important sense, if the US and China perhaps, or Russia even, are claiming parts of the moon, I think they're just going to start claiming parts of Mars. And maybe that initial kick rather than any commercial interest will be big enough to get the first settlements going. Now, of course, once the first settlements are going, that's where we get to an actually interesting point because I've always been fascinated by the beginnings of city life on Earth. And I have to point out that, you know, I think sociologically, psychologically, life in these Martian environments will be probably very different than life on Earth.

Yeah.

And actually, if you have multiple generations of people born there, it's currently unclear whether humans without some genetic engineering can actually carry a baby to term, a healthy baby to term in under half of Earth's gravity. But let's say for the sake of argument that that can be done, or that people become comfortable enough with genetic engineering that genetic engineering solves that problem. What does Martian culture look like after a few generations? And, you know, why does it change? I think that's like a super interesting big picture topic because, you know, in 1,000 years, people will forget the detail of like the scramble for Mars and the scramble for the moon. But there'll be totally new societies there. And those will have multi-millennia impacts on the future of a wider humanity.

Yeah, no, it's fascinating.

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And I want to get to the, that bigger picture conversation about Martian culture, but first let me re— resummarize some, some things or, or fill in the gaps. So for listeners who haven't followed the, the moon as a state sort of proposal, I want to just briefly share how Parrot Wires outlines the main benefits. So one is strategic and military. I— why would we want to sort of, you know, acquire the moon besides sort of the, the symbolic or spiritual element of it? So the tactical benefits— first is military superiority, you know, giving the US dominance over future space logistics, refueling stations, trade routes, uh, enabling greater surveillance and influence over Earth space activities in general. 2 is economic and resource extraction. The moon holds valuable resources, you know, rare earth metals, titanium, helium-3, which could reduce dependence on terrestrial supply chains and foreign adversaries. 3 is technological industrial edge more generally in terms of advancements in robotics, space manufacturing, infrastructure, giving the US a leading role in developing space-based economies and industries. And then lastly is, as you were kind of alluding to it, just the geopolitical leverage in terms of beating China and Russia to a permanent moon settlement would prevent them from establishing territorial claims and, you know, allow us to shape space governance in the future.

And, you know, the Chinese and the Russians have all the same incentives.

Yeah.

