There will be sex in space: Mars, science and the dictates of biology and human culture

Lets start by stating the obvious: Its far easier and cheaper to fix the problems of this planet than to find a way to live off-Earth.

What are the challenges that might make us want to find a new home in space? The ultimate demise of Earth will occur in four billion years when the Sun runs out of its nuclear fuel. At that point, the Suns core will collapse and the stars violent reconfiguration will eject a layer of gas that will engulf the Earth and cook the biosphere. But long before that, the Sun will start to burn hotter as it consumes its hydrogen; about half a billion years from now, the temperature on Earth will have risen enough to make the oceans boil.

Those timescales are long enough that we might be forgiven for not getting too worried. The best metric for proximate danger is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Starting in 1947, a group of scientists and engineers created the Doomsday Clock to show how far we were from apocalypse. As the threat of nuclear holocaust receded, the proximity of the clock to midnight started to take into account the possibility that through climate change, biotechnology, and/or cyber-technology we could cause irrevocable harm to our way of life and the planet. The clock sat at two minutes to midnight in 1953, at the nadir of the Cold War. In 1991, it receded to seventeen minutes to midnight with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2012, however, it read five minutes to midnight because of a surge of nuclear weapons in the hands of small, unstable countries, and the sense that climate change may have passed a tippingpoint.

Many voices have weighed in on the subject of leaving the Earth. Carl Sagan put it this way: Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaringnot from exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. Science fiction writer Larry Niven was more succinct: The dinosaurs became extinct because they didnt have a space program. We may be able to fend off impacts from space, but physicist Stephen Hawking sounds the alarm about other threats: It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

A mass exodus from Earth is implausible. After all, it costs $50 billion just to send a dozen people to the Moon for a few days. Elon Musk may claim hell reduce the price of a trip to Mars to $500,000, which is a hundred thousand times less, but that seems unlikely at the moment. If the Earth becomes contaminated or inhospitable, well have to live in bubble domes, fix it, or suffer through it. Nonetheless, in this century a first cohort of adventurous humans will probably cut the umbilical and live off-Earth. What issues will they face?

Beyond survival, their first issue is their legal status. As weve seen, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty addresses ownership. According to Article II, Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. That seems transparent, but it doesnt mention the rights of individuals. Bas Lansdorp, the CEO of Mars One, said his legal experts looked into the treaty. He thinks that what goes for governments also goes for individuals in those governments. If Mars One achieves its goal, thirty people will settle the red planet by 2023; the gradually expanding settlement will use more and more Martian land. Lansdorp insists that their goal isnt ownership. It is allowed to use land, just not to say that you own it, he says. It is also allowed to use resources that you need for your mission. Dont forget that a lot of these rules were made long ago, when a human mission to Mars was not within reach.

Some space players claim altruistic motives, but none of them can succeed without revenue to fuel their dreams. What happens when profit is the only goal?

Large multinational corporations are bound by international trade law, but they could plausibly argue that they have the right to use, even to exhaust, the resources of an extraterrestrial body. A government that wanted to appropriate land on the Moon or Mars might withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty, and its unlikely it would suffer any serious -consequences. Even Mars One exists in a legal limbo. Bas Lansdorp needs to fund his $6 billion mission: Imagine how many people would be interested in a grain of sand from the New World!

At some point, the debate will stop being hypothetical. The history of colonization of the Earth shows that a claim of ownership is irresistible. Each succeeding generation of settlers who are born and die beyond Earth will feel less connection to the home planet. They are likely to chafe at the rules and regulations imposed from afar. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, deputy director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law and a legal adviser to Mars One, says, I assume at some point these settlers will become more detached from Earth, and will live by their own rules.

The historical example of Manifest Destiny is misleading in the context of space colonization. Countries have grown and gained resources on Earth by seizing territory and displacing or subjugating the original inhabitants. Even in the twenty-first century, the stains of this brutal history persist. Space is a new resource. The people who leave Earth wont be taking land from anyone. Eventually, theyll have to make everything they need to survive and prosper. They will create their own wealth. It will be hard to hold them to any Earth-centric legal framework if they want to be independent.

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There will be sex in space: Mars, science and the dictates of biology and human culture