Sovereignty
Interesting post by Dan Schrimpsher (via Hobbyspace) on sovereignty, and whether future space colonies could one day achieve it.
I'm not that interested in the philosophical discussion of what sovereignty actually is, because I think it's pretty simple -- today, sovereignty is a state of mind. Like so many things in social currency, it's a shared agreement between people that exists pretty much only in our heads. Modern civilisation is founded on these concepts, concepts like law, and money, and decency, for that matter. All are essentially worthless... except for the worth that we choose to give them. Sovereignty is not controlling one's own resources, because in this globalised age, no one really does that. And most nations, even America, have to take the opinions of other nations into account when formulating all kinds of policies. I think the simplest form of sovereignty left today for a nation is the right to have one's own citizens form a government free from direct outside influence. Everything else is increasingly open to interpretation.
Could future space colonies eventually declare sovereignty? Well sure. But it would take the establishment of separate political institutions, because that's really the only domain of sovereignty left. Would this be likely to happen, say, with the moon? Well it depends on what lunar settlement actually looks like. As I've posted before, lunar settlement will only happen in a big way when prices come down far enough to get the private sector involved... and the public sector has proven incapable of bringing prices down in the first place.
Economically, it would be more important for a lunar colony to be self-sufficient than any Earth nation, because transport costs in space will remain high for a long time -- especially anything that needs to be hauled from a planet like Earth, with heavy gravity and thick atmosphere to contend with. That would create an incentive to base manufacturing and other industries locally, which would attract more settlers... so populations could expand relatively quickly. But how long would it take the various lunar bases to feel any kind of nationalistic unity?
The moon's not very big compared to the Earth, but it's big enough. Bases would have all kinds of different locations, and transport between them might not be all that simple. A lot of the colonies will have different functions too. The biggest ones would be multi-purpose free-hold settlements, where pretty much anyone, private or public, would be free to move in. But then there's public-sector research and science stations, there's possibly mining settlements, and others that are single-function. These settlements would have very different views of their relationship with Earth, and would be comprised of very different kinds of people. Also, not everyone wants to be a permanent resident, lots of time spent in lunar gravity will make your muscles waste, and I'd guess most people would work on rotation shifts -- kind of like oil-rig workers, two months on, two months off. There's also the fact that tourism, being the biggest and first major industry, would impose its own character even on private free-hold settlements, especially where language is an issue. Japanese and Chinese tourists, for example, being less likely to speak English, will be more likely to prefer holidays in settlements where staff speak their own tongues. Others, who speak at least some English, would be less fussy... but certainly there would be some settlements that feel far more 'nationalistic', ethnically speaking.
Another thing... children. Obviously when considering the future of nationalist sentiment, we're talking about the second or third generations, at least. For example, most English settlers who came to Australia continued to consider themselves English until the day they died, as did many of their children. It's only their grandchildren and beyond who began to think of themselves as Australians first. On the moon, we've got no idea what happens when you raise kids in low gravity. My suspicion is that children's growth-processes work something similar to that of plants... no, seriously. They need to fight against gravity, and without gravity, they won't know how to grow. We know long periods of microgravity do bad things to adults' bodies, particularly to bone density. My best guess is that raising kids on the moon will probably be fatal, leading to crippling bone-density problems, organ failure, the works. Maybe children could visit, but anything more than say 20 days a year, and 10 days at a time, would be illegal. They're growing all the time, after all.
How many colonists, even those who spent most of their time on the moon and were more 'lunar' than 'earthlings', would do so if they couldn't raise kids? Or if they had to send their kids to Earth boarding schools, or big orbital facilities with rotational gravity? This would all preclude the development of a nationalistic future generation.
For all these reasons, I think nationalism on the moon would take a very long time -- probably until they found some medical cure for the above-stated problems... like seriously advanced nano-technology. Mars might be a better candidate, but even there, the gravity is only one-third that of Earth's, and that might not be enough for children either. Big space stations with rotational gravity would solve the gravity problem, and workers could have and raise kids on them, and would probably develop a more united sense of nationalism too, the station being geographically more united. But space stations, no matter how large (and I'm thinking about something that holds in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people) are owned by someone else -- namely whoever paid to build them, and residents will never be more than renting tenants. Nationalism is predicated on ownership, so that seems an unlikely setting for sovereign movements too.
So I'm not sure we'll be seeing nationalism or separatist movements in this solar system any time soon. Maybe we'll have to wait until faster-than-light travel, and the discovery of Earth-like planets in other solar systems, for that to happen.
I'm not that interested in the philosophical discussion of what sovereignty actually is, because I think it's pretty simple -- today, sovereignty is a state of mind. Like so many things in social currency, it's a shared agreement between people that exists pretty much only in our heads. Modern civilisation is founded on these concepts, concepts like law, and money, and decency, for that matter. All are essentially worthless... except for the worth that we choose to give them. Sovereignty is not controlling one's own resources, because in this globalised age, no one really does that. And most nations, even America, have to take the opinions of other nations into account when formulating all kinds of policies. I think the simplest form of sovereignty left today for a nation is the right to have one's own citizens form a government free from direct outside influence. Everything else is increasingly open to interpretation.
