Few challenges are as vexing to ardent space colonization fans as the continued existence of Earth. Earth possesses a notoriously socialistic biosphere, one where even peons can breathe unmetered air, where food literally grows out of the ground, where the magnetosphere and a thick blanket of air protects even the undeserving poor from an endless sleet of radiation. How to attract workers to toxic, nearly airless, radiation-bombarded Mars, hellish Venus, or even the bone-eroding microgravity of the asteroids when there’s a perfectly habitable planet available?
To borrow a phrase attributed to a notable public figure, “No planet, no problem.” If for some reason Earth is not available, then workers would have no choice but to accept life on alien worlds for as long as it takes to kill them. Some of you might think Earth is pretty big and hard to get rid of. SF says: Hold my beer!
There seem to be five primary strategies available to eliminate Earth from the equation. In order of increasing apocalyptivity, they are as follows…
Unaffordability
The existence of a life-sustaining biosphere is only one aspect of living on Earth. Most of the other elements involving transferring money from one’s own pocket to someone else’s. Provided steps are taken to enhance the income-extraction aspects of living on Earth, moving to a place with metered air may seem like the lesser of two evils. Cost-of-living enhancements can vary from morally unjustifiable taxes squandered to prevent the remnants of Earth’s biosphere from collapsing to more tolerable micropayments required to maintain the license on one’s Kreb’s cycle. The exact details do not matter as long as the end result is that the characters cannot afford the fees for living on Earth.
Some centuries prior to the main plot of William Barton’s Acts of Conscience, residence was made expensive enough that only Earth society’s wealthiest could afford the fees. For the other forty billion people, there was an abundance of small, expensive habitats in space and the other rocky worlds of the Solar System. Gaetan du Cheyne is a master mechanic but he isn’t rich. Thus, he has no choice but to live in cramped quarters in a moderately hazardous space facility. It’s no surprise that when ownership of a functioning starship falls into his lap, he swiftly takes advantage.
Intolerability
An equally functional (and more common) alternative is to provide Earth with a culture or government that is intolerable. Although this often involves conditions such as rampant violence, crime, or political and/or religious repression, history shows that one can achieve much the same results with an excess of will-power-sapping positive qualities1. The important thing is that characters find themselves out of step with their surroundings, to the point that the environmental challenges of another world appear the better choice.
Readers might wonder why the inhabitants of 25 Phocaea in M.J. Locke’s Up Against It opted for their precarious existence in space. Life in the asteroid belt is an endless quest for volatiles, complicated by the necessity to fend off hostile takeover bids from borderline criminal organizations. The answer is that as challenging as the belt can be, life down in violence-ravaged America2 is even worse. Presumably the US is not alone in providing contexts which make space habitats seem like a good deal.
Forced Migration
It does not really matter where people prefer to live if they are given no choice in the matter. History is rich in examples in which states have decided for one reason or another that the state’s interests would be enhanced by shuffling populations around like pieces on a game board. This practice goes back at least as far as the Iron Age and probably earlier.
A century and a half before Alan E. Nourse’s Trouble on Titan begins, a small but hardy population was exiled to Titan precisely because Titan was so inhospitable. Titan seemed an ideal location for a prison. When valuable rubidium ore was subsequently discovered, the prisoners and their descendants were a convenient labor force. Intent on cost-cutting, Earth authorities decided that the descendants of the prisoners were just as villainous and unworthy of high wages as the original criminals. There will be, however, consequences for mistreating the workers on whom Earth’s energy security depends.
Inaccessibility
Space colonists have no choice but to make a life in space if for some reason they are barred from access to the Earth. While plunking the characters down sans maps in some remote region of the galaxy is a common gambit, people within the Solar System can be deterred from returning to the Earth via such rudimentary methods as technology-inhibiting fields or a propulsion regime entirely unsuited to landing on planets like Earth.
