A Post-Truth Test Tube

I’m currently a recovering addict. A few months ago on a whim I joined a FB group to debate Earth’s shape. I’ve come across flat Earthers before, online at least. Whether I’ve encountered adult Westerners who believe Earth is flat, I don’t know. Finding the group highly addictive, I became one of the main posters and enjoyed it a lot, but it isn’t really the best employment of one’s time. That said, it does constitute an interesting case study of the way we think and behave.

The useful thing about looking at flat Earther psychology is that it’s firmly established that Earth is spheroidal. The room for doubt is practically submicroscopic on this matter, so there’s no risk of being wrong or being drawn into believing that it’s flat, and because of that, rather than becoming embroiled in arguments which might persuade one, one can instead just examine how flat Earthers justify their position. Positions plural, actually. Most flat Earthers seem to believe we are on an almost flat surface under a transparent dome with the Sun going round us, but there are other views. For instance, some believe Earth as we know it is surrounded by broader rings of continents and oceans to which we have no access, and to be honest that is a really fascinating and appealing view which might go some way towards addressing the claustrophobia of the more restricted version, and a few of them seem to believe we are on an infinite plane. I say “seem to” because this is one of the problems with trying to work out what’s pagoing on: are they serious about this or just kidding around?

The answer to this is probably that it depends. This is one thing about groups seen from a distance as opposed to groups examined more closely: the details of individual differences become clearer. As far as I can tell, there seem to be several categories of “flat Earther”. There certainly are people who are just joking, and in fact when the flat Earth society was reëstablished in I think the ‘noughties, it appears to have been a joke. There are also trolls, which is a slightly different thing because I suspect the people concerned enjoy either tweaking the feathers of people they see as nerds or deceiving people into thinking it’s flat for fun. This seems to blend into a group of people who are trying to make money out of gullible people and present themselves as serious campaigners and investigators on the issue. Then there are their followers, who have bought into the whole thing, which is where the conspiracy theories start. There are few people who think independently on the issue, and there are then religiously-motivated people and people who are simply persuaded but not particularly religious. Finally, there are enquiring people who don’t seem to be skilled at fact-checking and simply feel that the two views, flat and round Earth, are equally open to question: kind of “false balance” people who think there is enough evidence for it to be a fair fight.

I can certainly vouch for the power of the force of gravity here, because I couldn’t leave it alone. Rather than manifesting itself as concluding Earth was flat for me, it came across as a compulsion to post and address issues even though I knew it wouldn’t persuade anyone to do it. It may be worth asking myself questions about why I felt the draw of the belief system and attempting to change it, and why “flat Eartherism” in particular has this pull. I know that I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies although I’m not going to pathologise that or embrace a self-diagnosis, but it is there and it probably is a factor for me. But it was also very time-consuming. Cutting my ties with it is also a judgement call, because it’s possible for some people actually to make a living out of addressing the issue. There are, for example, YouTube channels devoted to debunking flat Eartherism as well as all the so-called “Truth” channels focussing on promoting it. Pushing it far enough might in theory have brought some money in although I’m small fry in that pond,so probably not.

This raises the question of whether it’s harmless. In a way, this is beside the point. It’s more that the occurrence of the belief, which often seems to be a long way down the line for many people who have come to question other widely-held beliefs such as how genuine the Apollo program was, is symptomatic of poor fact-checking abilities, and when I say “ability” I do believe critical thinking can be developed in most people. They could even develop it themselves, although it may be difficult to overcome emotional and social attachment to a belief. It is also true that believing Earth is flat is going to exclude people from certain lines of work, or at least make it difficult for them to pursue them, such as on large engineering projects or piloting international aircraft, so maybe human resources are lost to society because of this belief. More broadly, however, there are the issues of overvalued ideas, vulnerability to more negative consequences from other beliefs (anti-vaccination comes to mind) and the general feeling of distrust and fear which may arise from the idea that there is a vast conspiracy to keep all this from the public. The size of this effort would be a lot bigger in this case than any other conspiracy I can think of, because so much more depends on the shape of the planet than other things.

