Can We Survive Technology, In Space?

(Originally published on Medium.com in March 2023.)

New technologies can bring both promise and the potential for peril. How much of each is difficult to determine, and the time horizon for assessing this can extend far into the future. What seems promising today may prove perilous tomorrow (or the next day, or the day after…) and vice versa. This are things that John von Neumann was undoubtedly thinking about when he wrote his 1955 essay Can We Survive Technology? He was trying to raise the alarm about a “rapidly maturing crisis”, born of the fact that technology was changing dramatically while the Earth remained a small and increasingly chaotic place:

“‘The great globe itself’ is in a rapidly maturing crisis — a crisis attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and underorganized. To define the crisis with any accuracy, and to explore possibilities of dealing with it, we must not only look at relevant facts, but also engage in some speculation.”

Von Neumann believed that while technological developments in the first half of the 20th century had been impressive, they had been limited by one key factor: geography. Specifically, the size of our planet. He called geography “an essential safety factor”. It constrained the potential chaos of technological advancements. He explained that “an ever broader geographical scope for technological activities, combined with an ever broader political integration of the world” had so far made it “possible to accommodate the major tensions created by technological progress.” In other words, the major players had enough room to freely move their pieces around the board without upending the entire game.

Not so by the mid-1950s. The situation had changed, Von Neumann suggested, because powerful new technologies were altering humanity’s fundamental experience of time and space. Geography was no longer the “safety factor” it once was. Because of these new technologies, the board didn’t feel so big any more. Carelessly moving one’s pieces the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, might spell disaster for everyone. He wrote:

“this safety mechanism [geography] is being sharply inhibited; literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the earth in a critical way. Thus the crisis does not arise from accidental events or human errors. It is inherent in technology’s relation to geography on the one hand and to political organization on the other.”

Unlike the industrial revolution, the latest technological developments — including the atom bomb and the computer — represented a dramatic change in humanity’s experience of the speed at which things happen over distances. This critical factor differentiated the industrial age from the post-industrial age. While the industrial revolution was characterised by an increase in “the speed of performing large-scale operations,” this “increased speed did not so much shorten time requirements of processes as extend the areas of the earth affected by them.” For von Neumann, post-industrial technologies were pushing humanity towards a new spatial-temporal territory:

“Since most time scales are fixed by human reaction times, habits, and other physiological and psychological factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of units — political, organizational, economic, and cultural — affected by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time. This important evolution has a natural limit, that of the earth’s actual size. The limit is now being reached, or at least closely approached.”

Von Neumann was writing in 1955 before some key milestones in humanity’s technological development, like the advent of space exploration and near-instantaneous global communications. A lot of technological development has happened since then (including those two things). So this begs some reflection. In particular, as humanity becomes a space-faring civilisation — with human social, economic, political, and military activities extending into outer space and eventually beyond our solar system — how will the expansion of our spatial-temporal landscape affect our ability to “accommodate the major tensions created by technological progress”? It’s an important question.

Von Neumann’s logic suggested that powerful technologies were increasing the risk of major tensions because the Earth was a small place. So, what happens when the planet no longer represents the spatial limit of human activity? What are the implications for the future stability of human civilisation as the solar system (and beyond) becomes our new playground? Does more space mean greater stability, or less? How will activities, behaviours, interactions, and communications over massive distances affect our collective propensity for sliding into chaos and instability?

It’s almost a cliché to talk about how much of modern life on Earth depends on the space-based technologies. They underpin everything from transport and navigation, to agriculture and weather monitoring — and, of course, our global communications network. But things are also heating up in space itself, and there’s increased concern about the risks associated with humanity’s activities out there. Countries are developing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons to destroy each other’s space-based platforms. Space debris can hurtle through orbit damaging or wrecking anything in its path; the International Space Station (ISS) recently had to dodge some of this. The major powers are developing a range of offensive and defensive space-based military capabilities. NATO, like many, recognises space as a “new operational domain, alongside air, land, maritime and cyberspace.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean space wars will become a thing anytime soon (although, perhaps sooner than we think). For example, awareness of how badly things can go wrong in space underpinned the US Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations General Saltzman’s recent announcement of a new “theory of success”. Called “Competitive Endurance”, the theory has competition rather than conflict as the guiding principle. Due to the cascading affects (namely, space debris) of using military force in space, Saltzman stated that “domain control in space cannot rely on overwhelming destructive force”. Therefore:

“our goal is perpetual competition, locked in a battle for stability in the domain, neither driving our adversaries towards disrupting the space domain nor towards desperation… That means orienting ourselves around the idea that there is no end-state, there is no victory in space because if you do this right, you never fight”.

But given humanity’s history, the notion that we wouldn’t take our violent tendencies with us into space seems a little ambitious. For instance, around the same time General Saltzman made his announcement, news broke that the US Space Force was interested in the AI-based space capabilities of private company True Anomaly. Its CEO told reporters “we’ve been funded by Space Systems Command to do… some sort of application development and the maturation of that software to help the Space Force orient space battle managers and orbital warfare operators to the environment and execute missions.” The Space Force is also interested in the company’s ‘Jackal’ spacecraft — “an autonomous orbital pursuit vehicle” for conducting “uncooperative rendezvous and proximity operations missions” with space targets, according to the CEO. Space battle managers, orbital warfare operators, orbital pursuit… it’s possible we’re witnessing humanity’s future sharpening up, bit by bit.¹

For much of human history, technology served to dramatically shrink our sense of space-time to the point where what happens on the other side of the planet can be ‘observed’ functionally instantaneously. Now, that sense of space-time is on the cusp of expanding once again as we use our latest technologies to push towards the stars. And as humanity becomes space-faring, the “essential safety factor” (i.e., geography) that von Neumann talked about will, in essence, be removed. The game has evolved. The board has expanded once again. Will this bring promise or peril? Only time (and space) will tell.

It’s difficult to think clearly about the future. Especially when it comes to systemic or paradigmatic changes. Von Neumann knew this. He wrote in his 1955 essay that almost all technologically-driven social and political transformations “are not a priori predictable and that most contemporary ‘first guesses’ concerning them are wrong.” However, he appears to have remained cautiously optimistic about the future:

“The one solid fact is that the difficulties are due to an evolution that, while useful and constructive, is also dangerous. Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

As humanity expands into the final frontier, let’s hope we bring those qualities along too.

Notes

[1] The point here is not to criticise any particular country, but to illustrate the nature of humanity’s entry into the space-faring era.