The Nonlinear Library LW - Dark Skies Book Review by PeterMcCluskey
Dec 31, 2023
10:21
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dark Skies Book Review, published by PeterMcCluskey on December 31, 2023 on LessWrong.
Book review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney.
Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book.
Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are careful to distinguish between value differences and claims about objective facts.
Bad in the senses that the good parts make the occasional unfair insult more gratuitous, and that Deudney provides little support for his predictions that his policies will produce better results than those of his adversaries. I count myself as one of his adversaries.
Dark Skies is an opposite of Where Is My Flying Car? in both style and substance.
I read the 609 pages of Where Is My Flying Car? fast enough that the book seemed short. The 381 pages of Dark Skies felt much longer. It's close to the most dry, plodding style that I'm willing to tolerate. Deudney is somewhat less eloquent than a stereotypical accountant.
The book is nominally focused on space colonization and space militarization. But a good deal of what Deudney objects to is technologies that are loosely associated with space expansion, such as nanotech, AI, and genetic modifications. He aptly labels this broader set of adversaries as Promethean.
It seems primarily written for an audience who consider it obvious that technological progress should be drastically slowed down or reversed. I.e. roughly what Where Is My Flying Car describes as Green fundamentalists.
War
One of Deudney's more important concerns is about how space expansion will affect war.
Because the same powerful technologies enabling space expansion also pose so many existential threats, whether and how humans expand into space assumes a central role in any consideration of humanity's survival prospects.
Deudney imagines that the primary way in which war will be minimized is via arms control and increased political unity (although he doesn't want world government, at least not in the stereotypical form).
Large-scale space colonization would make such political unity less likely.
It seems likely that large-scale space colonization will make it harder to achieve that sort of unity. In fact, some of the ideas behind space colonization actively resist political unity, since they're directed toward increased experimentation with new types of political systems.
Deudney focuses on obstacles to political unity that include large distances between space colonies (less communication, less intermingling), culture drift, and genetic changes.
Deudney's analysis seems fairly weak when focusing on those specific mechanisms. His position seems a bit stronger when looking at an historical analogy.
Imagine back when humans lived only in Africa. How should they analyze a choice between everyone staying in Africa, versus allowing humans to colonize Eurasia? Hindsight tells us that the people who expanded into distant regions diverged culturally and genetically. They became powerful enough to push central Africa around. It's not obvious how that affected political unity and incidence of war. I understand why Deudney finds it a worrying analogy.
Another analogy that I consider worth looking at is Britain circa 1600. Was it good for Britain to expand to North America, Australia, etc? It wasn't good for many non-British people, but that doesn't appear to have any analogue in space colonization. It did mean that North America became more militarily powerful than Britain. It seemed to cause some increase in British war between 1776 and 1815.
It looks like there were about 11 years of war out of four centuries in which Britain had mostly cooperative relations wit...
Book review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney.
Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book.
Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are careful to distinguish between value differences and claims about objective facts.
Bad in the senses that the good parts make the occasional unfair insult more gratuitous, and that Deudney provides little support for his predictions that his policies will produce better results than those of his adversaries. I count myself as one of his adversaries.
Dark Skies is an opposite of Where Is My Flying Car? in both style and substance.
I read the 609 pages of Where Is My Flying Car? fast enough that the book seemed short. The 381 pages of Dark Skies felt much longer. It's close to the most dry, plodding style that I'm willing to tolerate. Deudney is somewhat less eloquent than a stereotypical accountant.
The book is nominally focused on space colonization and space militarization. But a good deal of what Deudney objects to is technologies that are loosely associated with space expansion, such as nanotech, AI, and genetic modifications. He aptly labels this broader set of adversaries as Promethean.
It seems primarily written for an audience who consider it obvious that technological progress should be drastically slowed down or reversed. I.e. roughly what Where Is My Flying Car describes as Green fundamentalists.
War
One of Deudney's more important concerns is about how space expansion will affect war.
Because the same powerful technologies enabling space expansion also pose so many existential threats, whether and how humans expand into space assumes a central role in any consideration of humanity's survival prospects.
Deudney imagines that the primary way in which war will be minimized is via arms control and increased political unity (although he doesn't want world government, at least not in the stereotypical form).
Large-scale space colonization would make such political unity less likely.
It seems likely that large-scale space colonization will make it harder to achieve that sort of unity. In fact, some of the ideas behind space colonization actively resist political unity, since they're directed toward increased experimentation with new types of political systems.
Deudney focuses on obstacles to political unity that include large distances between space colonies (less communication, less intermingling), culture drift, and genetic changes.
Deudney's analysis seems fairly weak when focusing on those specific mechanisms. His position seems a bit stronger when looking at an historical analogy.
Imagine back when humans lived only in Africa. How should they analyze a choice between everyone staying in Africa, versus allowing humans to colonize Eurasia? Hindsight tells us that the people who expanded into distant regions diverged culturally and genetically. They became powerful enough to push central Africa around. It's not obvious how that affected political unity and incidence of war. I understand why Deudney finds it a worrying analogy.
Another analogy that I consider worth looking at is Britain circa 1600. Was it good for Britain to expand to North America, Australia, etc? It wasn't good for many non-British people, but that doesn't appear to have any analogue in space colonization. It did mean that North America became more militarily powerful than Britain. It seemed to cause some increase in British war between 1776 and 1815.
It looks like there were about 11 years of war out of four centuries in which Britain had mostly cooperative relations wit...