The Race for What is Above Us

I want to tell you a thing that is happening now, that most people do not know is happening. I did not know myself until a few years ago, and when I first read about it I thought it was science fiction. It is not. It is as real as Hadley's closing.

The countries that need energy and raw materials, and cannot easily get more of either on this planet without fighting over them, have started to look at what is above us. The sun, which is stronger in space than on the ground. The moon, which has minerals. The asteroids, which have more.

This has been discussed for seventy years as something that might happen eventually. It has become, in the last few years, something that is happening now.

The United States has passed a law saying that its citizens own whatever they extract from space. Luxembourg has passed a similar law. The United Arab Emirates has passed one. China has a moon programme. Russia has one. India has one. Private companies in various countries are building the machines that will do the work.

The old treaty that says nobody can own anything in space was written in the nineteen-sixties. Everyone has quietly stopped pretending it matters.

The moon has a few specific places that are more valuable than the rest. The poles have nearly permanent sunlight, which means solar panels would work there continuously. The craters hold ice that could be turned into fuel and into water. There is not much of either. The countries and companies that get there first will claim them. There is no-one to tell them they cannot. There is no court that can settle a dispute about a crater on the moon.

The work of getting there, building there, and defending what is built there, will not be done by humans. Our bones weaken. Our muscles fade. The radiation is too much for us. The work will be done by machines — by the same thinking machines we saw at the bus stop, and in the rooms where we find our tribes, and which we will meet more fully near the end of this walk.

And the rules by which those machines operate — what they are willing to do, what they refuse to do, whose side they are on, who their builders taught them to trust — will go with them.

This is not a far-future problem. This is a problem measured in decades, not centuries. Most of the arrangements that will shape how our species operates beyond this planet, for a very long time, are being set up now, by people under the same pressures as everyone else, in countries that do not trust each other, with machines the humans are still learning to build.

We are not having the conversation we should be having about this. The people who could be having it are too busy racing.