The Race for What is Above Us

I want to tell you a thing that is happening now, that most people do not know is happening. I did not know myself until a few years ago, and when I first read about it I thought it was science fiction. It is not. It is as real as Hadley's closing.

The countries that need energy and raw materials, and cannot easily get more of either on this planet without fighting over them, have started to look at what is above us. The sun, which is stronger in space than on the ground. The moon, which has minerals. The asteroids, which have more.

This has been discussed for seventy years as something that might happen eventually. It has become, in the last few years, something that is happening now.

The work of getting there, building there, and defending what is built there, will not be done by humans. Our bones weaken. Our muscles fade. The radiation is too much for us. The work will be done by machines — by the same thinking machines we saw at the bus stop, and in the rooms where we find our tribes, and which we will meet more fully near the end of this walk.

And the rules by which those machines operate — what they are willing to do, what they refuse to do, whose side they are on, who their builders taught them to trust — will go with them.

This is not a far-future problem. Most of the arrangements that will shape how our species operates beyond this planet, for a very long time, are being set up now, by people under the same pressures as everyone else, in countries that do not trust each other, with machines the humans are still learning to build.

We are not having the conversation we should be having about this. The people who could be having it are too busy racing.