[ExI] Three books - The case against humans in space

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-08-29 06:03, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:
> Book Review     The case against humans in space
> Three books push back on a rising tide of optimism about space 
> settlements.
> By Becky Ferreira     August 22, 2025
> 
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/22/1121428/case-against-space-travel-book-reviews/>
> Quotes:
> The Weinersmiths puncture the gauzy fantasy of space cities by asking
> pretty basic questions, like how to populate them. Astronauts
> experience all kinds of medical challenges in space, such as radiation
> exposure and bone loss, which would increase risks to both parents and
> babies. Nobody wants their pregnant “glow” to be a by-product of
> cosmic radiation.
> 
> Advocates for human space exploration reject the zero-sum framing and
> point to the many downstream benefits of human spaceflight. Space
> exploration has catalyzed inventions from the CAT scan to baby
> formula. There is also inherent value in our shared adventure of
> learning about the vast cosmos.
> Those upsides are real, but they are not remotely well distributed.
> Mandel predicts that the commercial space sector in its current form
> will only exacerbate inequalities on Earth, as profits from space
> ventures flow into the coffers of the already obscenely rich
> 
> All these authors ultimately conclude that it would be great if humans
> lived in space—someday, if and when we’ve matured. But the three books
> all express concerns about efforts by commercial space companies, with
> the help of the US government, to bypass established space laws and
> norms—concerns that have been thoroughly validated in 2025.
> ---------------------------------

These are all mere technical challenges that bioengineering can 
overcome. The proof-of-principle lies in all the known organisms that 
are better suited to live in space than baseline H. sapiens. Take for 
example the radiotropic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans that thrive in 
Chernobyl using melanin-mediated radiosynthesis to eat radiation like 
photosynthetic plants eat light. We can therefore either alter our genes 
to make us extremely radiation resistant or shield our spaceships and 
space dwellings by farming radiotropic fungus in the bulkheads to act as 
edible radiation shields.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIgSQOtlOG0

> 
> They support the case for robots and AI to do space exploration on
> behalf of humans.
> The future may belong to our AI children.

AI cannot colonize space on our behalf anymore than we can breath air on 
behalf of our fish ancestors. The notion is meaningless. If humanity 
cannot survive in deep space, then it has no hope of survive deep time. 
If humanity thinks clinging to mother earth offers it long term 
security, then it is sorely mistaken. To stay put here on earth is 
certain death. 99.9% of all earth-bound species that have ever existed 
have gone extinct. Not a single single space-faring species has ever 
gone extinct. Do the math.

Stuart LaForge