As for the possibility that people like Afghan refugees might provide an ideal type for the proletariat of space expansion, I don't think I'd like some technological illiterate fooling with the controls of some device I'd spent a fortune getting into orbit, no matter how brave they were!
But it is true that immigrants are often the best performers in their country of origin. It often carries on to their immediate descendants as well. This is my experience, growing up in Australia.
The worst people to have as workers are often the chauvinists or glory-seekers. We got them in the oilfield business, and we had to get rid of them as quickly as possible, hopefully before they did too much damage. As an example, a fellow was flown from Louisiana to Indonesia to serve as my relief while I was on a two-week break in Australia. When I gently tried to explain to him that our Indonesian workers had to be treated with respect, he replied, "Ah don't have a problem with niggers. Ah know all about niggers!" He had been fired before I got back from my holiday.
There would be a rapid winnowing of unsuitable types, both pre-flight and on the job. I spent some time on an oilfield exploration rig as a roustabout, or deckhand. I saw one fellow busted from driller to assistant driller to roustabout and off the job in three shifts. We had a major emergency at one stage, and all hands were ordered to help secure the blowout preventer, an enormous device through which the drill pipe was fed on the seabed, as it was hoisted from the depths to fix a fault. I volunteered to wear a bosun's chair and be swung out over the sea on a cable to secure the slings suspending it from the rig. All those roustabouts too frightened to come close to the action were milling about behind those of us doing the work, and the rig superintendent took a note of who they were so that all of them could be fired.
One of you mentioned the possible need to return to a cheap, risk-taking attitude toward human life, such as was the case in the great age of exploration some centuries ago. I think there will be a different balance operating with space settlement. For a start, the very high capital costs per human worker will mean much more attention is paid to their quality. Once again, this is very similar to the huge expansion of offshore oil and gas exploitation. If the profits are high and the risks are manageable, the investment in the businesses will be made.
Most of the jobs to be done in space will require specialist skills: welding, machining, process operation, fabrication of complex mechanisms and electrical equipment. The people who can do these jobs were once widespread, although the current de-industrialisation over the past few decades has seen their numbers shrink. But if the wages on offer are high enough, the best will be attracted to space-based jobs. I'm sure that when this happens, it will take place against a background of continuing opportunities shrinking on Earth. But not much expenditure will go to adaptation to the space environment.
When it comes to settling Mars, my belief is that the physical and social problems of it will put permanent settlement off for many generations to come. This is because the first flush of space workers will do it for the big money to set themselves up back on Earth. They'll have no desire to live the rest of their lives in a tin can on a radiation-blasted hellscape. That is why the Moon will be settled first. It will take a long time before there is a low-gravity-adapted human type who won't be able to return to Earth. Until that happens, the Moon will be inhabited on a fly-in, fly-out basis.
There will no doubt be a problem with stress from the flight into space, even though it takes only about 10 minutes. Weightlessness, too, will take some adaptation. Astronauts currently go through years of training, some of which is to habituate them to these stresses. But this will not be practical for the much larger workforce that is to come. I'm sure the answer will be medical intervention: sedatives for the flight to space and motion-sickness medication for weightlessness.
As for whether societies will continue to support space exploration and innovation, that will almost certainly fall away, as current industrial societies struggle to maintain order in a post-growth world. But it will pass into the hands of corporations driven by the profit motive. Already, there is little money to be made by investing in traditional industries on Earth. The world economy is like an overgrown garden, choking on its own growth. Hence, the current obsession with AI investment. Anything that shows hope of a return on capital invested better than a couple of per cent.
Space-based industries are embryonic at the moment, but if the promise of the SpaceX super-heavy booster is realised, costs to orbit will crash, and there will be an explosion of new businesses.
I think we must accept that the one-world, orderly world we've all grown up in is nearly over. The idea that there will be widely distributed wealth and universal social justice will founder on the rock of resource constraints. Not only that, but the common vision of desirable futures will splinter. The contracting, authoritarian post-growth countries will have no room for social experimentation or innovation, which might threaten existing power relations. This is already clearly visible in the high level of self-censorship crippling the intellectual classes, such as journalists and other creatives. I see this in my own family here in Australia. If your job depends on it, you don't rock the boat!
So these space-based industries are likely to be concentrated in places that provide the stability and freedom that they need. As is already happening with such industries fleeing California for Texas.
On the subject of motivation to go to space for extended periods, it's hard for many of us to see beyond our well-educated and well-heeled existence. What everyone needs to appreciate is that there are other levels of being, even in advanced societies, where people are caught up in less-than-ideal circumstances. If they are intelligent and energetic, they may well see opportunities for themselves that would not otherwise be available. I was exactly in this situation in the seventies, when I went to Indonesia to build oil rigs. It was tough, dangerous, and highly paid work in often quite uncomfortable situations.