Looking at the trolls, and here I presume that trolls exist and I’d expect there to be at least a few, an outsider would see them as pretending to be of low intelligence and poorly-educated, which is an odd thing to do to one’s reputation. I imagine that they are deriving entertainment from successfully deceiving others or annoying people they may see as nerds. I have in common with these people that I’m drawn into wasting my time and energy on a project which is not very productive and a bit of a pointless endeavour. Trolling is something I don’t fully understand and I sometimes wonder if trolls even know what their real motivations are, because it’s so easy to develop an online persona unintentionally. Beyond this, I can even develop a little conspiracy hypothesis of my own that the whole exercise is a distraction from more consequential issues for all of us, not just the flat Earthers. It’s possible to drop the whole intentional fallacy from this idea and just say, this is what it does and it doesn’t matter if it’s a concerted effort or not. This is one reason why I’ve given up on them, because it really is a bit of a waste of time.

There’s also something like the “sunk cost fallacy” operating here, perhaps on both sides. The sunk cost fallacy is the feeling that because you’ve spent a lot of time and resources, and have perhaps lost a lot in your own life socially and otherwise by pursuing a particular goal, it’s hard to back out of it. If you’ve become a flat Earther, you may value the comradeship of the people around you, online or off, and in many sallies away from majority opinion, people can lose friends and acquaintances, and also opportunities, and all of these things amount to costs. Another form of cost is the embarrassment one may experience from admitting one was wrong.

All that said, we should avoid “othering” people whose beliefs we’re confident are incorrect. One reason for this is that having delusions is part of the healthy human psyche, and even where they don’t serve a positive purpose they may nonetheless exist. Failure to acknowledge that we rationalise our beliefs, even if they’re correct and well-supported by evidence, is lack of self-awareness. Our beliefs also have functions beyond the practical. They can be like interests which bind a club together, and of course this is a substantial part of the function of religious beliefs. I have long maintained that religious belief of some kind is inevitable and therefore that we shouldn’t always resist it, as it can play a valuable part in maintaining good mental health. The question here is whether believing Earth is flat is worthwhile enough for the cost paid through lack of contact with reality.

I have an acquaintance who used to be quite a close family friend. We even went on holiday together and attempted some joint business ventures. Quite some time back, they expressed the view that the Apollo missions were a hoax. I engaged with them on this but they didn’t change their mind. I should point out at this stage that this person was a faithful Green Party voter and possibly even a member of the party. They were also an alternative medicine practitioner. This particular category of work has a lot of variation in it and can be stigmatised. It’s also how many people see me. Nonetheless there is a perceived issue of evidence supporting efficaciousness or otherwise which plainly does apply to some modalities. During the lockdown, they expressed support for Trump, not just regarding his approach to the pandemic but more widely. I could make a link between belief that Apollo was a hoax and this later conclusion. I found the incident very saddening and disappointing.

It seems that a lot of the more vocal flat Earthers nowadays connect their beliefs to the Apollo hoax idea, which makes sense if you think Earth is flat, and also to anthropogenic climate change denial, the New World Order conspiracy theory and anti-vaccination. Of all of these, I should point out that in the 1990s I was close to being anti-vaxx, although my problem was that as usual my opinion wasn’t similar to that of others. I tended to get lumped in with anti-vaxx people even though my actual position was that I wanted some vaccinations to be given by inhaler or nebuliser, not injection, rather than being opposed to vaccinations as such, and as such wasn’t opposed to the single tetanus jab or OPV per se. Now that this is being done routinely with children, I no longer have that objection although I am still concerned about the evolution of slow viruses by attenuation. However, I’ve long felt that the real problem with vaccination resistance is that much of the population doesn’t feel respected or listened to, and I wonder also if this is a factor here. This is one conspiracy theory I’ve seen from the inside. I get the impression also that flat Eartherism is the “hard drug” as it were. It’s the last thing people end up believing in once they’ve accepted all the others.

