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olks is in fact what climate scientists study there are so many things left for them to study so much we don t know about climate i imagine some climate scientists dearly wish they could study things other than global warming and of course lots of them do what is ironic to the point of hilarity about the episode is this ridley and others are claiming that this is a story about how climate science insists of a simplistic narrative that ignores all nuance but in order to do that they must create a simplistic story devoid of all nuance the fact is that the story is deeply deeply odd for brown s version amounts to something like this climate science is biased and broken and ignores complexities that don t fit its narrative creating a misleading picture meanwhile i have published a paper that ignores complexities that don t fit that conventional narrative and is therefore misleading but the paper is in fact good and i m not at all ashamed of it and its conclusions still apply but also it is also a deliberate partial falsification i was forced to do this for career advancement but only because i d decided that was the case i didn t bother to submit the paper i should have written to see if my preconceptions were correct and in fact i didn t even try to do the work that would have required the fact that nature published the paper just shows that they only look for the simplistic narrative even though their peer review process asked me to go into the complexities but i told them that was not possible and they and the referees accepted my explanation on good faith so shame on nature for publishing this poor work which is in fact also perfectly respectable and useful work because i did it but not as useful as it could have been if i d done the other things that needed doing but which i didn t do because i chose not to or couldn t and it s all a scandal sorry it really doesn t make any sense does it but there you have it posted by philip ball at 9 29 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday september 04 2023 should we colonise space how not to debate that question software engineer astrophysicist and human spaceflight enthusiast peter hague has commented on twitter about my guardian big idea piece assessing the notion of colonising other worlds i debated whether i should respond given that hague s critique is steeped in the kind of vituperative ad hominem attacks that seem to characterize a lot of the discourse coming from advocates of space colonization something remarked on by erika nesvold whose excellent book partly inspired my piece but perhaps a response will serve to illustrate some of the challenges of debating the issues so here goes hague says ball claims there is a dismaying irrationality in the answers and then proceeds to quote mine and cherry pick answers without adequately demonstrating that they are in fact irrational or in fact being specific about what he means by irrational it s actually important because whether some action is rational or not is entirely contingent on what you are trying to accomplish ball s statement has embedded values even though he leaves them unstated perhaps relying on the guardian audience to share them in that case irrational just becomes a word that can describe more or less anybody who doesn t share that worldview i have not quoted anything by hague unless he believes he is stephen hawking i had no idea what hague might or might not have said on the issue i ve simply no idea what he s talking about there the irrationality i have in mind is illustrated by what follows but also by the ad hominem aspects mentioned above one might imagine for example that hague would start by finding out something about the author of the piece he is attacking which would have very quickly revealed that i am not a guardian writer unless every single person who has ever written in the guardian becomes that by default hague quotes me thus the timescales just don t add up climate change either will or won t become an existential risk well before it s realistic to imagine a self sustaining martian settlement of millions we re talking a century or more speculating about nuclear war post 2123 is science fiction so the old environmentalist cliche is right there is no planet b and to suggest otherwise risks lessening the urgency of preserving planet a as for the threat of a civilisation ending meteorite impact one that big is expected only every several million years so it s safe to say there are more urgent worries the sun going out sure in 5bn years and if you think there will still be humans then you don t understand evolution he then says ironically here ball vindicates a point i have made myself a century probably is a timescale for when migration off earth becomes a significant contributor to resolving pressure on the biosphere but this means we need to get started now so that we can get to that point in a century doing so means we only need to juggle human and environmental issues for a finite time and we don t have to just slowly wind down human civilisation huh is anyone suggesting we must wind down human civilization well i guess some might you can always find someone saying anything but it is hardly the default position anyway i don t follow this resolving presumably meaning relieving pressure on the biosphere many forecasts suspect that human population will peak around 2075 2080 and then stabilize i don t see many arguments that off planet settlement is needed to absorb an excess of humans but presumably to make a real difference we d need to see a billion or so decamp on that kind of timescale is that likely to happen i have to say it seems hard to imagine at any rate my point is elsewhere specifically about the popular idea that an off world colony would be a back up for civilization on earth going off the rails the threats we currently face can t credibly be extrapolated to the point where a human settlement on mars say might plausibly be entirely self sufficient and in any event the argument seems incoherent it s like saying that because johnny s behaviour is wreaking havoc in his neighbourhood the solution is to send him to the next town where somehow he ll stop being so antisocial hague adds his complacency about asteroids is not shared by those who study them and the argument about the lifetime of the sun is not used as an argument for immediate settlement by anybody i know of and he doesn t attribute it so we can move on from that this is what i mean about rationality sure we are right to want to monitor asteroids and meteorites because a tunguska size blast over a major population centre could be devastating and bigger ones would be terrible indeed but a blast so great that it poses a truly existential risk to the planet i give specific figures for at kind of threat the chance of it happening in the next couple of centuries say is minuscule if you re kept awake at night because of that fear to humankind you have an impressive capacity for displacement but does hague address this he does not he simply tries to imply that the issue here is a lack of expertise hague then quotes me for some the justification for planetary settlement is not existential fear but our innate drive to explore the settlement of north america and other continents was a prelude to humanity s greater challenge the space frontier reads a 1986 document by the reagan appointed us national commission of space rather