You know, I think we are probably underestimating Russian engineering at this point. I think they will replicate reusability. Currently, reusability is a Same thing that has been achieved by SpaceX and Blue Origin is well on the way. And I would expect the Chinese will be sort of number 2. And at that point, when the Chinese are number 2, I think the very same treaties for space technology cooperation that have bootstrapped the Chinese program from Russian technology will probably bootstrap the reusable rockets from Chinese technology. So unless there was a worsening of relations between Russia and China, we should just assume that when China gets the reusable launch vehicle, The Russians are not far behind and the Russians basically copy the successful Chinese design and implement it. So probably again, both countries will have worse scale. They'll have these reusable super heavy launch vehicles. They'll be able to go to the moon. They'll be able to go to Mars. So let's, let's start talking about a few things here. Now, genetic engineering throws a big wrench in all of this. For example, The simple truth is that if either of us went to orbit for 2 years, we would not only lose bone mass, we would permanently lose muscle mass. There would be a weakening of our heart muscle, right? And, you know, we can go back to the gym, I can get my gains back, but my heart muscle is going to stay weaker permanently. That is actually a really clear indicator that human bodies are not designed for zero gravity. There are a variety of reasons we might want to, you know, full stop in our modern society. Just maybe we should tell our muscles to stop shrinking quite as fast because we're no longer calorie constrained. So like on Earth, you know, you go to the gym, can you imagine how wonderful it would be? You go to the gym once a year, you work out, and then you just don't work out, but your muscles kind of stay functional. I think for a very sedentary life, like the kind we tend to live, We're already maladapted. So really when we're talking about the difference between being, you know, on a laptop or being in zero G, these are both already maladapted situations for the human animal, for the human being. But like, let's say that we don't genetically solve this. Anyone who grows up on Mars will physically be too weak to ever be comfortable on Earth. Like they'll probably be able to visit, but it's going to be very difficult for them. Like their heart will struggle. They're going to have difficulty, you know, even with weight training on Mars. Let's say if like, for example, everyone just wears a 50 or 80 pound weighted suit on Mars as they're growing up and you, and you swap out the suits as you're growing up and you go back to Earth, inevitably it's going to be physically strenuous. Now, we don't know whether you fully adapt or not, but let's just say that for the sake of argument, the immigration ratchet, the colonization ratchet is one-sided. How might Americans or Australians have felt about Europe had it been physically impossible for them to ever go live back in Europe? I think that's not a question we, we ask ourselves. But I think we might see on Mars a shockingly fast ethnogenesis where the Martians themselves think they're going to emit. I think they're going to start saying, we don't want anyone from Earth coming much faster than they ever started saying that on in Australia or the Americas or whatever. And like, even in Australia and the Americas, what did it take? Like 100, 200 years for people to be even averse? To more colonization or more immigration from particular sources. Not so much from England. So I do think nationality here matters. And I do suspect that Martians, if, you know, part of Mars was a U.S. state, or if the moon was a U.S. state, I think they would probably identify as Americans for a surprisingly long time, but the identification would eventually fade. So the relationship between, say, the Earth's moon, if you have many millions of people, or Mars and the United States government or any government, I think will be very similar to the relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia. They're going to have a particular favorite country. It's sort of the country that started culturally, politically, economically. They might favor it. They might want to be involved in Earth politics for the sake of it. But they will probably want to limit even migration from that favorite country because they'll pretty straightforwardly say, hey, you know, you're coming to Mars. You can always go back. It's very hard to go back. It's a many-year journey, but you can actually go back. I'm stuck here. The success of this colony is like all we have going for us. If this colony sort of fails, like our descendants don't really get to go. back to Earth. Now maybe they go to the asteroid belt or somewhere else, but still, you know, it's a very, it's a very bought-in perspective. And because of this, because of this, there might also be a sort of resentment for the wealth of Earth. Now this might seem a little bit unusual to talk about, but you know, if you imagine the early life in any sort of settlement, was usually not that great, and often colonies would be evacuated. On Mars, the material expenditures necessary to sustain human life are much higher than on Earth. So I think the Martians will tend to view Earthlings as spoiled. It's like, you know, you don't even need to work for your own atmosphere. The air is just breathable. Like it will seem like Earth is easy mode and they're hardcore. So they will have this sense that we're spoiled by our environment, that the environment's kind of wasted on us, that, you know, earthlings, when they come to Mars, they don't know how to deal. They don't know how to live. They're not serious enough. They're frivolous. And I think you get there after you have something like 2 generations, let's say. Because as long as your parents are earthlings, you can't really be that anti-Earth or Earth skeptical. But once you get 3 generations removed, it starts being, you can, you can make the claim pretty straightforwardly, oh, the best people already left Earth. There's going to be a certain amount of pride in this very distinct way of living. Now, we don't know how rapid future terraforming technology might be. AI really does change this. Robotics truly do change this. It's unclear, but I think the likeliest future is that people will live in enclosed habitats. So the social life will also not be like the social life on a village. Yes, or in a village or in a city on Earth. It will be more like life on a submarine. If you think about it, the submarine is an enclosed space. It's loud and cramped with machinery. The machinery is there and accessible to humans so that humans can maintain it even underwater. So the same principle applies on Mars. The machinery will often be pressurized so that humans can easily maintain it. The machinery that's not pressurized, well, that's harder to maintain and mustn't fail. Everyone in a submarine is in the same boat, literally, right? A leak could sink the whole submarine. Well, a leak can depressurize a whole Martian colony. And I'm sure there'll be like various fail-safes and various means of like, you know, locking up rooms. There'll be like an alarm. It'll be like a fire alarm and all the doors close and one of the rooms is depressurizing. And then we go repair it and then it's a hassle, but everyone is like, okay, fine. We're now going about our day. The whole colony's not going to be exposed, but I think this will produce a very strong sense of community that we will find unusual. Now on Earth, if you have a village that does communal farming, like say in West Africa or in some parts of Eastern Europe, there's a different form of communal farming, or China, that over the centuries resulted in a very different family structure. Than societies where you basically had yeoman farmers. So there's a massive difference. You probably, I don't know, have you ever read anything on the Hajnal line in Europe? It is an anthropological line where on different sides of it, there's a practice of like sort of early marriage and cousin marriage is more prevalent. And on the other side of the line, you know, marriage is delayed and cousin marriage is infrequent. So you can have centuries-long consequences to who do people, how is property distributed in a village or city? Is it communal? Is it individual? There can be centuries-long consequences as to who you are marrying or who do you tend to marry, right? And then, you know, cousin marriage in the Western world is sort of like the butt of all jokes. It's the butt of jokes, but in a lot of the rest of the world, it's like One of the only groups of people you can actually trust is family. So marrying within a family is a way to keep property within the family. And, you know, societies that tend to practice a lot of cousin marriage tend to be very clannish. So where does this leave us with Mars? Well, and we are of course in the realm of speculation. I'm just speculating off of currently displayed human behavior. Now, assuming that, you know, we solve the fertility question And let's say that the Martians, even after radiation sickness and low-G pregnancy complications, let's say they somehow eke out a TFR. They have a fertility rate of like, I don't know, 2.4, let's say, which is about modern Israel's TFR. I don't think they're going to go much higher than that for a variety of reasons, even if they were hyperfertile cultures. To be frank, you know, early American colonists were actually known for having unusually high fertility. Compared to their English relatives back in the, back in the British Isles? Well, because the land was very abundant, right? After you defeat the Native Americans, you have a lot of land. It's easy to feed people. On Mars, land will be always very expensive. Like, if we mean living space, right? Uninhabited, irradiated land filled with minerals, that will be abundant. Farmland will be rare, scarce, and like intensely cultivated, and habitable space will be at a premium. Because of this, you can't really have families with 10 kids. You can't have families with 6 kids. You probably can have families with 2 to 3 kids because people want children. You probably also need to marry relatively late. So I suspect Martians will have children in their late 30s. I think they will have to work and prove themselves to their own communities because I think they will basically, I think these submarine-like communities will actually be surprisingly communal. There'll be surprisingly little privacy. Now, this doesn't mean that they're not going to be an independent people. I actually think different settlements on Mars. will be fairly isolated from each other. In a way, the sort of idea of, okay, you have a roommate. Well, what if you had an atmosphere mate? Like there's someone that, you know, shares the same air as you do. Maybe that'll come to be a familial relation. You know, we live in Habitat 17. We're all, we all share that we breathe the same air might become a phrase as relevant as we share the same blood.