Due to the universal nature of delusions, a more useful marker for mental illness may be the overvalued idea. It isn’t so much that people believe Earth is flat as that they’re preoccupied with the idea and it comes to dominate their lives. It is understandable that if you think something so fundamental is different than how it’s presented publicly, you probably would think it was quite important to do something about it, and are also likely to think there may be a sinister reason behind the deception. Is it an overvalued idea for a starving person to focus on finding something to eat?

According to the conspiracy theory, the rationale behind persuading the world that Earth is round is to dislodge humans from the centre of creation and lose Earth in the vastness of an impersonal Universe, thereby undermining theism. If that were the aim, it seems like overkill. Why would it be necessary to keep “building” the Universe in the way they would have had to have been doing, for instance initially portraying distant galaxies as nebulæ within our own and likewise with quasars, before promoting them to enormous distances? There’s another perspective within this one that the Big Bang theory, evolution and flat Earthism are all part of a plot to do this, and are associated with the Illuminati, the Masons and unfortunately sometimes the Jews. This last association probably indicates why all this might be dangerous.

I actually find the bog-standard flat Earther view to be claustrophobic and think it makes the world feel like a prison. It also seems to guarantee that there is no life anywhere except on Earth, which for me is a deal-breaker for theistic prayer and worship. If God chooses to sustain a Universe where we are the only sentient beings in a single biosphere, it seems like God cannot be related to by humans on an emotional level. This makes more sense if one does see the Universe as vast, but it still works to some extent on the prison world hypothesis because whereas God could have chosen to sustain a vast Universe, she chose not to, which means we’re trapped conceptually. Of course, we could still be literally trapped on Earth in a vast Universe, but at least the way things are we do know how enormous the world is and the contrast with the largely lifeless Universe in which we’re embedded emphasises the specialness of this planet. This would be less true of an infinite plane Universe though there is still the problem of apparently being at its centre, since it is supposed to be infinite and therefore has either no centre or a ubiquitous one.

Of course one might be forgiven for asking why this matters given the current world situation, and that’s a valid question. It would be easy to come up with a conspiracy theory of one’s own here, that fine minds are being distracted from what matters in order that atrocities can be committed, but in response to that I would say that many of the minds which are being distracted, mine included, are rather far from fine and wouldn’t make much of a contribution anyway, and also that it’s a basic principle to focus on the consequences of a set of circumstances more than the cause, which is a distraction in itself and also symptomatic rather than the more general underlying cause of the problem, which would be worth addressing. The question remains, then, of whether one should bother with this at all. Unfortunately the answer seems to be yes, because analysis of how the issue has arisen allows insight into how other more serious issues have, or might do in future. It’s a kind of model for how, for example, Russian trolls might influence voting in elections or how the Rohingya genocide was engineered.

The idea of conspiracy has tended to centre on NASA as a major actor in this realm. This is peculiar as the sphericality of the planet seems to have been first suggested by Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, its circumference measured by Eratosthenes in the third century BCE and it was then accepted by the Church into the European Middle Ages, to the extent that they used to discuss whether it was possible that God would have created land on the opposite side of the globe from Christendom because if it were inhabited, it might not be feasible for the Word of God to reach them. I have to admit to being a little confused by this as it seems to imply their view of gravity was quite modern, but it is nonetheless so.

This does, however, raise the question of what kinds of people accepted Earth as round at the time. It does seem quite likely that the average European peasant would not have had an explicit view of Earth’s shape at the time, as they had more pressing concerns, but that might be to underestimate their mentality. Likewise, it also seems entirely feasible that even today many peoples who have not had contact with Western civilisation would assume Earth is flat. The rather startling figure of seven percent of Brazilians, though, appears to refer to Europeanised Brazilians rather than the likes of the Yanomami.

