Humans in Outer Space Interdisciplinary Odysseys, a collection of studies in space policy

Reviewed by Tom Kennedy on 24 Feb 2009

Space travel is no longer a matter of how, but of how far are we prepared to go. Hundreds of people have already experienced what it is like to break free from the gravity of Earth, and in a book published in association with the European Science Foundation, Marcel Egli, who heads a space biology group in Switzerland, commented that "this is not an extraordinary task anymore."

The exploration of space has progressed rapidly since Yuri Gagarin went aloft in 1961, and where robots have gone, a growing band of astronauts and space settlers are likely, at some stage, to follow.

The possibilities of taking off into space are becoming real enough for scientists and indeed policy makers to take the issue seriously, and this book, Humans in Outer Space, is a collection of papers delivered at a conference held just over a year ago in Vienna. At that conference, organised by the European Space Agency, the European Science Foundation, and the European Space Policy Institute, a number of issues relating to our extra-terrestrial endeavours were discussed.

Not least of the issues was the one of ownership. Who actually owns space? As James Muldoon, a specialist in medieval legal and ecclesiastical history pointed out, the question is hardly new. Back in the 16th century, Hugo Grotius penned a work called the Mare Liberum, in which he refuted papal claims to the oceans. In his reformist view, God had willed that all mankind "be of one race and to be known by one name." This questioning ultimately led to our laws of the sea, and by extension, international law makers are determined to avoid territorial disputes in space.

We can think of setting up shop on the Moon, we are likely to see some brave souls dispatched on a long journey to Mars, but are the obstacles to be overcome in going further so immense as to be impossible? Maybe not, but Agnieszka Lukaszczyk writes, "an interplanetary society may emerge at the moment a first child is born on another planet."

This brings up one of the really fundamental questions about colonising space. Humans have evolved to live on Earth, and in space they are aliens, ill equipped to survive for any length of time. So, should we allow, or even encourage our bodies to adapt? How important is it to keep our film star looks, when survival on some distant planet is at stake?

This is a serious question, and one that could mean a lot more to us if the World's population continues to climb. Apart from any harm we might inflict on our home planet, we cannot rule out the possibility that some catastrophic event could wipe out life on Earth again, as happened in the past. Then, there is that issue of resources, and one of the authors, Gísli Pálsson, Professor of Antropology at the University of Iceland, has a telling quote in which Mahatma Gandhi was asked if the newly independent India should follow the British path to development. In response, Gandhi said; "it took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve this prosperity. How many planets will a country like India require?"

Unless we want to become like a mound of bacteria in a petri dish, emigrating into space might yet become an option to consider, and if we are prepared to consider that, we would have to let humanity evolve. Biologically this is not at all an obstacle, we are, after all, a relatively young species, but it is just something we might rather not think about. Curiously enough, the Jesuit palaeontologist and philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, entertained the idea that humanity was destined to move on. At the time of his death in 1955, he was being unfairly dismissed as a mystical dreamer rather than being celebrated as "a proper philosopher", mainly because he was postulating the ultimate unity with the one-and-all, but half a century on, the idea has taken on a new meaning, not unity, but possibly survival.

Commenting on the significance of the book, Archaeology Professor Ulrike Landfester from the University of St Gallen, remarked that we may have to reconsider some of our notions about the reality of space before humanity continues its progress from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and on to Homo celesticus.