Hold the Starships -- an Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on Mars Settlement, Socialists in Space, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Immortality, and the Purpose of Science Fiction

 

Kim Stanley Robinson, 2017, photo by Gage Skidmore, Wikicommons

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most respected contemporary sf writers. While his Mars trilogy,  completed in 1992, inspired Mars settlement enthusiasts, his more recent work, often depicting the ramifications of global warming, is part of the “cli-fi” (climate fiction) movement. I conversed with him via email in spring 2019, while researching Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe (Pegasus Books, forthcoming August, 2020). My main interest was in his 2015 novel Aurora which describes a failed mission to settle a distant star system, leading the protagonist to conclude that star settling was ill-advised. As it turns out, KSR has never been set on conquering the universe.

 

 Does Aurora fairly sum up your views on the limitations of interstellar travel for humanity? Or are you describing just one possible outcome of the effort to settle a "Goldilocks" planet? Do you think that given the opportunity, in the next say 1,000 years, Aurora-like missions, nevertheless, might take place?

Aurora does fairly sum up my views, although it’s also the case that it describes a single example of interstellar travel, so it is not comprehensive by itself. But some characters in it talk about other cases, so the general situation gets discussed in this particular case study, so to speak. I think that although some of the problems that my characters experience are particular to their situation, many of these problems are going to be facing anyone trying the same things.

 As to what might happen in the next thousand years, that’s hard to say. I set Aurora hundreds of years into the future, to allow time to build and propel such a massive thing as Ship (and its lost twin) toward Tau Ceti, so to some extent I did try to imagine what might happen in the far future. But this was to make the realism of the exercise a little sturdier. We are nowhere near ready to launch a starship with people inside it (the case of a tiny robotic probe is different) so it is already an exercise in thinking “what might happen in the next thousand years.” And as such, the book does imagine that there might be people who are interested enough in the project to want to pursue it, no matter the obstacles.

 If they do, they will be ignoring some of the unsolvable problems that get pointed out in Aurora. By unsolvable, I mean there is no future technology or human development that I believe in that can solve them. Here my judgment may be wrong, but I’m trying to make these judgments based on matters of solidly understood physics, biology, ecology, etc.

Were there any specific sf works that Aurora was a response to?

 No, not really— it was more a matter of the entire sub-genre of science fiction that you might call the starship story, or the multi-generational starship.  

 It was a response to what you might call the cultural meme, or simply the idea, that humanity is destined for the stars, with sometimes the corollary that if we don’t become a star-faring species, we are in danger of extinction or will have been some kind of failure as a species. This kind of thinking has a beginning or is marked by Tsiolkovsky’s epigram, ‘Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not meant to spend your whole life in your cradle’—something to that effect, I may be mangling the quote, but the import of it is that. This notion which might be older than Tsiolkovsky, has been taken up by a pretty large number of people, maybe even a community of people who believe it to be true. But Tsiolkovsky and all who agree with that sentiment are in my opinion simply wrong.  In Tsiolkovsky’s time, we didn’t know enough to judge the case well—even how far away the stars were was in dispute, and the nature of the interstellar medium, the speed of light, the nature of other suns and their planets, and so on. Now that we know more about these things, the case has to be reconsidered. New discoveries in biology (radiation effects, the microbiome, etc.) add physical and ecological problems to the case that it simply isn’t possible. The new paradigm might be that life is a planetary expression, and away from its home planet, life withers and dies. This would explain the Fermi Paradox, and anyway is looking like it may be true.

 Specific sf works that I read and enjoyed as novels include Brian Aldiss’s Non-stop, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun (and the Book of the Short Sun sequel). Wolfe’s four-volume masterpiece is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and the three-volume sequel (which returns to the starship) is also superb. The scientific possibility of starships is irrelevant when considering them as a story space. It would be like complaining that Middle Earth isn’t real. So what? As a story space, they are perfectly legitimate.

 So I am not trying to kill a science fiction subgenre that I have greatly enjoyed, but rather the idea that we could really do such a thing, and that we should, or we are failures. That I think is wrong. 

Do you know of any other sf writers who share your skepticism of the interstellar project?

 Geoff Ryman was part of a group calling itself “mundane science fiction” as a kind of movement to focus on Earth, the near future, and what really might be possible. The name was a bit of an inside joke for the science fiction community, as for many years people not interested in science fiction were called “mundanes” and of course there’s the double joke of “uninteresting,” such that I thought the name was maybe two or three levels of irony too far, but it got some discussion about five years ago, and Geoff could tell you more about it…Then the British sf writer Charles Stross has been very good at calculating the true energy and economic needs of many of the big sf ideas, and I think I recall him writing about interstellar attempts from this angle, and therefore skeptically.  