I’ve noticed also that some flat Earthers are merely repeating claims without checking up on them. Two of these in particular are that until the 1920s, US public schools taught that the world was flat. This does not tally well with discoverable facts about history. It was the work of a couple of minutes to locate a digital archive of nineteenth century school geography textbooks, on whose first page it was stated categorically that Earth is round and we live on its exterior. This particular work was published in 1889. It is possible that children were being taught that the world was flat at a later date, for a couple of reasons. One is that teachers don’t necessarily teach what is on the curriculum, and could be either poorly educated themselves or believe that it’s flat, in which case they would presumably teach that if the issue arose. Another is that it isn’t clear how far such textbooks had penetrated by this time. A second, less consequential, claim is that Eratosthenes was inserted into textbooks in the 1980s. I am in the happy position of being able to refute this. I first read of his experiment in ‘The Collins New World Of Knowledge Encyclopedia Of Science And Technology’, published I think in 1973. It’s quite an audacious claim that it was added more recently than that, and I expect that if I were to bother to look, I would find earlier examples. These two claims make me feel that it’s almost Last Thursdayism. A rather similar claim is that NASA pictures taken in the 1960s are CGI, which is very peculiar as there would’ve been many other ways to fake images at that time.

Getting back to NASA, there are two oddities about this particular focus. One is that their existence is completely superfluous to the evidence Earth is round, which as I said is millennia old. Another is that they are only one of many space agencies, which I think probably reflects the US-centric nature of Flat Earthism. There are around sixteen space agencies with launch capability and several times that number capable of doing things like building satellites to be launched by others. These two aspects seem to reveal a considerable degree of ignorance about general knowledge. This is coupled with two other aspects of how flat Earthers view education. They often view mathematics with suspicion and are unwilling to apply the scientific method, often engaging in ad hominem attacks when these are used. All of this taken together had led me to feel that they have been poorly served by the schooling system. They seem to regard belief in a round Earth to result from indoctrination when well-expressed scientifically based tests which are easily reproduced by someone without elaborate equipment are actively avoided. This makes it more likely that their beliefs are motivated by religious sensibilities, but unfortunately not open-minded or progressive ones.

The Bible does seem to imply that its human writers tended to assume Earth was flat. Apart from references to “the four corners of the Earth” in the Tanakh, Jesus is depicted as rising into heaven above Earth, which suggests a sandwich-like cosmology with heaven constituting an entirely horizontal layer above the terrestrial realm. It also raises a question in my mind which I’ve been unable to answer so far. If Biblically literalist Christians (and also many Muslims but not religious Jews on the whole) are often young Earth creationists due to their approach to their sacred texts, why is it less common for them to be flat Earthers? Such a view is clearly assumed by Biblical authors just as creationism is, yet the view is much less popular. If I could crack this conundrum, it might lead me towards better arguments against creationism. This might also be a massive waste of time of course, like the rest of it.

A major problem with how flat Earthers interact with the rest of humanity is that we who have an accurate view of Earth’s shape are often guilty of ridicule and insult towards them. This leads to entrenched positions which are defended and attacked not by reasoned argument but through largely emotional interaction. I can imagine a flat Earther becoming more relaxed about her beliefs and getting on with her lives in other ways, and then eventually not caring much about Earth’s shape or quietly conceding she was wrong, but if that day does dawn in their lives, it will do so a lot later if they’ve been pummeled for their beliefs in this way. They’re likely to thrive on persecution, and it is in any case wrong to behave thusly towards them. This may fuel the retention of the beliefs in question.

Flat Earthers, oddly, seem to see the rest of us as indoctrinated “sheeple”. Both sides seem to accuse the other of the same things, and for once because we are able to state confidently that Earth is not flat and back that up with evidence, it’s possible to separate the accusations from the reality, but it is still interesting that they perceive us as we perceive them. Unlike us, sadly in a way, the evidence they present is not remotely convincing and could only be believed by someone who was both unaware of science in the sense of it being a body of information and of the scientific method. They often think of scientists as having their views dictated by monetary interests, and to be honest this has been known to happen, as with medical research into the consequences of smoking tobacco, but in the case of investigating Earth’s shape this is easily reproducible. I have, as mentioned here before, suggested that in order to avoid accusations of manipulation, they come up with their own falsifiable test but I have never known one to do that.

