Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space

“What kind of world do we want our descendants in space to inhabit?” asks astrophysicist Nesvold in her thought-provoking debut. Expanding on her podcast, Making New Worlds, she ponders the ethics of space settlement, including how to handle property rights, whether there is a moral way to determine if people can safely reproduce in space (where gravity and radiation levels may affect development), and how to select crews to populate settlements without succumbing to eugenics. Nesvold aims to spark discussion, and her knack for identifying thorny quandaries will undoubtedly do so, as when she addresses the difficulties new settlements will face in responding to crime when a community might be so small that the accused might be the “only person who knows how to fix the water recyclers.” She draws smart historical parallels, warning that the failures of Jamestown’s original colonists, who were mostly upper class and lacking practical skills, could repeat if space exploration becomes the sole province of the wealthy (though she’s quick to note the limits of analogizing the settling of uninhabited planets with European theft of Indigenous land). Nesvold’s timely warning is bolstered by nuanced ethics and her careful attention to how colonization has historically been accompanied by injustice and violence. This raises hard questions that deserve serious consideration. (Mar.)