In an In These Times interview you suggested that in the next fifty plus years Mars might merely be the site of a limited science outpost. Are you no longer a proponent of major colonies on Mars? What has changed your ideas here?

Recent findings show perchlorates in the Martian sand and dust at levels very poisonous to humans. That will be a problem. Another is the idea that there might be bacterial life still on Mars, hidden in refugia deep in the regolith where water will be liquified by heat from the planet’s core. These are different kinds of stoppers to any rapid inhabitation of Mars. All along I have considered that the project of terraforming Mars is a great idea that if it ever happens, needs to come in its proper time, which is when we have gotten to a just and sustainable civilization on Earth.  For now, I think it’s a very good project to send people to Mars and set up scientific bases that resemble the bases in Antarctica. Rotating crews would occupy and use these bases and again that’s like Antarctica.

 Major colonies, as you call them, are a very different proposal and I think not practical or needed, and not appropriate even to try for yet. We need to take the process in a stepwise fashion, and the actual terraforming might not start for hundreds of years, nor be finished for thousands of years. That’s okay— there is no hurry. And if it happens it will be one sign of a successful human civilization on Earth.

 I regard my Mars trilogy as a good novel, but not a good blueprint.

 Why do you think so many science fiction writers, many of them who are scientists as well, are stuck on this teleological notion that evolution "demands" we leave the Earth, or that humanity has a cosmic role of spreading "life" or "mind" throughout the universe? Is this a case of myth overpowering clear-headedness?

Yes, I think it is a case of myth. Note how your question slips into the mythic without noticing, because it’s framed by the issue as it’s been discussed so far. “The universe”—no. Our galaxy is I think as far as even the most fervent space believers take the idea of human dispersion. If anyone claims we can get to other galaxies, I am amazed to hear it. There are 400 billion galaxies, maybe more, the count keeps rising, but even the closest ones are really, really far away. We can’t get to them. Some may say “but what about not-yet-discovered jumps over cosmic distances?” I say, nice story, but not likely to happen. And if it did all the problems related to going to even the closest star to us come into play. Navigational problems come into play. No—that part is fantasy.

 I think there is life and mind already spread throughout the universe. My feeling is that since we exist, the principle of mediocrity suggests we are not alone or even unusual. Life may be an aspect of the laws of physics unfolding in time, there is new work suggesting that. So it may be everywhere, and I suspect it is very common. Then evolution is a process that seems to increase the complexity of life forms, so mind too is probably very common.

 So the cosmos doesn’t need us to spread ourselves, to get life spread around. Life is already out there, probably in nearly “eternal return” quantities, as in somewhere else in the universe, right now, some alien is composing something like this very sentence in reply to something like your question. “Right now” being a hypothetical thing of course.

 So— evolution “requiring" anything? It’s more random than that, but say that living creatures try to stay alive. Seems to me true and even part of the definition of life, sort of. So we want to stay alive as a species—I think that’s right. And five billion years from now, our sun will expand and burn this planet up. So we have five billion years to figure out something in terms of species survival; before that time comes, our species' survival is absolutely most likely to occur right here on Earth. So if survival were the criterion, given that we’re endangering ourselves right now, people concerned with that would dispense with the star dispersion project and put their energies to work on sustainable civilization projects here on Earth. But those are hard; and some people want an out from that hard thinking and doing.

 What is your take on current futurists, including Silicon Valley leaders, who take  their cue from Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky, and other Cosmists, and reject death outright?

 It looks religious to me. I don’t want to assume too much about what other people believe, or why. But in that crowd you list in your question, I see a lot of rejection of death. They say it outright. Which makes sense, in the life wants to live category.

 But living things die, and indeed the universe itself is mortal. So really this is about longevity, unless you get to a really metaphysical level of immortality lasting even outside this universe’s history—big thinking there. But really I think it’s about longevity— wanting to live longer. I feel that very strongly myself. So, I think despite that desire, most humans alive now will live to a maximum of about 120 years, and then die. Medicine will keep pushing that age limit, and may have some successes. I’ve written repeatedly about science fictional medicine that extends average lifetimes to 300 and even 600 years. But I think however far out we manage to push average lifetimes, death will come. And the push looks sometimes like it will be against an ever-increasing resistance, the farther we push it out. Not sure about this, no one is.

 So, we used to have heaven. Ordinary people lived with the understanding that there was an afterlife, that we had souls that weren’t connected to our bodies that would outlast our deaths, and were even immortal, existing in an eternity that was really eternal, with no end. This wasn’t a fanaticism or a fundamentalism, but a common belief of the “general intellect” as some call it, or a feeling in the structure of feeling that everyone grew up in and believed. But now that’s gone. Science tells a very specific and evidence-backed, compelling story that seems to suggest our minds and souls are expressions of our bodies, and that when our bodies die, our minds and souls die with them— no more us.