It only takes one reliable falsification for a hypothesis to be rejected. In the case of Earth being flat, many falsifications are available. It would be interesting if the hypothesis that Earth is round could be falsified, but apart from minor details such as its oblateness this has not happened so far and nothing offered by flat Earthers that I’m aware of has succeeded in doing so. Good quality evidence would be most welcome, but is not forthcoming. The closest they get is objects being visible which seem to be beyond the line of sight, but when this is definitely testable it can be explained by refraction of light by the atmosphere, which can only make objects appear higher, i.e. visible if somewhat beyond the horizon, than they would be if no atmosphere was present. Other, similar attempts have been made, such as the claim that RADAR works beyond the horizon. It does, but that’s a special kind of RADAR called, appropriately, “over the horizon RADAR” and works by bouncing short wave radio waves off the ionosphere. Similarly, a microwave mast in Cyprus can communicate with one in the Lebanon, and since microwaves only work by line of sight this would only be possible if each is above the horizon from the other’s perspective, but in fact Lebanon is quite a mountainous country and this is not at all problematic.

I’ve also noticed quite basic misunderstandings which seem to result from not reading sources closely. One flat Earther claimed that my own claim that seismic waves indicated that there was an apparently spheroidal core centred six thousand odd kilometres below the surface was outdated because Earth’s core was not made of iron and nickel but of ionised light elements such as hydrogen and oxygen, and provided a link. What they actually linked to, if followed, reveals a paper which was scientifically quite rigorous but didn’t make this claim. Rather, it claimed that seismic waves appeared to show that Earth’s core was an alloy of iron and nickel combined with ionised hydrogen and oxygen which behaved differently due to the high pressure. This particular flat Earther said they were an ex-engineer who had accepted all their life that the planet was round, but changed their mind later on. Although I’m not questioning that, I do wonder if it’s a sign of cognitive decline, because the paper did not claim anything like they said it did. There were also many spelling mistakes not similar to autocomplete errors in their writing, which again doesn’t show for sure that they’re mistaken but does suggest something regarding their reliability.

All of this, then, seems to be the consequence of something characteristic of our time, perhaps like the Targeted Individual community, where people diagnosable as in a markèdly delusional condition meet others online who reinforce their beliefs of persecution, but combined with poor educational attainment and critical thinking skills. However, we can’t feel all superior about this because not only is it partly about bad luck with the education system, but it’s also nothing more than a delusion we happen not to share, unlike the individual delusions the rest of us happen to have.

If you’re a flat Earther reading this, I want to say the following to you. Although you’re wrong, I will also inevitably be wrong about some of my beliefs, and the reason you’re wrong is not connected to you being in the minority. Even if only a single person in the world believes something, the mere fact that it’s just the one person has no bearing on whether it’s true or not. I don’t want you to feel I treat you with contempt, and if any of what I’ve written has made you feel this way, I sincerely apologise. It takes courage to stick to a belief which the whole world is against, and I respect you for that. Who knows what else we might have in common outside this area?

Artemis And Doomsday

Right now, the chances are that everyone reading this is a basic human like me, living on Earth, or at an outside chance, in low Earth orbit (who am I kidding‽). Consider that condition. What are the chances that that’s what you are if human life goes on and our descendants fan out into the Galaxy? I’ve gone into this many times of course, and the Doomsday Argument, as this is called, is flawed, but it’s worth going into it again for the purposes of applying it to the situation in which the human race finds itself today.

I’ll just recap briefly. There was a guy who visited the Berlin Wall in the 1960s and predicted that it would come down at approximately the time it did through estimating the probability of where he was in the total number of visitors to the Wall, using only probability, statistics and the time since it had been put up. His name was Brandon Carter, and he later applied a similar argument to estimating how long the human race has left based on the assumption that one is about half way through the total number of human births. When I did this calculation based on my own date of birth, the 1977 CE estimate that 75 thousand million people had been born before me, which covered the past six hundred millennia and a doubling period somewhere around three decades, as it was at the time, it gave me the result that the last human birth would take place around 2130. There are various silly aspects to this argument. For instance, if Adam existed and had made this calculation just before Eve appeared, he would conclude that the human race would be most likely to end with Eve’s death. By the way, I am not fundamentalist and therefore do not believe Eve and Adam ever existed. I just want to make that clear.

