C.S. Lewis’s 1938 “Out of the Silent Planet” is a beautiful philosophical science fiction novel in which a traveler voyages from the theologically “silent” planet of Earth to first Mars (Malacandra) and then in a sequel Venus (Perelandra). Our technology has advanced gigantically since 1938, so that colonies on Mars although probably not Venus are almost with us. I thus thought it worth examining the possibilities of extraterrestrial colonization, away from this overcrowded planet which with modern communication has become too noisy rather than too silent, and what it might offer the adventurous spirits of the near future, philosophically as well as physically.

I was awakened to the potential philosophical benefits of space colonization by President Trump’s welcoming speech to King Charles III last week, where he remarked:

“Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and the Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny and pride.”

The (mostly English, but many Dutch and other Europeans) colonists who set sail for North America were trying to build a society different from those they had left behind. Religiously, most of them did not wish to submit to the control of the Church of England (though their alternative, at least in Boston, was far more authoritarian).

Politically, as evidenced by the 1619 creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, they sought a system different from the absolute monarchies that still dominated Europe, at least before 1642. Their voyage across the stormy Atlantic was undertaken, not for the joys of digging an unforgiving uncultivated soil and fighting off marauding Native Americans, but to give themselves a new life free from the political constraints and norms of their home countries.

In today’s world, there no longer exists the possibility of finding a new and virgin land which we can colonize according to our own beliefs. The world is full, and we can only choose from the governments available, by and large a pretty sorry lot. For one like myself who values free speech, free markets and property rights, there are really only two alternatives today: Donald Trump’s America and Sanae Takaichi’s Japan (which would not let me in anyway!) There is no longer a European country that is not subject to grotesque over-regulation in the interests of “net zero” or some other chimaera, while free speech in the EU is conspicuous by its absence.

We are not even secure against backsliding in the United States (apart from the dread possibility of a Democrat victory in 2028). The Trump administration is considering whether to institute compulsory government vetting of AI models – as AI becomes more and more central to the economy and society, it is not difficult to see the harm that could be done by such regulation in the wrong hands. Government is the last institution to trust in the regulation of anything important, because it is always in danger of subversion by leftist cranks, against whom ordinary citizens have no practical recourse.

The philosophical need is thus approaching to find a new home that is not subject to the ever-tightening global consensus against freedom and property. In 17th century Europe, even Galileo Galilei would have benefited from a colonizing trip to North America. The same need to escape the deadening miasma of leftist consensus is almost upon us today.

The questions are: how and where? There are two technologies needed for a substantial colonization of other planets to take place: fusion power and advanced genetic engineering.

Fusion power is needed to transport the huge payloads of colonization across interplanetary distances. Conventional rocket engines, such as we have been using since the 1950s, require a vast multiple of their payload in fuel and fuel tanks when undertaking an interplanetary journey. Given that rockets cannot be infinitely scaled up, the payload that such rockets can carry is only sufficient to carry a few colonists on each trip, and the energy costs for those trips are gigantic. In addition, since conventional rockets are limited in their speed, a trip even to Mars requires several months, exposing voyagers to damaging amounts of radiation. Fusion power when available will avoid these limitations, allowing larger groups of colonists to be sent and permitting trips even to the outer planets and their satellites in a reasonable space of time, say a couple of months.

All the planets other than Earth offer pretty hostile environments for human life over the long-term. To some extent, technology can overcome this. The Florida peninsula was considered to be more or less uninhabitable when the U.S. acquired it in 1819; the main interest was in the Panhandle – but air conditioning has allowed luxurious human life to exist even in Miami in August. Thus, while the Moon cannot have an atmosphere retrofitted – its gravity is too low – something may be possible on Mars, and other Solar System bodies, such as Saturn’s moon Titan, may also be inhabitable with geoengineering. Like the means of transport, geoengineering will require nuclear fusion or some equivalent power source, since it will be extremely power-intensive.

However, even with geoengineering and even picking target planets carefully, human beings as currently constituted will have a hard time living there. We are optimized for a dense atmosphere, a quite strong gravity and a fairly narrow range of ambient temperatures. Even a “terraformed” Mars, given currently practical limits, will be much smaller than Earth, have a gravity about 40% of Earth’s and will suffer temperatures far below Earth average simply because of the lesser supply of solar radiation and the thin atmosphere. Human beings will be highly suboptimal for such an environment. While Mother Nature would produce a redesigned human being in a few thousand years of Mars residence, those few thousand years would be thoroughly miserable.

Accordingly, for mass settlement of Mars we must tweak the human genome so that it can survive happily on lower gravity, a thin atmosphere and a cold average temperature. We are quite close to having this capability currently; it should be well within our grasp within a couple of decades, when we have fusion power and other necessities for colonization.

Once we have genetic engineering, there is no need to restrict ourselves to Mars. Other planets will require more severe terraforming and genetic engineering, either because they are too cold, (Titan) too hot (Venus) or have excessive gravity (Jupiter). Jupiter is the most attractive real estate in the Solar System, because it is so big, but to live there we must create a form of humanity that can deal with an ammonia/hydrogen atmosphere, much more powerful gravity and an ability to swim, since there is no solid surface. A tough ask, probably producing a kind of human jellyfish! However, there are several planets with atmospheres dense enough to support some form of life, and a re-engineered humanity and a certain amount of terraforming should multiply our potential habitats.

Beyond the technology of colonization, there is the question of its political and economic structure. Here, we are at a disadvantage to the Jamestown settlers and the Pilgrim Fathers: our communications are too good. Even if we settled on Neptune, or on the partner of Pluto with a newly discovered atmosphere, both audio and video communication will be possible with a signal delay of only about 4 hours. If an authoritarian world government or group of national governments, such as seems very possible to appear, wanted to control its colonial outposts it would be perfectly able to do so logistically, provided the outposts did not declare Independence, at which point a General John Burgoyne would have to be sent out.

That would vitiate the purpose of colonization. If the Pilgrim Fathers had known that through modern communication they could be forced to listen weekly to sermons from Archbishop William Laud, they would never have bothered to leave England. We therefore need to ensure that any colonization is carried out by agreement with some suitably eccentric trillionaire, with no government involved at any stage of the process. With such a sponsorship, a Mars, Titan or Neptune colony would be self-governing from the start, with every colonist subscribing to an Ayn Randized U.S. Constitution “with the errors and ambiguities left out.” (Of course, if hardline Marxists or theocrats wanted to colonize somewhere they would be free to do so – and the best of British luck to them!)

Olaf Stapledon, a writer whom Lewis did not care for because of his atheism, in Last and First Men (1930) created a future history covering 2 billion years in which humanity genetically engineers itself into 18 different species, moving inwards to Venus when the Sun shrinks into dwarf status and outward to Neptune when it goes nova. By this evolution, human civilization reaches heights far above anything imaginable to us First Men. We are now close to the technology to make Stapledon’s dream (hopefully with Lewis’s ethical system) a reality, and in far less than 2 billion years.

A mixture of Lewis’s aethereal eldils and Stapledon’s Fourth Men Great Brains, solving the problems of the universe in their almost immortal concrete bunkers, is probably ideal.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)