3 Humanity’s Dilemma before Abaddon’s Gate

       Leonard Kahn

      James Holden manages to convince an alien technology—Abaddon’s Gate, created by the protomolecule—that human beings are not a threat. It opens up 1,300 Einstein‐Rosen bridges, providing humanity access to at least as many habitable worlds. Humanity faces a dilemma at the start of the fourth season of The Expanse. How should we proceed? Should we use the Ring System to explore and colonize the galaxy, even though trying to do so might kill us all?

      Throughout the season, UN Secretary General Chrisjen Avasarala and her political rival, Nancy Gao, debate this question. While Avasarala advocates a slow, cautious approach, Gao champions immediate and aggressive exploration and colonization.

      NANCY GAO:

      “Whatever is out there, we’ll deal with it because that is the history of our species.”

      CHRISJEN AVASARALA:

      “Right up to the moment that our species ceases to exist.” (“Subduction”)

      By the end of the season, Gao has won the debate. She replaces Avasarala as Secretary General and appears poised to begin what James Holden fears will be a “blood‐soaked gold rush” (“Abaddon’s Gate”).

      But we can ask, who should have won the debate?

Gao’s reasons for favoring a rapid and forceful approach to colonization are rooted in Earth’s dire circumstances. Centuries before the series begins, humans have damaged Earth’s ecosystem. As a result, about half of its 30 billion inhabitants live on Basic Assistance, a welfare program that provides just the minimum needed to survive. The only way to break free from Basic Assistance is to get a job or training, and competition for these escape routes is so fierce that only 1 in 6,000 people manages to do so. Nico (a man whom we briefly meet in “Cascade”) admits to Bobbie Draper that he has been waiting for a spot on the vocational training list for 35 years. Gao herself was able to escape Basic Assistance only because a well‐connected family friend interceded, a fact that Avasarala gleefully threw in her face. As Gao put it, “the system is broken,” and the way to fix it is to allow Earth’s inhabitants to use the Ring System to explore the hundreds of new worlds available to them (“Oppressor”).

      Yet the alien technology, the protomolecule, responsible for opening Abaddon’s Gate is dangerous. Experimentation with it caused the Eros Incident, which almost killed everyone on Earth. Even after the opening of Abaddon’s Gate, the protomolecule was on the verge of wiping out the entire solar system because it saw humanity as a threat. The protomolecule is dangerous, so we need to consider both the benefits and the costs of using the Ring System.

      How effective is this response to Gao’s reasoning?

      The answer depends. In part, we have to know whether Gao counted the benefits correctly. Providing better opportunities for 15 billion people would be wonderful, of course. Yet doing so pales in comparison with other benefits that utilizing the Ring System could have. Gao’s reasoning becomes much stronger if we consider the future, rather than just the present, effects of using the Ring System.

      Looking at the other advantages means imagining the ends of our potential as a species.

Colonizing the System

      The very first words of The Expanse appear on a title card: In the twenty‐third century, humans have colonized the solar system. In addition to the 30 billion humans on Earth, 1 billion people inhabit its moon, and another 10 billion live on its former colony, Mars. Furthermore, tens of millions of humans live among the Outer Planets, comprising asteroids between Mars and Jupiter and a number of the moons, like Ganymede, of the outer giant planets.

      Human colonization of the solar system is a shopworn trope in science fiction—so much so that we might not give it a second thought. Yet, that would be a mistake. Understating the overwhelming importance of expanding beyond our home planet is easy.

      Start by considering Derek Parfit’s (1942–2017) famous thought experiment:

      Compare three outcomes:

Obviously, (1) is the best outcome, and (3) is the worst outcome, with (2) sitting between them. However, as great philosophers often do, Parfit pushes past the obvious truth and discovers insights hiding just out of view.

“Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2), but I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy humankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.”¹ One of Parfit’s main insights is that the future has the potential to contain vastly more value than the present. (We’ll return to Parfit’s other main insight later in this chapter.)

Toby Ord, a philosopher at Oxford, expands on Parfit’s thinking. “If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two‐hundred‐thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty, and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today.”² On this quite reasonable assumption about the habitability of Earth, our planet could support an upper bound of 10¹⁶ human lives of normal duration over a billion years. More than 1 million times as many humans as exist today could exist in the future, and at least ten thousand times as many humans as have ever existed.

Nevertheless, as good as this earthbound possible future would be, humanity has another possible future that is many, many orders of magnitude better. This possible future is one in which we expand far beyond the bounds of our solar system. Ord gives us a glimpse of this possible future: “if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could have more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present‐day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.”³ Expanding beyond our solar system could allow humanity and its descendants somewhere between 10³⁴ and 10⁷¹ lives of normal duration.⁴

      In other words, failing to colonize our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps even the Virgo Supercluster could cost the future between 10¹⁸ and 10⁵⁵ human lives.

These numbers are so immense as to defy understanding. Here is one provocative way of thinking about the matter. The worst disaster in human history so far has been World War II, which cost about 50 million human lives over six years. Sticking to conservative estimates, failing to colonize the Milky Way would be worse—one hundred trillion times worse. Put somewhat differently, the loss would be approximately equivalent to one World War II every second from 1200 BCE (at the time of the Late Bronze‐Age Collapse, the writing of the Rigveda, and the zenith of the Shang Dynasty) to our own present day.

A moment ago, we noted that it is easy to understate the importance of humanity’s ability in The Expanse to travel