 This can be a frightening thought and it’s certainly disturbing. And there’s a big part of our brains that grew by feeling religious feelings—seems to be partly in the temporal lobe, near where epilepsy and hypergraphia are located when things go wrong there. We evolved to feel religious, and maybe even to feel immortal. A defense mechanism maybe, who knows.

 So, now, many people struggle to find a new story that can hold this desire for longevity or immortality. Science itself provides some of these stories, and we’re in a scientific age, so this is very helpful to bolster this feeling of wanting to live longer than looks likely.

 Add the idea that the individual may die, but if the species lives on, then at least your DNA or your species lives on, so that’s one form of longevity that fits the new paradigm. Starship travel fits into that strand.

 As for personal longevity/immortality, there you get the downloading of your mind or soul into a computer, and what you called “the rejection of death outright.”

 This is my theory to explain this phenomenon. I also had someone recently say to me, “narcissists in particular have a very hard time accepting their own death. It seems to them the only important, or even the only real, thing is dying, so it’s a kind of end-of-the-universe thing.” Now maybe this isn’t fair—or we are all a little bit narcissistic, or at least self-centered, by definition, being stuck in our own thoughts.

 But there is a fairly good set of responses that admits mortality and then tries to get along with that fact as best one can. Stoicism, parts of Buddhism, common sense of some kinds, etc.

Would you say you are more in the camp of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth folks?

 Yes, they were right. They got attacked because their predictions didn’t come true in the time frame they set up. Every prediction about the future of human history is always wrong. But they were right about limits to growth, of human population, and especially of capitalist growth, meaning profit, in the finite system of Earth’s biosphere.

 People who attack that limits to growth thing are like the person falling off the Empire State building and saying at the tenth floor, no problem, it’s fine, etc.

From a socialist perspective, what would be the ideal model for entering space?

NASA. A public government agency, doing space science “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  As such, NASA has always contracted and paid private companies to build some of their stuff. I’d like there to be a publicly-owned utility that did that building, but that’s just pointing to where socialism insists that public goods should be owned by the public.

Then in terms of what we do in space, again I like NASA’s approach; stay safe, don’t get people killed, use robots when you can. Use space for science.

 But by science I include STEM—science, technology, engineering, medicine (instead of math). Space for communications satellites, for weather satellites, etc.—fine. Space for satellites that speed up high frequency trading? No. And so on. Space is only just our home after all. “In space”—we’re in space now. So all the questions apply there too.

 So it’s the total social purpose of all these activities that I think needs to be examined and then prioritized. That to me is also socialism in action.

I'm thinking it might be helpful for sf writers and readers to remember they are not prophets but speculative thinkers. Does this "destiny in the stars" notion come from a confusion between story-telling and prophesy?

 No, I think it comes from an unexamined religious impulse, and a dislike of the idea of one’s own death, as I said above. But there is something important here to think about, in this difference between story-telling and prophecy. Because science fiction is both at once, and that’s part of its power.

 Story-telling can be about things set in the past, present, or future. Past and present are not part of this problem, they are stories we tell. Stories set in the future are always prophecy, although sometimes without insisting “this is the specific thing that is going to come to pass.” Anyone who makes that insistence is always proved wrong. And yet we still make prophecies and they can still be useful. They need to be thought of as exhortations—we should do this—there we get utopias and so on. Or they can be warnings—don’t go this way or you’re doomed! There you see the dystopias and the jeremiads, etc.

 Or you can have the kind of modeling exercise, or thought experiment, that is a kind of if-then statement, for consideration. If we do this, we will get that. This doesn’t have to be too heavily weighted as positive or negative, although usually we judge them pretty quickly that way. But often a mixed picture leads to another mixed picture.  

 Stories do like clarity, though. So stories kind of de-strand complex situations and try to say something clear. Not all that far from the analysis of science.

 So if the distinction you are making between prophets and speculative thinkers is, prophets insist their futures are really going to happen, while speculative thinkers are just speculating, I would go with the idea of sticking to speculation. But there’s an ancient power to prophecy, and every human has thought—I should do this. Or, don’t do that or you’ll die! Etc. So the two are not all that easily distinguished in any given thought.

 What I meant at the start about science fiction being both at once is that sf is like the 3-D glasses you see at movies. One lens is really about the future, a kind of prophecy or modeling. The other lens is a metaphorical or symbolic portrait of right now. Combine the two and what pops is a deep time vision of history, illusory but useful, like the 3-D in 3-D movies. You get History in a story, and looking forward History as part of it. Very powerful, very valuable.