Although this is not a particularly marvellous argument, I do think a similar one works fairly well in one particular area, as I’ve mentioned before. It does in fact seem fair to assume the principle of mediocrity about one’s own existence. In that respect, it’s fair to assume I’m a typical example of a human and have been born at a time when prevailing conditions are “normal”, i.e. that the fact that I find myself living at a time when we have only ever lived on one planet and are not cyborgs to a greater extent than Donna Haraway claims. Transhumanism is not the usual human condition and there are neither orbiting space colonies nor settlements on other worlds. If we even settled ten other worlds they would only need a population over the whole period humans dwelt on them about equivalent to the current population of this planet for us to be outnumbered, and that’s a very modest estimate of how human history would unfold if we began to live elsewhere than on this planet. It would be more likely for there to be numerous settlements, either in the form of space stations or people living on other habitable planets. Say there were a million planets settled, which is still a conservative estimate for the number of suitable planets in the Milky Way, and they were settled for only a thousand years each. That’s an æon of human life on other planets. For it to be more probable for us to be here now than there then, it would need the population on each of those planets to average out at less than seven dozen. That is clearly absurd, so we have to conclude that as a species we will never settle on any other planets or build any permanent space habitats, or that our existence here and now just happens to be fantastically impossible.

For this to be the case, we have to conclude that our efforts to go into space are also only ever going to be very minor to non-existent, something which is confirmed right now by the fact that only twelve people have ever visited another celestial body. Even that was difficult because one crew didn’t make it. Now we’re supposed to try again with the Artemis Project, the current plan to go back to where Apollo went. Incidentally, I’ve long thought that one of the issues with the conspiracy theory is that getting there is only equivalent to going round the world ten times. Patrick Moore had a car which had gone further than twice that distance, and the average flight crew probably notch that up in a couple of weeks. Not that it wasn’t an amazing achievement. But humanity didn’t go on to do anything else afterwards, is the issue.

We’re confronted with a problem in the current moment then. It’s looking like there will be more people walking about up there in a couple of years, but if that happens it looks suspiciously like this version of the Doomsday Argument will have been refuted. But before I go there, I want to talk about Brooke Bond.

In 1971, Brooke Bond brought out a series of collector’s cards on the Space Race which started with Sputnik 1 (let’s Russ that up a little: Спутник-1) and proceeded through the various early satellites, planetary missions and the like up to Apollo and then past into the future. I collected the cards and got the book to stick them in. It must’ve been 1971 because it had the pound marked in both shillings and “p”, and they only did that in that year if I recall correctly. Anyway, it was from this publication that I learnt of the plan to send a human mission to Mars via Venus launching in the late ’70s. I remember looking at the years and thinking “1979” and “1980” looked really strange and futuristic, like the numbers on the public library date stamp which had yet to be used. But yes, there was a tentative plan at that point to send astronauts to Venus and Mars which everyone seems to have forgotten. There have in fact been a very large number of such proposals, but I didn’t know that at the time:

Actually, looking at this I realise I got it the wrong way round. They were going to visit Mars first and then do a Venus flyby. My confusion arises from the fact that there were so many different plans to do this. The Russians even considered a Venus mission to be launched in the early 1960s. I remember eagerly awaiting this, in full expectation that it would happen, and the dates passing with nothing to show for them, and how disillusioning it all was. This was a feature of my life at the time. When they found CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and that carbon dioxide emissions were causing climate change, I was convinced that they’d just go, “right, lets take the fluorocarbons out of aerosols and stop using fossil fuels”, and it’s the same kind of disappointment, from which you can see that I wasn’t your typical space nerd or environmental activist, because I suspect rather few people were equally enthusiastic about Green politics and astronautics, but that’s who I am. There is a seamless disappointment there. It’s all part of my same imaginary world, and it was very hard to cope with at the time. I can’t believe how slowly everything except IT progresses, and it’s also weird that IT did advance that quickly compared to everything else. I have certain theories about that, not conspiracy theories but something else, which I’ll leave for another time.