The backstory to John Varley’s Eight Worlds novels, for example, involves first contact with judgmental aliens. Preferring cetaceans to primates, the aliens simply turn off all advanced technology on Earth. An astonished Lunar colony is forced to survive without Earth. Fortunately the Lunars were up to the task.3
Uninhabitability
The simplest method of removing Earth as a factor is to render it utterly uninhabitable (non-existent is a specific subset of uninhabitable). Whether by nuclear war, runaway nanotech, rampaging hypernova, or micro-black hole mishaps, the main thing is to force people to move elsewhere by making it lethal to remain on Earth.
Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes features a community in the clouds of Jupiter4. Why settle such a challenging world? Because humans in their exuberance rendered Earth even more uninhabitable than Jupiter. Go team human!
* * *
Perhaps there are plot-enabling stratagems that I have omitted or examples better than the ones I selected. Feel free to expound on them in comments below.
- The obvious example being Pilgrims fleeing the Netherlands lest their children be tempted into scandalous ways. Provide the Earth of tomorrow with a sufficiently licentious society and prim protagonists might well opt to flee for some more modest community in space.
- Canada seems to be pleasant enough, although that may only be in comparison with the United States. There are many reasons why people might choose space over Canada, starting with the complete absence in space of Canada geese.
- Possibly because it would have been very hard to sell a series set in space if all the space-dwelling humans had died off centuries before. Sure, there’s the George Stewart approach of personifying natural events (as seen in Fire and Storm) but is there a market for Solar Flare? or A Billion Years of Uneventful Near-Misses Amongst Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids? Although I’ve seen a Jupiter-centric simulation of asteroid orbits and it is very hypnotic.
- The planet is called “Giant” in the novel, but as it is orbited by Jupiter’s moons, it seems likely that it is Jupiter. Of incidental note: while most of the giant planets in the Solar System have close to Earthlike gravity, Jupiter doesn’t.
Let’s see if they’ve got comment subscriptions up and working. I did notice I can now put links into footnotes, which used to be a no no.
The old feature of clicking on a footnote to return to your place in the main article is gone. But hitting the browser’s back arrow does the job.
Comment notifications now work. Let us hope line wrapping is next.
And liking a comment, which doesn’t seem to work for me, at least.
Once I’d refreshed my login, I could like a comment
Or possibly it was just the process of refreshing the page. Not sure
I want the collected comment notifications for the day back. And an option for unthreaded comments. And for replies to *not* be in a tiny font.
One odd aspect of the comment notificatoins — they put “the” in front of people’s names (or handles): thus, your last comment was emailed to me as being by “the Nancy Lebovitz.” Which would be fine if there were a whole lot of Lebowitzen named Nancy, and they were saying that you were the Nancy Lebowitz, but I don’t think that’s true of everybody here…
I’m not, actually. I’m the Nancy Lebovitz.
Other than that I don’t like the threaded comments with the replies in a tiny font. It’s harder to see what’s new.
One senses some SF authors know how much better even a post-nuclear war Earth is than any other choice in the Solar System. Joe Haldeman’s Worlds adds in a lethal pandemic to keep the space people off Earth. Thomas Scortia’s Earthwreck! does the same and makes Mars unexpectedly easy to terraform… not that we learn if that effort succeeded, as the novel ends when the survivors reach Mars.
Money? I’m sure there are lots of stories in which working in space, at least for a while, means getting enough cash in hand to retire.
That runs into the “are oil rigs ‘ocean colonization'” comparison; you’re not exactly leaving Earth behind if you’re going back in 6 months when your contract’s up.
More for intolerability– Rainbow Cadenza by L. Neil Stephenson–sexual imbalance on Earth results in a sex draft for women. The sex draft might be bad but tolerable, but the main character falls into the control of a sadist. She leaves Earth.
Friday by Heinlein. Earth is bad in any number of ways. There’s general loss of trustworthiness and specific prejudice against the main character for being genetically modified. She leaves.
Methuselah’s Children by Heinlein. Innately long-lived people find that the short-living majority aren’t as civilized as hoped. The long-lived minority barely flee in time.
