Human Governance Beyond Earth by Charles S. Cockell

Author:Charles S. Cockell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

8.6 Modeling Space Governance Systems: Where Can We Go from Here?

The case of virtual worlds provides one salient data point for considering the forms of governance which may emerge or be supported in future extra-terrestrial settlement. Substantial work is being done in simulating the social environment of early small-scale deep-space and Mars missions (e.g., the NASA Haughton Mars Project, [30] the Mars Desert Research Station, [31] the Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, [32] and Mars 500 [33]), which builds on decades of extreme environment social research. However, with Mars settlement actively proposed and debated, research into socio-cultural issues of permanent extra-terrestrial settlement is no longer premature. As the remote Burning Man festival was viewed as a model by the designers of SL, (Au 2008) we may look to extant and custom-built physical communities as models for extra-terrestrial settlement: Arizona’s Arcosanti and Biosphere 2 have been useful experiments in that regard. Beyond the sort of ethnographic work in virtual worlds which I have performed, custom platforms may be created for social science experimentation, as economist Edward Castronova has long advocated (Castronova 2005).

As Malaby (2009) documents and my own work supported, virtual worlds saw a socio-cultural disconnect between designers and users, which had significant negative ramifications on governance and culture. Designers—predominantly software engineers—valued technical skills, a do-it-yourself ethic, and expected the users of their virtual-world platforms to be similarly motivated. Users, however, tended to value aesthetics, social interaction, consumerism, and conspicuous consumption/status display. Much of the story of designer/user interaction within virtual worlds has grown out of the resultant clash of values and practices. The potential for a similar conflict to arise between aerospace engineers and off-planet emigrants is high. Modeling, simulation, and ongoing social science research may aid in shaping the design process to prevent or mitigate clashes over values, technologies and processes, and may make the difference between the success or failure of a future settlement.

This story of the mis-fit between the techno-libertarian ideals of entrepreneurs and engineers on the one hand and early adopters of social technologies on the other is a cautionary tale in at least one additional respect: besides suggesting the need for building lessons learned into the design process, it suggests that there may be a fundamental disconnect between the types of people likely to build and inhabit space settlements and the values and practices most likely to produce sustainable societies in those habitats. In that respect, Marsden’s examination of Indigenous practices for long-term sustainability (Marsden 2013) may prove crucial: drawing on the experiences of those cultures which have survived longest in extreme environments may be the key to reshaping space settler’s cultures so as not to propagate a dynamic shown to be problematic in analogous environments (a point also made by Cockell 2013, p. 70, n. 7).

It may be that rather than a shortage of space libertarians to inhabit the envisioned spaces of advocates and entrepreneurs, we may instead choose to address a shortage of space communitarians, and turn to a set of best

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