I dropped out of a Bachelor of Engineering course at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973. The reasons were complex, but mostly because I could not see any future for myself in the engineering world in Australia at that time. I wouldn't have fitted in. I was trying to find some more meaningful path for myself (and for society as a whole), so I embraced the hippy back-to-the-land movement.
But I was immediately caught up in the recessions of the early seventies, which made it very difficult to earn enough to buy a decent piece of land. I worked many lowly jobs over the next few years, travelling with my girlfriend around Australia and New Zealand. My girlfriend got sick of the stress and moved on to a better prospect, just as I was offered a job in oilfield construction, first as a machinery operator, then as a foreman. The money was staggering (up to ten times the average weekly wage), but the work was demanding, dangerous and episodic, as contracts would run for just a few months at a time.
The oil shock of the seventies made oilfield work an international emergency, so these jobs were available paying multiples of normal income, often in dangerous and difficult circumstances. I had become part of a labour aristocracy: one of my younger brothers, who was an electrician, was the same, earning stupendous money on a crane barge where he maintained all the electrical systems.
I took a risk, bought a few beautiful acres, and began building my hippy dream house in a settlement of like-minded hippy types. But the oilfield industry in Australia was maturing, and the money was now not as good as it had been, leaving me stuck in a debt trap. I started to feel desperate.
Then, a few months later, in 1979, I was offered a yard supervisor's job in Indonesia. I was picked from a small crowd of likely prospects, some of whom might have been able to pull it off, but who were unable to make the necessary social and relationship sacrifices. Once again, I was lifted up into a world where I was earning effectively ten times the wage I'd recently been making in Australia. I found myself, at the age of twenty-nine, in charge of one hundred and fifty workers supervised by fourteen foremen.
The work was demanding, with long hours, dangerous diseases (I spent six weeks in a hospital in Singapore with hepatitis), and in what amounted to a malarial hellhole.
I paid off my house construction, my land and all my debts in six months. After a year and a half, I left the job, came back to my little slice of heaven in Southern Australia, and started thinking about the hippy dream again. But of course, it was dead! The local alternative scene had exploded socially, with most couples splitting up while I'd been away. I also realised I'd had a fling with every available woman in the district, and couldn't go around twice. So I left for the big city to start over again, renting my house out.
What followed was another series of extraordinary adventures. I did rather better socially, but was always far from normal society. And I worked for myself, building all kinds of extraordinary things!
As for the possibility that people like Afghan refugees might provide an ideal type for the proletariat of space expansion, I don't think I'd like some technological illiterate fooling with the controls of some device I'd spent a fortune getting into orbit, no matter how brave they were!
But it is true that immigrants are often the best performers in their country of origin. It often carries on to their immediate descendants as well. This is my experience, growing up in Australia.
The worst people to have as workers are often the chauvinists or glory-seekers. We got them in the oilfield business, and we had to get rid of them as quickly as possible, hopefully before they did too much damage. As an example, a fellow was flown from Louisiana to Indonesia to serve as my relief while I was on a two-week break in Australia. When I gently tried to explain to him that our Indonesian workers had to be treated with respect, he replied, "Ah don't have a problem with niggers. Ah know all about niggers!" He had been fired before I got back from my holiday.
There would be a rapid winnowing of unsuitable types, both pre-flight and on the job. I spent some time on an oilfield exploration rig as a roustabout, or deckhand. I saw one fellow busted from driller to assistant driller to roustabout and off the job in three shifts. We had a major emergency at one stage, and all hands were ordered to help secure the blowout preventer, an enormous device through which the drill pipe was fed on the seabed, as it was hoisted from the depths to fix a fault. I volunteered to wear a bosun's chair and be swung out over the sea on a cable to secure the slings suspending it from the rig. All those roustabouts too frightened to come close to the action were milling about behind those of us doing the work, and the rig superintendent took a note of who they were so that all of them could be fired.
One of you mentioned the possible need to return to a cheap, risk-taking attitude toward human life, such as was the case in the great age of exploration some centuries ago. I think there will be a different balance operating with space settlement. For a start, the very high capital costs per human worker will mean much more attention is paid to their quality. Once again, this is very similar to the huge expansion of offshore oil and gas exploitation. If the profits are high and the risks are manageable, the investment in the businesses will be made.
Most of the jobs to be done in space will require specialist skills: welding, machining, process operation, fabrication of complex mechanisms and electrical equipment. The people who can do these jobs were once widespread, although the current de-industrialisation over the past few decades has seen their numbers shrink. But if the wages on offer are high enough, the best will be attracted to space-based jobs. I'm sure that when this happens, it will take place against a background of continuing opportunities shrinking on Earth. But not much expenditure will go to adaptation to the space environment.