ISTM there’s a difference between fleeing to some very Earth-like planet (as in Friday), or stealing a spaceship so capacious that nobody minds (Methuselah’s Children), and moving to an environment known by the writer to be hostile (e.g. Mars after the mid-1960’s, Venus about the same time, space after a few week-long Gemini expeditions, …)
Spoilers following? “Methuselah’s Children” involves a starship looking for a new home planet. It goes not especially well. Perhaps you are remembering Robert Heinlein’s “Universe”, though that is not a spaceship large enough for everyone in it to live happily at peace with their neighbours. Empirically, Earth isn’t big enough to be that. ;-)
You may consider J. G..Ballard’s “Report on an Unidentified Space Station”, still not a happy story, and possibly Arthur C. Clarke’s “If I Forget Thee, O Earth”, which it’s at least possible to read as Earth being so radioactive from modern warfare that refugees have to live on the back side of the Moon for safety. Earth is glowing visibly. The whole planet. That is bad. And expensive…
In Methuselah’s Children, the Howards weren’t leaving earth because they wanted to look for a new home for the sake of adventure,, they left because short-lived humans on earth had become very dangerous to them.
I don’t know where to leave a complaint, but I’d like the option of having comments in chronological order, the way they used to be. It’s easier to find new comments that way while still having somewhat coherent conversation.
I also hate having replies be in a tiny font.
Rainbow is by J. Neil Schulman, not Stephenson. If it had been by Stephenson, it would have been two or three times as long…
Schulman was at the centre of a bizarre encounter I had online years ago. I made a needlessly snarky comment about his Alongside Night. An angry Schulman appeared in comments, ferociously defending his book. Except then the real Schulman showed up to reveal the first guy was an imposter. The real Schulman was far less contentious.
I remember “fake Schulman” on your blog. Weird.
Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood provide an example of a series set in space where all the original humans had died off long before, even if the android civilisation they left had resurrected/recreates some humans by the second book.
The Bobiverse series features a race – will humans leave Earth because of the fatal effects of climate change, or
because the aliens are coming to kill them all? Nothing like having a solution be overdetermined.
You’ve skipped over the reason that most of the currently-ardent would-be colonists seem to have: that the Earth is plagued with poor people that demand you pay your taxes so they can do Woke Liberal things with your money.
That is an example of an intolerable Earth, where the undeserving walk around all happy-like.
Mostly, the United States feeds its poor. Shames them, also. Other countries do not do socialism so well as that. Though, having said that, there’s health care – or there isn’t.
Other methods used in science fiction –
The earth has been taken by advanced aliens in the name of cetaceans and have driven the humans away.
Earth is in the process of becoming / has been turned into a hive mind and our obstinately individualistic protagonists would like to keep their own personalities if it’s all the same to you.
And the opposite, in Bruce Sterling’s Shaper/mechanist universe – to the cybernetically and biologically enhanced posthumans of the solar system, Earth, populated only with baseline humans, is of little interest, so nobody of consequence ever goes there.
The hive mind story might be Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers or Barnes’ Century Next Door series
Given what dicks the Shapers and the Mechanists were, I feel like being unfashionable was a major win for the Earthies.
That first one is almost certainly Varley. In that case, *almost* all the humans on Earth have been killed, but there are a few survivors.
Which is mentioned in the original post.
Revolution from Rosinante gets people to move into habitats with the promise of wealth… except space investment is an unsustainable bubble that pops early in the book.
Spider Robinson’s Stardance series gives people the opportunity to bond with sparkly space aliens therefore gaining the ability to survive in space but not in a gravity well.
This would involve star travel, surely, but did you miss the possibility of “Found some place Better Than Earth”? SF certainly does have its paradise planets (“Raisa” on Star Trek, “Flossten Paradise” in the 5th element) though they never seem to be the first thing colonized.
When one considers that evolution, given time, precisely matches the design of the organism to flourish in an environment, “Better than Earth” is a tall order, but, hey, this is SF.
