Off-Earth Geoethics (by Ilan Kelman, UK)

iapgeoethics
Jul 28
3 min read

By Ilan Kelman

University College London (UCL), Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and Institute for Global Health, United Kingdom https://www.ilankelman.org/

Geoethics examines the ethics of human and Earth interactions.

Topics range from planetary-scale modifications for stopping human-caused climate change through to creating local micropollution for improving livelihoods. All subjects also apply to human interests away from the Earth, including spaceships, space stations, other planets, moons, and stars.

Asteroids are filled with elements which might satiate our thirst for mobile phones and electric vehicles while Helium-3 from our Moon could help to fuel fusion reactors on Earth for electricity and for rockets. Should we shift mining from the Earth to outer space? Mars and Venus could provide comfortable human homes, apart from the surface temperatures and atmospheres.

Should we engineer these planets to make them suitable for a thriving human society—or instead construct artificial worlds with their own built moons and stars? As humanity develops settlements and cultures away from the Earth, how could we avoid colonisation becoming colonialism? How much should we tamper with the geodiversity and geoheritage of other bodies?

Not that these questions are new or original. Fiction writers and scientists have been publishing on them for generations, asking exactly the right questions, researching or speculating on the answers, and proffering entire societies facing and occasionally resolving ethical dilemmas across galaxies and parallel time pathways. Examples include cannibalism so that some aboard a stranded spaceship survive until rescue (mirroring plane crashes in isolated areas on Earth) and viewing the galaxy and its constituents as a single self-sustaining entity more than the sum of its parts (mirroring the Gaia hypothesis for Earth). One question that has not been fully answered relates to the prefix ‘geo’ meaning ‘Earth’. Does this prefix apply off-Earth?

One response is an easy ‘yes’. Accept geoengineering, geodiversity, geoheritage, and others—and hence geoethics—as being for the context of the physical and temporal situation under discussion. It might be a comet, a planet, a moon, a solar system, a supercluster, a black hole, a white hole, or inside a black hole or white hole. This alternative might assume that ethical issues must the same for Earth and off-Earth. Neither scientific nor artistic consensus exists on this point. Instead, ongoing investigations consider whether or not Earth-developed ethics should and do remain Earth-bound ethics.

Another angle is the usefulness and useability of a plethora of neologisms, some of which are already used. Does differentiating areoethics (for Mars) from veneriethics/cythereethics (for Venus) help more than terming them ‘Mars geoethics’ and ‘Venus geoethics’ respectively? Deciding between the two words for Venus might not be straightforward, as with lunaethics/selenoethics and helioethics/solaethics/soliethics. Nattering on about hadeaheritage and hermetiengineering confuses far more than simply naming Pluto and Mercury. Plenty of authors detail astroethics, but not so many asterethics, astrethics, sidusethics, stellaethics, or stellethics. Galactoethics for galaxies might get confused with galactoethics for milk.

Leading to the query about why ‘geoethics’ assists compared to just ‘ethics’—and why the definition and scope must necessarily involve human beings. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), artificial general intelligence (AGI), and artificial superintelligence (ASI) means that geoethics applies far beyond one species. Cyborg settlements deep in Pacific Ocean trenches would have as much (geo)ethical relevance as those floating in the Jovian atmosphere. Cyberspace uses energy on Earth and in spaceships. Doomsday scenarios of AI running amok have been applied to outer space in the book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Earth in the movie Ex Machina, and to the Earth from outer space in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (book) / Blade Runner (movie).

After all, Asimov's Laws of Robotics were formulated long before the first satellite orbited

the Earth! More-than-human off-Earth geoethics is pertinent across universes.

Picture credit: Photo by Dakota Monk