Warren Ellis: On space travel

Clipped from Wired:

I am writing this in the wake of the announcement -- entirely expected -- that US government funding for Nasa's human space flight initiatives has been cancelled, and any American progress in that area will now be turned over to private enterprise. And if you think that this is a good idea, just ask yourself how reliable your local rail service has been since deregulation.

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

In the past, people have offered me arguments against this. That we should fix our biosphere before running off to another one, for instance -- as if we're utterly incapable of doing two things at once. This sometimes leads to the further argument that the human race doesn't deserve to persist, and that it is arrogance to wish to protect the species and its achievements. I personally believe that if that is your position, you may as well just kill yourself now. I'll help.

People argue that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Honestly, that's an argument that can be applied to pretty much anything. Imagine how many starving people could be fed if, say, a 100 per cent Simon Cowell tax was levied on any instance of Simon Cowell. Imagine if anyone caught spending money on Stephanie Meyer novels could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser.

All of these arguments are weak minded bullshit and fail to address the central issue: if animals all live in the same place, one little accident can remove them entirely from the gene pool. And I didn't spend all these years evolving the ability to operate a bottle-opener to have all possible minions immolated in one go. (It may be true that other biospheres are far less kind to human life. But so is Glasgow. We adapt.)

The second good reason is why the Chinese space programme may not, in the final analysis, galvanise any one into kick starting human space flight initiatives: because the Chinese will probably end up going to the Moon robotically, and robots don't make our metaphorical nipples stand up. Well, not unless we're one of those creepy techs from Japan hellbent on constructing android whores in the near term.

Wired may be the wrong place to say this, but robots going places is not as exciting as humans going places. The only people clamouring for space launches to Mars to recover the wandering robot skateboard currently stuck in a sandtrap there are, well, the people who want to make it their android whore. And when your Martian explorer is not exploring any more because it's stuck in a sandtrap, it means you've sent a skateboard to do the job of a human.

Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it's in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.

We're almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We're just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.

In my life I've seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.