clumsily letting slip who it was and was not speaking for but at least because it would be cool is an honest answer to the question why go and he replies this is a low blow he is cherry picking a forgotten government document to try and lob a vague accusation of racism around if he wanted to look seriously at the argument that there are parellels sic between the opening of the american frontier and the opening of the space frontier he might address the work of robert_zubrin who has articulated this far better there is no indication the author has even heard of zubrin though which doesn t speak well to his knowledge of the argument he believes he is rebutting ok there s a fair bit to unpack here first there s the question of whether you really want to hear from someone whose argument goes like this anyone who hasn t heard of zubrin is probably not qualified to write on this issue and i m going to totally guess that the author hasn t heard of zubrin so there you go what s even more absurd is that when it was pointed out to hague on twitter that in fact i very much know of zubrin as he could have discovered without too much trouble he says in effect well that proves my point he knew of him but didn t mention him specifically then it s especially ridiculous that ball ignores his advocacy in favour of skimming ancient nasa documents for some hook to launch his fatuous accusation it s possible that he has forgotten who zubrin is seeing as his interest in the subject is clearly surface level ah so ok i knew zubrin but perhaps forgot about him sorry but christ on a bike also about that forgotten government document someone on twitter kindly pointed out that it is on the contrary it is a significant text whereupon hague says sorry for dissing the document bear in mind i was 5 when it came out so how does this work should i be confining myself only to things that were known or published after hague grew up moving on hague says now he takes a swing at gerald o neill or more correctly he takes a swing at don davis for his famous illustrations of o neill colonies given that the dismissal of o neills entire work seems to be based entirely off aesthetics and lifestyle a lifestyle by the way that although it isn t approved of in the guardian migrants literally risk their lives every day for a chance at sorry what let s come back to the point yes and my point is that there is a long history of presenting life in space as utopian in the case of those famous illustrations at the expense of all scientific credibility just cut out a slice of the american natural ecosystem and plant it in a rotating space colony i don t see a response to that here then at last we get to the meat of the objection if you want to know what to expect from colonies established by billionauts such as musk or jeff bezos perhaps ask their employees in amazon warehouses or the twitter offices many advocates for space settlement are neoliberal techno utopians says the astrophysicist erika nesvold who sell it on a libertarian ticket as an escape from the pesky regulation of governments the space industry doesn t talk much about such things as nesvold discovered when she began quizzing commercial space companies in 2016 ethical questions such as human rights or environmental protection in space typically meet with a response of we ll worry about that later the idea is to get there first hague says ball presents nesvold as an authority and not an activist which is what she is and gives her a platform to basically label bad labels on the enterprise so anyone who has a view different from his even when articulated carefully calmly and in a deeply informed way as in nesvold s book is dealt with not by addressing those arguments but by dismissing said person as a mere activist you see what i mean about longing to see a more rational debate he says it s not explained why space colonies being libertarian is bad nor why they would be run like amazon warehouses this is just a collection of boo words for the particular audience of this paper i think hague is having a lot of trouble distinguishing the piece from the platform in which is appears with which he clearly has lots of issues in any case if a powerful person has an ambition to establish an enterprise i d be curious to see how they have run other enterprises in the past call me naïve but i just have a hunch we might learn something from it sure i can t speak for anyone but myself when i say that i d not want to be living on mars under the aegis and whim of a musk or a bezos i just feel governance is an issue some might like to think about hague quotes me thus if the notion of a colonial transporter gave you a twinge of unease you re not alone associations of space exploration with colonialism have existed ever since it was first mooted in the 17th century some advocates ridicule the comparison there are surely no indigenous people to witness the arrival of the first crewed spaceships on mars but the analogy gets stronger when thinking about how commercial incentives might distort rights afforded to the settlers musk has floated the idea of loans to get to mars city being paid off by work on arrival or how colonial powers waged proxy wars in far off lands and if the argument is that these settlements would exist to save us from catastrophe on earth the question of who gets to go becomes more acute so far it has been the rich and famous then he says correctly sensing he may be ridiculed for this argument ball tries to preempt this but then continues to make equally ridiculous arguments simply because the word colonialism is bad and anybody using it must be planning to become the next east india company reasoning by analogy is not valid i m curious to know what is ridiculous here but there s no indication so it is hard to know what to say personally i think history has things we can learn from so it is worth heeding it i think that s probably quite a common view among historians hague goes on to quotes me perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the columbus comparison however is that it encourages us to believe that space is just another ocean to sail with the lure of virgin lands to draw us but other worlds are not the new world space is harsh beyond any earthly comparison and it will be constantly trying to kill you quite aside from the cold and airlessness the biggest danger is the radiation streams of charged high energy particles from which we are shielded by the earth s magnetic field currently a crewed mission to mars would be prohibited by the permitted radiation limits for astronauts we don t have any solutions to that problem he says in the single point where he makes any kind of technical argument ball immediately fumbles it is not primarily the earth s magnetic field that shields us from cosmic rays well you know what i think i ll go with what nasa says here as they actually send people into space and they are not as lethal as he believes if they were every geomagnetic reversal would be a mass extinction event the possibility of mass extinctions associated with geomagnetic reversals has in fact long been discussed many palaeo scientists anticipate that this might happen but it has been hard to assess not least because it is not clear to what extent the geomagnetic field really does drop to nearly zero during a reversal some studies suggest that while the field rearranges it remains substantial enough to provide a fair degree of shielding nasa again duri...