Right.

Because we're maintaining the same atmosphere scrubbers, right? We're maintaining the same life support systems together. And if we as a community fail to maintain our Earth, like at best, a different community has to save us. And then we're part of that community and we're sort of impoverished secondhand citizens. And they would be secondhand citizens because like I said, these communities are going to value hardiness, self-sufficiency, if only as a cope. For why their life is actually a little bit harder and poorer than it is on Earth in some ways, right? People on Mars will, for starters, like you won't be able to afford a pool. I mean, when I say it like that, it's, it's pretty self-explanatory. But if technology keeps going forward on Earth, well, you know, I wouldn't be shocked if eventually everyone kind of has a pool, or if they don't have a pool, it's because they don't want one, right? Water is cheap. And on Earth, we solve water through desalination, as I explained. Water will not be solved on Mars for a long time. Desalination is not easy. And, you know, so on and so on, right? And of course, there'll be more important things to spend the labor on. But seriously, because they value self-sufficiency in their identity versus Earth, I think they will value self-sufficiency from the other colonies. So it's, it's starting to sound, if this is starting to remind you of certain kinds of science fiction, I think that's not a coincidence. There's a very loose analogy that can be played with the Fremen of Frank Herbert's Dune, right? Where they, they come to be obsessed with like water economics and saving water and the water of your own body in their culture is on loan from your tribe. It's not really yours. I don't think it'll go quite that as far, but I think that the Martian culture will turn out to be very oriented towards life. In small groups of people. It'll tend to be, it'll tend to value very hard work. It will tend to value frugality. It will value responsibility. And in some ways, it's going to be, it's going to be less compassionate with misfortune per se, or rather it'll be very judgmental of incompetence. It will have High affordances for helping those, you know, who share your air, who share your life support system, but less interested in helping those with a different life support system, with a different city, and even less interested in helping those back on Earth with the moderating factor that I think for a long time, but there will be the sense that, oh, we're kind of a state of the United States or we're a province of China. Or we're a province of Russia. But I think just as on Earth, all you need is like one big war and that sort of patriotism starts to fade away. It's no coincidence that when the Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians fought for the British Empire in World War I and World War II, each of these wars notably weakened, not strengthened their British identity. So if say the U.S. and China go to war, And the lunar colonies are blowing each other up and there's survivors. I think after the war, the lunar colonies, the remaining people in the lunar colonies are less inclined to think of themselves as Chinese or American and more inclined to think of themselves as whatever lunar culture or identity they've picked up. Now, I don't think Mars colonization, by the time Mars colonization is very advanced, whatever possible great power conflict has happened between China and the US will have happened. And at most there'll be like remaining smaller tensions, right? One of these powers is going to become after 100 or 200 years, clearly the greater power. So I don't think we can forecast the geopolitics there of the distant Martian future. Still, I could see them being involved in one great Earth war. I could see World War III Being a multi-planetary one, or World War IV being a multi-planetary one. And after that, there'll be this kind of period of more isolationist perspectives. And I think that this follows from the limitation of technology though. Once you terraform Mars, you might actually see a profound transformation of Martian culture. And I guarantee you that there'll be a debate in Martian culture. Whether they even want to terraform Mars after a few hundred years, because they will come to value this life and they'll say, well, this is how it's naturally supposed to be. And this is how we cultivate and maintain these hard virtues that we've won over many centuries of struggle. And if we terraform our atmosphere to be Earth-like, we'll be soft like those people back on Earth. I think ultimately practicality will win. Eventually they'll decide to just terraform the planet. But I bet they'll fight a cultural war over it.