That’s part of what gives humans so much wanderlust and adaptability — we’re far too young a species to be “precisely” matched to our environment. We’re still in the clumsy transitional phase; we haven’t even perfectly adapted to walking upright, which is why we have fallen arches and back pain and hemorrhoids. (I often feel that the reason so many of us either adore or fear cats is because we recognize that they are perfectly adapted to their niche, so much so that their shape and behavior remain essentially unchanged across species regardless of size, and we half-formed bipeds trying to figure ourselves out look upon these beings existing in the total contentment of having all their answers, and we either revere that or feel threatened by it.)
On top of which, we have intelligence and technology, which lets us level up on evolution by inventing ways to adapt to our environment or adapt our environment to ourselves. We’ve already transformed Earth massively since prehistory, enlarging deserts through overgrazing, cultivating or destroying forests, changing the course of mighty rivers, even slightly shifting the Earth’s rotational axis by redistributing vast amounts of water with dams. Terraforming is a reality already, albeit in a crude and largely uncontrolled stage.
I was restricting myself to Solar destinations only but I can think of an example: In Simak’s City, it turns out life as a Jovian on Jupiter is far superior to life as a human, so most humans emigrate to Jupiter, where they are turned into native lifeforms.
A lot of Heinlein’s works involving leaving Earth for space appear to be a combination of “Unaffordability/Intolerability,” a matter of lack of opportunities and/or restrictive society. At the time Heinlein was writing, Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the American frontier (first presented at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893) was still widely accepted. It proposed that American exceptionalism stemmed from the accessibility of the “frontier,” whereby the restless and ambitious could find prosperity and freedom unavailable “back home.” There was implicit a strong element of “Social Darwinism;” that is, it was the “fittest,” both physically and mentally, would be motivated and capable of building a new society, leaving the weak or complacent to stagnate in the lands left behind.
Of course, the settlement of the American frontier relied heavily on money from the eastern US and federal expenditures, especially on the US Army (how else to kill or displace the people already living there?)
As I recall, In the Wet offered the exact opposite model: Shute proposed that anyone, no matter how feeble, could flourish in the resource-rich, underexploited continents, while only the fit could prevail in crowded, resource poor homelands [1]. How unusual that Heinlein preferred a model that cast Americans in good light, whereas Shute preferred one that favored English people.
1: Shute also felt India was sure to be among the monarchy’s most faithful supporters, despite India having become a republic some years early. Clearly, a man of unparalleled vision.
Canada seems to be pleasant enough, although that may only be in comparison with the United States. There are many reasons why people might choose space over Canada, starting with the complete absence in space of Canada geese.
“The wild geese are flying out on a bright wind,
“Their journey is taking them ever so high:
“They’ve stolen our lovely new starcruiser which
“They haven’t a clue how to fly.”
Another one: Curiosity. S.M. Stirling’s planetary romances imagine a world in which human history is exactly as in the real world except that, beginning in the 19th century, our culture has had to deal with the knowledge that there are in fact canals on Mars and oceans on Venus. With the prospect of walking around without a suit, the space program gets to interplanetary travel a lot more quickly, but they don’t have any super-science shortcuts. The expense in both directions means that if you’re going to Mars or Venus, and you’re really good at whatever you do on Mars or Venus, you may end up working there until you are not physically able to stand the trip back to Earth.
Of course, politics must have their part, but there is lots of room for pure research and exploration, for those who are willing to leave everything behind.
Another excellent example of Forced Migration: Cordwainer Smith’s “When the People Fell,” in which China exports millions (billions?) of excess citizens to Venus, there to terraform it by manual labor. Most will die. The Chinese government, which makes me think that Smith had in mind a scenario where the CCP is still in power, or perhaps a reversion to the Imperial/Mandarin system.
“When the people fell” was my first thought when I read the title and topic of this essay. Smith was an excellent, unique writer.
Given the timing, it could be either. It may be relevant here that Smith’s godfather was Sun Yat-sen.