The space-based Doomsday Argument, which I’m going to call “Space Doomsday”, can easily explain why this didn’t happen, although maybe “why” is the wrong word here. The immediate reason the Mars mission didn’t happen was budgetary cuts to NASA in 1970. However, considering our lives as a relatively random sample of human history, we are aware that it’s improbable that human space exploration will ever make much progress, or we probably wouldn’t be here sitting on this single planet where we originated. It’s possible but improbable. The idea that we will in fact end up doing this isn’t ruled out by the fact. It’s similar to the idea that if you have lung cancer, you have probably been a long-term tobacco smoker. That’s something you can reasonably conclude about someone’s previous life given their current condition, although it may also be that they got it from passive smoking or asbestos exposure, for example. It isn’t a dead cert, but it’s probable. Hence it’s probable that something would happen to prevent people from landing on Mars, assuming of course that the expansion into space follows such activities, and in that sense Space Doomsday has predictive power, or perhaps forecasting power. We know we’re here on Earth, so we can reasonably believe the human race does not have a spacefaring future. A slightly less reasonable conclusion is that there will be no human missions to other celestial bodies in our future.

This could potentially lead to a weird version of “Moonlanding” denial conspiracy theory. Obviously I accept humans landed on Cynthia six times owing to not being delusional in that respect, but suppose Artemis happens. I am wedded to the idea that humans will never go there again because of Space Doomsday, so if they do go there I’m tempted to deny that due to it not fitting in with my world view, and the same applies to any planned Mars mission. Am I perhaps a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist in the making? If someone believed in Space Doomsday in the 1960s, would they have ended up denying the Apollo missions were real? If the news that Artemis does succeed appears in the media and we see pictures from the lunar surface and the rest, it’s fair to conclude that we probably have gone there in a second batch of missions, but one’s belief in Space Doomsday could be so strong that it would lead to K-skepticism. For me, that would be motivated by depressive thinking, but others might have more positive reasons for doubt, such as the idea that it isn’t appropriate for so much money and resources to be spent on space missions when there are enough problems on this planet to be addressed.

Speaking of this planet, there could be a link between these two major sources of disappointment emanating from my childhood. Alternative futures are possible from these. In one, we simply don’t go into space much. Perhaps robotic probes become ever more sophisticated, take over from us, and colonise the Galaxy themselves, or maybe there’s just no impetus to do so and we all become more focussed on whatever’s going on down here. This is a relatively positive future compared to the other one, which is that this apparent lack of concern for environmental disaster simply wipes out the human race in a few years, before anyone gets the chance to go to Mars. This chimes with the apparent, though egocentric, forecast that the last human birth will occur around 2130.

The interesting thing about Space Doomsday is that it seems to have predictive power. For instance, it predicts that there will be a reason why nobody will go to Mars or the Artemis project won’t come to fruition. In fact, Artemis has indeed met with problems. The plan is for at least eight missions, the first two of which won’t involve a lunar landing. Artemis I is an unoccupied test of the spacecraft which will orbit Cynthia and return, splashing down on Earth, next year (2022). Artemis II happens the year after and involves a crew orbiting Cynthia, which would be the first time anyone has left cis lunar space since 1972. 2024 is expected to see humans back on the surface for the first time since Apollo, and a series of missions after that will involve building a lunar base for permanent habitation. This looks like the point of no return for human settlement in space, although it might just not happen or not go any further. But in order to be “scientific” about this, I need to define exactly what I mean by the statement that humans will never settle on other worlds or establish a permanent presence in space. That initial statement looks wrong for a start because of the International Space Station, which is a permanent presence. Otherwise, I’m moving the goalposts, and I might say after Artemis I, “well I never said the hardware wouldn’t work” or after Artemis II, “well I never said nobody would ever leave cis lunar space again” and so on. I need to be more precise, and base it on evidence.