Yeah, I was going to ask what kinds of things they'll have cultural wars over.

Yeah, I think, I think the terraforming of Mars, if it's taking a few hundred years, by the time it's half completed, there'll be people advocating that it should not be completed. That actually things are good enough because we can survive just fine and there's no reason You know, there's no reason that we should spoil these like landscapes, these like harsh, beautiful red landscapes we've all grown to love because your sense of aesthetic does shift over time. I mean, I think part of the reason that say Saudi Arabia is not yet terraformed is because people in Saudi Arabia are just really used to it looking like desert. The fact that they're rich enough to make it look different, like that's something that Has to be reasoned through pretty explicitly. I also think that there will be, like I said, I think there'll be friction between newcomers and those born on the planet just because of the sheer biological difference. I think humans are like very good at making that distinction already, even when it comes to immigration on Earth. We really like making that distinction. I'm not saying we should, but we do. And I think if you have this way in which, like, you know, I was born on Mars, Mars is my home, I have no choice. Why do you want to come to Mars? What's so special about you? Why should we accept you? Right? I think that starts being a factor once Mars feels like it's filling up. And, you know, Mars, Feeling like it's filling up might happen at a very low population. I can imagine Mars having half a million or a million people and people and individuals will make the case that, look, you know, to give an analogy, all these debates we'd have about housing on Earth where it's physically easy to build more housing, all of those will exist on Mars except radically intensified, and it'll be very difficult to build new housing. Right. Again, now maybe robotics and automation will make it easier to build habitats in the future than it is to build a wooden house in Minnesota today. But I sort of think that's going to take a while for technology to be that advanced. And even if it is that advanced, well, it will still be harder to build a habitat on Mars than it will be to build a giant house in Minnesota with that indoor swimming pool and with the robo-butlers. Right. So even if you push forward technology, they're still going to be slightly richer on Earth despite everything. So in some of these science fiction stories, space is the luxurious part and Earth is sort of this like overpopulated slum. But if you think about it logically, in a way, every single square kilometer of the Earth's surface is like half a life support system already. At most, there's some temperature control you have to do. Maybe you have to provide food, but you can survive as a human almost anywhere on Earth. And that's just not true in space. So I think because space will be at a premium, you know, people on Mars are going to start asking, wait, we have to limit the number of kids we have to like 2 or 3. Why? So that we can take 5,000 Earth colonists? We don't need that. If they want to come, they need to build their own habitats. We're not sharing our habitats. Right? Like, that's— can you imagine that being like a political argument right now? You can probably see that people on Earth will want to build these habitats. So there's this funny situation where, you know, even if Martian colonies from part of Mars declare independence from the US, that just immediately gives the US incentive to claim other parts of Mars. It's not like independence is declared and then suddenly all Earth powers stop colonizing different parts of Mars. I don't think it works that way at all. It didn't even work that way in North America. Like the British and the Americans were still having territorial disputes at the end of the 19th century, right? Trying to claim, deciding which part is going to be Canada of the, you know, modern day Seattle. Like, is that going to be part of the U.S., part of Canada? The Russians selling Alaska and so on and so on. So I think that there will be a new and unseen type of culture that will not be quite clannish, will not be quite communal or nationalistic. I'm sort of imagining it's going to be very no-nonsense sort of, I mean, almost like a Like a very, a very sort of hard culture of somewhat disagreeable and gruff village elders who just all show up and they're like, you know, our air scrubbers are too old. We need more air scrubbers. We don't have any weapons to supply for this, like upgrade of the orbital station. Let the Earth people pay for it if they want to come. For example, right? That'll be very common. It'll be like, okay, we have ourselves handled. We're not necessarily interested in all of this. We're born here. We live here. We kind of don't really care about even people on the other side of the planet, let alone back on Earth. And I think, you know, actually it will probably be good for humanity that that exists because that Is what frontiers are for. Different territories, different terrains, different biomes producing different cultures, I think will give humanity a welcome injection of new cultural evolution.