Could future space colonies eventually declare sovereignty? Well sure. But it would take the establishment of separate political institutions, because that's really the only domain of sovereignty left. Would this be likely to happen, say, with the moon? Well it depends on what lunar settlement actually looks like. As I've posted before, lunar settlement will only happen in a big way when prices come down far enough to get the private sector involved... and the public sector has proven incapable of bringing prices down in the first place.
Economically, it would be more important for a lunar colony to be self-sufficient than any Earth nation, because transport costs in space will remain high for a long time -- especially anything that needs to be hauled from a planet like Earth, with heavy gravity and thick atmosphere to contend with. That would create an incentive to base manufacturing and other industries locally, which would attract more settlers... so populations could expand relatively quickly. But how long would it take the various lunar bases to feel any kind of nationalistic unity?
The moon's not very big compared to the Earth, but it's big enough. Bases would have all kinds of different locations, and transport between them might not be all that simple. A lot of the colonies will have different functions too. The biggest ones would be multi-purpose free-hold settlements, where pretty much anyone, private or public, would be free to move in. But then there's public-sector research and science stations, there's possibly mining settlements, and others that are single-function. These settlements would have very different views of their relationship with Earth, and would be comprised of very different kinds of people. Also, not everyone wants to be a permanent resident, lots of time spent in lunar gravity will make your muscles waste, and I'd guess most people would work on rotation shifts -- kind of like oil-rig workers, two months on, two months off. There's also the fact that tourism, being the biggest and first major industry, would impose its own character even on private free-hold settlements, especially where language is an issue. Japanese and Chinese tourists, for example, being less likely to speak English, will be more likely to prefer holidays in settlements where staff speak their own tongues. Others, who speak at least some English, would be less fussy... but certainly there would be some settlements that feel far more 'nationalistic', ethnically speaking.
Another thing... children. Obviously when considering the future of nationalist sentiment, we're talking about the second or third generations, at least. For example, most English settlers who came to Australia continued to consider themselves English until the day they died, as did many of their children. It's only their grandchildren and beyond who began to think of themselves as Australians first. On the moon, we've got no idea what happens when you raise kids in low gravity. My suspicion is that children's growth-processes work something similar to that of plants... no, seriously. They need to fight against gravity, and without gravity, they won't know how to grow. We know long periods of microgravity do bad things to adults' bodies, particularly to bone density. My best guess is that raising kids on the moon will probably be fatal, leading to crippling bone-density problems, organ failure, the works. Maybe children could visit, but anything more than say 20 days a year, and 10 days at a time, would be illegal. They're growing all the time, after all.
How many colonists, even those who spent most of their time on the moon and were more 'lunar' than 'earthlings', would do so if they couldn't raise kids? Or if they had to send their kids to Earth boarding schools, or big orbital facilities with rotational gravity? This would all preclude the development of a nationalistic future generation.
For all these reasons, I think nationalism on the moon would take a very long time -- probably until they found some medical cure for the above-stated problems... like seriously advanced nano-technology. Mars might be a better candidate, but even there, the gravity is only one-third that of Earth's, and that might not be enough for children either. Big space stations with rotational gravity would solve the gravity problem, and workers could have and raise kids on them, and would probably develop a more united sense of nationalism too, the station being geographically more united. But space stations, no matter how large (and I'm thinking about something that holds in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people) are owned by someone else -- namely whoever paid to build them, and residents will never be more than renting tenants. Nationalism is predicated on ownership, so that seems an unlikely setting for sovereign movements too.
So I'm not sure we'll be seeing nationalism or separatist movements in this solar system any time soon. Maybe we'll have to wait until faster-than-light travel, and the discovery of Earth-like planets in other solar systems, for that to happen.
3 Comments:
Well what I want to know about moon colonization is this: how come SF writers are forever imaginging that colonists on the moon and in space are naked? I mean, what is this obsession that Sci Fi writers have with nudity?
I swear, every second SF novel I read features some colony on the moon where people have shed their silly, provincial Earth habit of wearing clothes. Everyone goes around butt naked.
Even CS Lewis, in his sci fi "Out of a Silent Planet", I remember that when three guys go to mars, as soon as it gets a little warm in their space ship, they all take off their clothes.
I mean, c'mon, I'm just sayin the whole concept is kind of dumb. I've spent most of my life in warm climates and a good bit of time in extremely hot deserts, and thankfully I never saw anyone just suddenly become a nudist. (I mean face it, 99% of people don't look so good naked).
I have a follow up if you are interested.
Sovereignty Part 2
Dan
Hi Dan
Interesting discussion. The more i think about it, the more I reach the conclusion that it all depends on the details. Like my idea about raising children above -- such technical details determine demography, and demography (cliche warning!) is destiny. Different colonies will exist under different conditions, with different details. So we're really not going to know for sure what any of this will look like until it happens.
Until then, however, there's always science fiction...
Joel
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