When it comes to settling Mars, my belief is that the physical and social problems of it will put permanent settlement off for many generations to come. This is because the first flush of space workers will do it for the big money to set themselves up back on Earth. They'll have no desire to live the rest of their lives in a tin can on a radiation-blasted hellscape. That is why the Moon will be settled first. It will take a long time before there is a low-gravity-adapted human type who won't be able to return to Earth. Until that happens, the Moon will be inhabited on a fly-in, fly-out basis.
There will no doubt be a problem with stress from the flight into space, even though it takes only about 10 minutes. Weightlessness, too, will take some adaptation. Astronauts currently go through years of training, some of which is to habituate them to these stresses. But this will not be practical for the much larger workforce that is to come. I'm sure the answer will be medical intervention: sedatives for the flight to space and motion-sickness medication for weightlessness.
As for whether societies will continue to support space exploration and innovation, that will almost certainly fall away, as current industrial societies struggle to maintain order in a post-growth world. But it will pass into the hands of corporations driven by the profit motive. Already, there is little money to be made by investing in traditional industries on Earth. The world economy is like an overgrown garden, choking on its own growth. Hence, the current obsession with AI investment. Anything that shows hope of a return on capital invested better than a couple of per cent.
Space-based industries are embryonic at the moment, but if the promise of the SpaceX super-heavy booster is realised, costs to orbit will crash, and there will be an explosion of new businesses.
I think we must accept that the one-world, orderly world we've all grown up in is nearly over. The idea that there will be widely distributed wealth and universal social justice will founder on the rock of resource constraints. Not only that, but the common vision of desirable futures will splinter. The contracting, authoritarian post-growth countries will have no room for social experimentation or innovation, which might threaten existing power relations. This is already clearly visible in the high level of self-censorship crippling the intellectual classes, such as journalists and other creatives. I see this in my own family here in Australia. If your job depends on it, you don't rock the boat!
So these space-based industries are likely to be concentrated in places that provide the stability and freedom that they need. As is already happening with such industries fleeing California for Texas.
On the subject of motivation to go to space for extended periods, it's hard for many of us to see beyond our well-educated and well-heeled existence. What everyone needs to appreciate is that there are other levels of being, even in advanced societies, where people are caught up in less-than-ideal circumstances. If they are intelligent and energetic, they may well see opportunities for themselves that would not otherwise be available. I was exactly in this situation in the seventies, when I went to Indonesia to build oil rigs. It was tough, dangerous, and highly paid work in often quite uncomfortable situations.
What made you go out there?
I dropped out of a Bachelor of Engineering course at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973. The reasons were complex, but mostly because I could not see any future for myself in the engineering world in Australia at that time. I wouldn't have fitted in. I was trying to find some more meaningful path for myself (and for society as a whole), so I embraced the hippy back-to-the-land movement.
But I was immediately caught up in the recessions of the early seventies, which made it very difficult to earn enough to buy a decent piece of land. I worked many lowly jobs over the next few years, travelling with my girlfriend around Australia and New Zealand. My girlfriend got sick of the stress and moved on to a better prospect, just as I was offered a job in oilfield construction, first as a machinery operator, then as a foreman. The money was staggering (up to ten times the average weekly wage), but the work was demanding, dangerous and episodic, as contracts would run for just a few months at a time.
The oil shock of the seventies made oilfield work an international emergency, so these jobs were available paying multiples of normal income, often in dangerous and difficult circumstances. I had become part of a labour aristocracy: one of my younger brothers, who was an electrician, was the same, earning stupendous money on a crane barge where he maintained all the electrical systems.
I took a risk, bought a few beautiful acres, and began building my hippy dream house in a settlement of like-minded hippy types. But the oilfield industry in Australia was maturing, and the money was now not as good as it had been, leaving me stuck in a debt trap. I started to feel desperate.
Then, a few months later, in 1979, I was offered a yard supervisor's job in Indonesia. I was picked from a small crowd of likely prospects, some of whom might have been able to pull it off, but who were unable to make the necessary social and relationship sacrifices. Once again, I was lifted up into a world where I was earning effectively ten times the wage I'd recently been making in Australia. I found myself, at the age of twenty-nine, in charge of one hundred and fifty workers supervised by fourteen foremen.
The work was demanding, with long hours, dangerous diseases (I spent six weeks in a hospital in Singapore with hepatitis), and in what amounted to a malarial hellhole.
I paid off my house construction, my land and all my debts in six months. After a year and a half, I left the job, came back to my little slice of heaven in Southern Australia, and started thinking about the hippy dream again. But of course, it was dead! The local alternative scene had exploded socially, with most couples splitting up while I'd been away. I also realised I'd had a fling with every available woman in the district, and couldn't go around twice. So I left for the big city to start over again, renting my house out.
What followed was another series of extraordinary adventures. I did rather better socially, but was always far from normal society. And I worked for myself, building all kinds of extraordinary things!