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Because I suspect on Earth, you know, there's of course the ongoing retreat from globalism and sort of a more nationalist perspective. But I think on the very long timescale, the internet is still sort of doing its magic. Like arguably just this year, young Chinese and young Americans became closer than ever, maybe not in a way that the Americans liked when masses of Americans installed Red Note. I can guarantee you that memetically that brought the 2 groups closer together. Both were exposed. And I think that's sort of inevitably what happens online. The beauty of Mars, by the way, will be that while you'll be able to tweet from Mars, I'm sure, I'm sure Elon will make sure that you can tweet from Mars. The speed of light represents A permanent barrier. Like you won't be able to have a Skype call or record a live podcast like we're doing right now with a Martian. It'll be more like a video letter, right? You'll record a short video or record a short audio, and then you'll listen to it back. And you'll know that this happened 10 minutes ago back on Earth, and then you'll reply. And you'll need a few minutes of talking, and then once you're done talking, it'll be transmitted to Earth and they'll listen to your voice message or your video message. So that is still much more connected than people were historically when they were writing letters, but it's much less connected than people on Earth will be. And there's a very interesting way in which, even though a lot of these arguments apply to the moon, I think the moon's going to have way less cultural divergence because they'll share the same internet. I'm sure there'll be like a fun slur. I'm sure we'll call them moonies and then call us dirt people or something like that. But we're going to be roasting each other on the same internet. And the Martian internet though will feel different. It'll feel more different than say, you know, when you, when you are on different time zones, the internet feels different. It's like, oh, the Europeans have woken up or like people in Asia are logging online, et cetera. It's going to be like that, but an even greater distance. It'll actually start to become its own cultural center.

Would multi-planetary life lead to a more likelihood of a global government or US and China being much more united or just continuous fractious, fragmented fight— fighting?

I think there's no default reason for Earth to really unify. I think that, you know, colonization of the world didn't really cause Europe to unify. In a way, Europe only unified once it lost control of the rest of the world. And this unification, let's be frank, it's not clear how long it's going to even last, right? At the very least, you have like, you know, Russia is an independent power and Britain is not part of the EU, even if it's allied with the rest of the EU. And then there's the EU. It seems to be a relatively rickety structure lately. So I think that Earth will be periodically unified and disunified, but mostly from internal drivers. You could see a situation where, say, 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now, there's an invasion or a war of some kind between Earth and a different planet in our solar system. Might not even be Mars, right? Might be the moons of Jupiter or something like this. At that point, you might see an Earth-like identity come to be, but I think that it's going to be a very, very long time before Earth stops feeling like the center of the universe. I think Earth plus the moon will feel like the center of the universe. Maybe the moon will actually feel the most relevant place in the solar system. Let me explain why. All the manufacturing on Earth, A lot of it can probably be done on the moon. And I think that there might be a lot of economic opportunities on the moon, but the moon is also close enough to Earth that, for example, you can put a data center on the moon and do your compute there just fine. You can build a data center on the moon, right? And because of that, I think that the moon will sort of benefit from the development of space industries and might become Actually an industrially very important part. It kind of sounds funny to think about, but imagine a world where the moon has sort of the yearly exports back to Earth that are equivalent to Japan's exports to the United States, right? Like that's a pretty prosperous society, rich in machinery, still poor in living space, but very, very rich in machinery and capital and robots. And presumably, you know, they benefit, they benefit from those exports quite well.