Another reason: Freedom to do what you want, can be seen as a variant on Intolerability.
An example is The Great Explosion, by Eric Frank Russell, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Explosion , where three different societies are visited.
Another variant on this, genetically engineered people who aren’t treated as people on earth and flee for self-determination. The two that occur to me are the Quaddies in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series (in earlier history) and the Peltedverse books by MCA Hogarth.
Your very first sentence brought the “Quaddies” to my mind.
(those minds running in the same gutter?<grin>)
I don’t think the Quaddies ever lived on earth or any other planet. Weren’t they genetically engineered for space, and grew up in space?
Vonda N. McIntyre had a nasty twist on that: people were crafted to live in extra terrestrial environments and then the project was cancelled before people got shipped to their intended worlds.
In my novel Only Superhuman, colonization of the Asteroid Belt is driven by economic opportunity due to its immense mineral wealth, plus the Belt Homestead Act, passed by Earth to encourage migration and reduce population pressures as part of the effort to restore Earth’s environment. Also, there are legal restrictions on life extension therapies on Earth but not in space. This article is all about negative incentives for staying on Earth, but I think you can achieve more by offering positive incentives.
There’s also just human nature. Both my novel Star Trek: The Original Series: The Captain’s Oath and my short story “Comfort Zones” in The Arachne Omnibus mention the “generalist specialist” theory of human origins. Our ancestors were unique among hominins in their willingness to settle in environments outside their usual comfort zone, in uncomfortable or hostile climates that required adaptations to survive. Other hominins may have wondered why we bothered to live in such uncomfortable places, but our drive to expand let us survive when the other hominins’ environments changed and they died off, as well as promoting technological and cultural innovation. So you can argue that what literally makes us human is our innate drive to explore strange new worlds and boldly go etc. (which is why the theory was such a great fit for an inspirational James T. Kirk speech). We don’t need some special reason to expand into hostile environments; we’ll do it just because we want to see if we can.
That sort of destiny reminds me of events in Douglas Adams’s “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, specifically when a planet called Golgafrincham announces that it is doomed and the population must evacuate, starting with middle managers, hairdressers, and office telephone sanitisers. I’ve wondered what the author had against hairdressers. Anyway, spoiler, that useless lot crash land on prehistoric Earth, and shortly afterwards, Neanderthal humans start to die out. My point is it’s actually sad. Also see “North America” and “South America” and “Everywhere else that Europeans go”.
Meanwhile, further spoiler of a sort, the long-haired creative writers still living on Golgafrincham are wiped out by a lethal unsanitised telephone disease.
“Although I’ve seen a Jupiter-centric simulation of asteroid orbits and it is very hypnotic.”
You would not happen to have a link to that, would you?
Here you go.
Thank you!
Also fun: the curlicue trajectory of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, launched in 2021, visiting not only the L4 Trojan asteroids but also the L5 Trojans, seen from a Jupiter-centric reference frame.
In Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, the trick to getting people to settle Venus is “Tell them a lot of damn big lies”.
It seems to me that Larry Niven’s Smoke Ring, from The Integral Trees and other novels of The State,
is a good example of an Intolerable Earth scenario. Then James P. Hogan’s Echos of an Alien Sky
shows an Uninhabitable Earth, as I recall.
Lots of the older SF had people leaving Earth to get expensive exotic things that could not be
acquired on-planet; Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories are a good example. It is sad that
as we got more information about what it takes to keep people alive, we learned why the bulk of
Earth’s population is likely to be on Earth for the foreseeable future.
Asimov’s Robots and Empire has “Making the Earth uninhabitable” as one of the main plot points.
Well, there is always the random asteroid that destroys the earth (or an entire planet in “When Worlds Collide” – which was actually halfway decent)
And most of these types of books/films deal with the selection process. Who gets to go and who must stay behind to be destroyed?
the negativity here is just sad. SF is so much more fun when there is a more realistic blend of douchey predator bros & those who would best them at their own game for fun, profit, & the betterment of humanity.