My claim is based on the idea that the total number of human births is likely to be at most 150 thousand million. More than this and the chances of living now rather than later in history fall below fifty percent. In fact, therefore, it’s possible to forecast from this position that the total population of space will always be less than seventy five thousand million minus the population still on this planet. In fact if it were ever close to being that high, that would seem to herald the extinction of the human species for probability-related reasons, which suggests further that there will never be self-sufficient space colonies or that some perhaps solar-related disaster will befall life in this Solar System.

Artemis is supposed to lay the foundations for the eventual exploration of Mars. This in itself means it’s unlikely to succeed, not because that’s over-ambitious but because it means it does in fact appear to be a stepping stone to people living permanently off Earth, which either can’t happen or is likely to end in disaster, or at best peter out. Hence it can be expected that there will be major snags in the program. Now it’s difficult to tell whether I’m seeing patterns where there are none, as any major long-term complicated undertaking is likely to meet with the occasional problem. Thinking again of our hypothetical Space Doomsday person living in the ’60s, they might focus on the Apollo I fire and the Apollo XIII disaster as signs that it wasn’t going to work, that there would turn out, for example, to be insurmountable safety obstacles to strapping three guys into a seat on top of a hundred metre column of high explosive. I mean, who’d’ve thought it? But there were six successful missions as well as more successful translunar incursions (excursions?). It is probably true, speaking from my deeply uninformed position, that the risks taken on those missions were much higher than they would be today, and presumably are on the Artemis program, but maybe not. I confess to not paying much attention to Artemis because I don’t want to be disappointed again, so I don’t know much about it.

There are sound economic reasons for returning, including the presence of metals such as titanium more easily accessible than here and, if fusion ever happens, and that’s another thing which seems infinitely deferred, helium-3 in the soil, and water is now known to be available, in the form of ice in the parts of polar craters in permanent shadow, freeing a base from the necessity of a water supply from Earth. It was detected by the Clementine mission in March 1996, in Shackleton Crater.

The spacesuits for Artemis have been delayed, it was announced this August. This will prevent a 2024 landing, since they won’t be ready until April 2025 at the earliest. That puts it later than the next presidential election, and if for example Trump is re-elected, which unfortunately is still possible it seems, he could cancel the program before then. The current space suits are not intended to be used for extensive periods on the lunar surface, hence the need for new ones. One reason for the delay is budget cuts and another is the pandemic. But you could look at it, rather unscientifically, as a curse or fate. There is reason to deduce that something will always stop it happening because it’s possible that we can be confident nobody will ever go there again or to Mars at all. The details of the cause are apparently not available, but right now they seem to include Trump, the pandemic and budget cuts.

The Artemis program involves the building and transport of infrastructure and equipment separately from the crewed missions. This is a factor in its demise. If it was just about astronauts visiting without setting up a permanent base, it could well go ahead as that’s a less significant step in establishing a foothold elsewhere in the Solar System. Hence the crewed lunar orbital mission is more likely to happen, although this is also a step on the way. It would also be more likely to happen if it wasn’t supposed to be a preliminary to going to Mars. There was a plan, decades ago, for the first astronaut to arrive to start putting together a permanent lunar base, which it’s possible to predict wouldn’t happen for the same reason.

I’m not going to deny that a lot of this post is motivated by depressive thinking, although I’m not actually depressed just now. To counter that, I want to point out that depressive realism helps one perceive unpleasant truths, one of which appears to be that our descendants are trapped on this planet forever. And I’m not even saying that Earth is not a wonderful and beautiful place. It’s for this exact reason that humans should move many of their activities, and for that matter bodies, into space, off this planet, to preserve it and allow it to recover. Moreover, there was always going to be positive fallout from space travel, such as the Overview Effect, the Spaceship Earth concept, the discovery of the possibility of nuclear winter, the reminder Venus gives us of how easily climate change can get out of hand, not to mention the various technological benefits. Nonetheless, some people would see being stuck here as a positive thing, and it has positie aspects. It means, for example, that there is no escape from the effects of pollution, reduced biodiversity and anthropogenic climate change, except that maybe there is for the rich and powerful but not the poor and oppressed.

So wouldn’t it be nice if we had a lunar base, went to Mars and built space colonies for the people left here on Earth?