Fascinating. What else have we not yet discussed as it relates to the future of culture as we, as we go to a multi-planetary species? Obviously we've, we've gotten to some fascinating points here. Is there anything else that you want to make sure that we get to?

Well, I think, um, 3 points. One, the kind of technology we use to go to space will profoundly shape the kind of culture we bring to space. So, If we settle the surface of a planet, or if we settle something like a megastructure, like an O'Neill cylinder, this is going to produce very different cultures. So it's going to be actually very similar to history, right? When you have a farmer culture expand with its technological package, or when you had the Inuit replace the doorstep culture in North America with their, you know, with their better technology. I think that humans will tend to spread out in waves to the different planets of our solar system. I think that there will be some genetic adaptations. People will genetically engineer to fit their planets. I think especially, look, they're going to try to find medical solutions, but I think they're just going to tweak their genome to at least match the gravity of a planet, right? Tweak bone density, tweak muscle mass, tweak how you lose it or not. They might not go further than that, but once you go that far, You might as well select for, for example, for genes that reduce your risk of cancer, right? Or improve your resilience to radiation and so on. Things that have not really been under that much selection here on Earth. So I think that these will still be humans, but they will be genetically distinct again. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a solar system filled with Near humans or humans who are different kinds of humans. If you want to imagine the range in a way, this will be a return to the historical normal. Half a million years ago, if we looked on the Earth's surface, what would you see? You would see Homo floresiensis, the tiny short humans living in modern-day Indonesia. You would see Neanderthals in Europe. You would see modern, basically Homo sapiens in the Middle East and East Africa. You'd probably see some long lost species like the Denisovans in East Asia and so on, recognizably human, using speech, using technology that's not too far away from each other, right? These were all Paleolithic era technologies. And I think we might see a future on the earth where it's not that people won't migrate between these places, they will. But I think that I think that a lot of the, a lot of the physiological and biological differences you'll see between human populations will once more tend to diverge. Like for the last few thousand years, we'd actually been a planet of shrinking genetic diversity.

Why?

Because a few populations became very successful, had a population explosion and replaced all others. Like that's true in all sorts of parts of Europe. We can discuss the genetics of this. Maybe we should have a friend, Razib Khan, sometimes on the show. He could talk about the great population replacements in ancient Eurasia when, you know, farmers displaced hunter-gatherers and then later, you know, horse barbarians replaced farmers and so on. But because of these various effects, we've actually had a decrease in genetic diversity, becoming closer to each other, and the speed of travel has reduced our distance. So this is reducing our memetic and genetic variance over time because we can travel fast. Like, I can go to the other side of the planet in like 20 hours. That was simply impossible a million years ago. That was impossible 1,000 years ago. And even 1,000 years from now, it'll be impossible for me to go to Jupiter in like 20 hours. It will simply be impossible. And because of that, we'll return to a kind of solar patchwork, space stations, habitats, terraformed worlds near Earth, far from Earth, eventually out in the outer solar system. I don't know whether we expand beyond our solar system, but I think the incentives are overwhelming for the colonization of this one. And to give people a perspective, I think that the mass outside of Earth is sort of like thousands of times the mass available on Earth. So the livable, eventually the habitable space in the rest of the solar system will far surpass the entire surface of the Earth. So it'll take a long time, many centuries for Earth to not feel like the center of the universe, but it'll eventually start feeling that way. So that's the last one. A million years from now, Earth is not the center of the action in our solar system.

Wow. The, what is the, say more about the timeframe on the, on the nearer side of like when we're going to start to potentially be multi-planetary even, or even like start planning for it this century.

