The Expanse and Philosophy. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ Expanding beyond our solar system could allow humanity and its descendants somewhere between 10³⁴ and 10⁷¹ lives of normal duration.⁴

      In other words, failing to colonize our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps even the Virgo Supercluster could cost the future between 10¹⁸ and 10⁵⁵ human lives.

These numbers are so immense as to defy understanding. Here is one provocative way of thinking about the matter. The worst disaster in human history so far has been World War II, which cost about 50 million human lives over six years. Sticking to conservative estimates, failing to colonize the Milky Way would be worse—one hundred trillion times worse. Put somewhat differently, the loss would be approximately equivalent to one World War II every second from 1200 BCE (at the time of the Late Bronze‐Age Collapse, the writing of the Rigveda, and the zenith of the Shang Dynasty) to our own present day.

A moment ago, we noted that it is easy to understate the importance of humanity’s ability in The Expanse to travel across and colonize the solar system. Now we can see why. Moving beyond the confines of the Earth is the first step toward achieving humanity’s interstellar potential, what Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, has called our “unlimited cosmic endowment.”⁵

Colonizing at the Speed of Light

Yet, once it becomes evident just how much is at stake, another point comes into view. It matters greatly, not only that humanity expands, but how quickly. On one self‐consciously conservative estimate, every second that we delay colonization of the Virgo Supercluster is “a loss of potential equal to about 10¹⁴ potential human lives.”⁶ That is one thousand times as many human lives as have existed until now.

      The opening of the Ring System is even more important than it might seem. About 130 years prior to the beginning of the series, humanity had barely begun to colonize our solar system. The settlement on Mars was dependent for resources on Earth, a planet that was struggling to provide its own inhabitants with the wherewithal for survival. The invention of the Epstein drive changed this situation radically. By allowing humans to move much more quickly throughout the solar system, the inhabitants of both Earth and Mars could begin to extract and utilize the resources of the asteroid belt and the moons of the giant planets beyond. The Epstein drive’s importance is made clear by the fact that during the first four seasons, the only substantial flashback we see is to Solomon Epstein’s invention of the drive named after him (“Paradigm Shift”). Improvements in the Epstein drive continued for more than a century, and the results rightly impress. As the series begins, the construction of the LDSS Nauvoo, a generation ship with the most sophisticated Epstein drive ever created, the G4000, is close to completion. The G4000 is so powerful that eight of them can accelerate a ship that is 2 kilometers long and half a kilometer wide to over 10 percent of the speed of light. By way of contrast, the tallest building as of this writing, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is not even half the size of the Nauvoo. Moreover, the fastest humans have managed to travel in space is 0.0037 percent of the speed of light, just 1/27th of the speed of this generation ship.

Even so, the Nauvoo would have taken about 100 years to reach its goal, the Tau Ceti system, a mere 12 light years away. The journey of the Nauvoo would have exposed its crew to a century’s worth of extrasolar risks, all of which it would have to endure without any possibility of help. Moreover, even if the inhabitants of the Nauvoo were lucky enough to avoid 100 years of extreme danger, Tau Ceti might not have a world habitable by human beings. The journey could easily have been a literal dead end for everyone involved. Now, consider the fact that the Milky Way’s diameter is between 170,000 and 200,000 light years. Hence, relying on Epstein drives to explore and colonize the galaxy would take hundreds of million—if not billions—of years and cost an unimaginable amount of future human lives.

      In contrast, the Ring System presents humanity with over 1,300 portals to worlds that they know to be habitable. The system allows journeys that would take unnumbered generations millions or billions of years to be reduced to a matter of months. For example, a mundane research vessel like the Edward Israel traveled from Ceres Station, just beyond Mars, to the planet Ilus in a mere 18 months. Though we are not told how far Ilus is from our solar system, it could easily be tens of thousands of light years. Furthermore, though the Belter settlers on Ilus, such as Felicia, Jakob, and Lucia Mazur, were clearly on the bleeding edge of human expansion, the Ring System allowed them to remain connected with the rest of humanity. They arrived on Ilus with limited supplies, but they planned to extract lithium from the planet so that some of them could return through the ring to our solar system. Unlike the would‐be colonists on the Nauvoo, these settlers didn’t have to do the impossible and plan for every contingency. To be sure, the Belters faced great dangers on Ilus—and not only from Royal Charter Energy’s goons. But colonizing the rest of the Milky Way galaxy via the rings would be many orders of magnitude less risky for individual settlers than doing so while relying on Epstein drives. More importantly, it would also be many orders of magnitude faster.

Unimaginable Opportunities

      We can now return to the debate between Gao and Avasarala. Clearly, Gao underestimated the potential benefits of rapid expansion by means of the Ring System. Not only could doing so provide better opportunities for billions of humans today, it could make possible orders of magnitude more human lives in the future.

      But the debate is not over. We have only looked at one side of the ledger.

The risks involved with using the Ring System are clear from the Eros Incident. Gao acknowledges this, but she maintains that, given the “unimaginable opportunities” provided by the Ring System, the “real danger of Eros is that we only react to it in fear.” Always ready with the pithy rejoinder, Avasarala retorts that the real danger of the Eros Incident was “that it was about to kill everybody on Earth” (“Oppressor”). She is concerned with the fates of the 40 or so billion human beings alive at the time of The Expanse. In order for her response to Gao to convince us, Avasarala needs to expand her circle of moral concern beyond those alive today to those who will live in the future. Risking the lives of 4 × 10¹⁰ humans for the sake of the lives of as many as 10⁷¹ humans seems more than reasonable. At that level, the population of the solar system is a rounding error at more than 50 decimal places.

      However, this line of thought is flawed. It involves comparing the gains for all humans who will ever live if we successfully colonize the galaxy with the losses for all humans who exist right now if we go extinct as a result of using the Ring System. This calculation ignores all the humans who would have existed if we either did not use the Ring System or were more cautious in its use, as Avasarala suggests. In other words, Avasarala’s response to Gao is most convincing when we think of using the Ring System as what philosophers call an “existential risk.”

Ord defines existential risk as “a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s long‐term potential.”⁷ If use of the Ring System kills the current generation of humans, 40 billion people die. As bad as that is, the result is actually much worse. It also prevents the existence of all future human beings.

      Recall Parfit’s point: even if we remain earthbound, we might live here for another billion years during which time about 10¹⁶ humans can live sustainably. Yet, our comparison is not the number of humans on Earth, but the number in The Expanse. Humans have already begun interstellar travel and colonizing the galaxy. Even at radically subluminal speeds that will delay colonization of the galaxy by tens or hundreds of millions of years, the potential number of human lives could come within several orders of magnitude СКАЧАТЬ