I think that Starship has made it Easy enough. And the national security incentives for the moon, which is very close, you just, it's a 7-day journey there, basically, even with 1970s technology, right? The moon is actually so close that I wouldn't be shocked if 30 years from now, you or me will be able to just buy a not too expensive ticket to go visit the moon. I think the economics are actually super good. So if we count the moon as multi-planetary, okay. And I Believe we will be, there will be manned settlements on Mars with people born on Mars before the end of this century. And I think what's different this time is that when this was first proposed, they were expecting rapid drops in launch costs that just didn't occur. People need to remember that the space shuttle was a failed attempt at reusability, right? The space shuttle was supposed to be super reusable. The way Starship is, or the way the Falcon rockets are. It was supposed to make it super cheap. It was supposed to be a space truck, not a space limousine, but the cost, the price tag was a space limousine. The approach to reusability didn't work. Okay. Now SpaceX has an approach to reusability that works. And because of that, the cost, the costs go down, right? And in a way, all these other things have become vastly better. Solar cells are vastly better than they were. Batteries are vastly better. Fuel cells are better. Materials are better. Robotics is better, right? Every single aspect of technology, the last time humanity dreamed about colonizing space, has improved while we were waiting for launch costs to go down. And now finally launch costs are down. So I actually suspect we're going to make up for lost time. I think that by the 22nd century, I think there'll be millions of people living off-world. And I think by the 23rd century, if humanity still exists and we've not been wiped out by AI or replaced ourselves by AI, there'll be billions of humans living off planet. Again, this is all still predicated on Do we solve fertility on Earth? If we don't solve fertility on Earth, I think we'll still colonize space, but it'll be this sort of overflow, right? A lot of talented people will go to space. They'll go to space. They won't have a lot of babies, but they'll do interesting work. And new adventurous people will constantly leave Earth to go as Earth's population itself starts to slowly shrink. So the economic incentive to settle space is high, but only if you also solve— reproduction in space, do you get this effect of cultural and biological evolution where we get to explore more of what it means to be human? I think we will still see humans and we will see something like, you know, a universal man emerge, like a man that is not just an earthling. And I think that'll be an important step in our, in our evolution. Maybe one last question.

I'll get you out of here. What if, what if we're underrating sort of AI development or the speed of it and we get, you know, AGI and get it sooner than we think? How does that change your prediction for timing or just what that means for—

Humans will live in space as a novelty. You'll like have a golf course on Titan because why not, man? And also you love the view and you love knowing that it's an actual physical planet above you. The Jupiter looming in the sky is not just a holographic projection, right? And you'll talk to your AI and you'll be like, you know what? I want to freeze myself and I want to go to Alpha Centauri. And the AI is going to be like, well, that's a weird request, but okay. And it's not going to be that weird that you and the AI, you go travel off. So I think it'll be much more of an eccentric pursuit and then there'll be fashionable places to live. And I think still humans will choose to habitate in weird places in space, but that's sort of assuming this like extreme luxury society. You could imagine a situation where, for example, actually the AI is pretty ethical and they value nature. And they define us as part of nature. So humans, you know, humans are safe on the Earth, preserve, you know, you can't increase the temperature of the Earth by more than 3 degrees with your data centers. We've got to preserve our natural heritage. But, you know, Mars, whatever, Mars can be turned into Calputronium. So that's, that's one possibility. But again, the problem is once you start talking about truly agentic, truly superhuman intelligence, I think you hit the boundary of the Vernor Vinge definition of the singularity, right? This almost an event horizon past which you can't really predict things very well. All my predictions were based on something like useful, but not actually super intelligent AI, right? And that's, you know, if human evolution and settlement continues with only incremental assistance. From computer systems and artificial intelligence. With that, you know, I, I do think the real estate in the solar system is pretty valuable. And I wouldn't be surprised if the AI decided to, instead of building its own nuclear reactors, to start, you know, disassembling various planets, maybe other than Earth, and building something crazy like a Dyson sphere to capture The sun's energy to power its compute. Like I can imagine, you know, scenarios like that where our near— the sky looks very different after the AGI revolution. And it's just economically impossible for anyone on Earth to outbid the AI and like say buy Mars because, you know, the AI will be so much more economically productive than we are, for example. So there's situations other than Let's call it luxury space consumerism and human extinction that are possible, uh, where something like a transformation of the space economy still happens. Uh, but I think it is baked in. I think either a human or a machine-led transformation of the resource base that is our solar system into a true economy. I think that's overdetermined.

Um, that's a great note to end on. Semmo, this has been a fantastic discussion and exploration. And as always, until next time.

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