Keywords

14.1 Introduction

When it comes to the future establishment of space colonies, the kinds of societies that will inhabit them, the rights and liberties those inhabitants will have and the mechanisms they will use to express dissent and make and change decisions are questions that appear to bear directly on the success or failure of such colonies (Cockell 2013). This paper will examine some economic and social foundations to the colonising of space and to consider the appropriate seeds we need to sow now for the colonisation process to begin on a sure footing and long before humans actually begin to occupy locations in space.

The often-expressed view of future visionaries is that the space economy should be driven by the need to save humanity from extinction. For example, Stephen Hawking: “mankind must colonise space or die out.” (Hawking 2010); or Elon Musk, “…I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary…in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen….” (Musk 2004).

Others point out that the technological developments in the pipeline will drive the space economy. Industries founded on autonomous robots, programmable shape-shifting materials, nano devices like fluid computers, movement amplifier suits for workers in space, artificial organs and genetically engineered plants and animals for life in space, advanced health care and organ regeneration and more, are innovations that will make space habitable, even though the most significant of these are projected to be in use only well into the second half of the century. This paper will consider however, that the current economics of capital and labour are more determining of humans’ ultimate progress in space than any of these drivers.

It seems that in many of the discussions about settlements in space, the Earth economy is expected to fund space industrialisation naturally (Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand ’), but the economic realities do not seem to support this. While there are economic benefits for governments to invest in space activities, generally considered to be an investment multiplier returning value by way of new products, advanced cutting edge research and employment for every $1 spent, they do not yet obey market forces as a whole, and the route by which general benefits from investment in space activities accrue to the Earth economy are often assumed but not clearly drawn and are still controversial.

An optimistic approach to space settlements found in the NASA study (NASA 1977), the result of design work initiated by Gerard O’Neil in 1975, was to put 10,000 people into an L5 habitat in 20 years from go-ahead, and attempted to calculate the cost of this goal. Yet the matter of who paid for this and who received the income from the activities was not described. The Earth market for electricity and metallic resources is assumed to monetise the new supply from space at ever rising values unencumbered by rising costs from, say, biosphere degradation and/or feeble consumer growth and excessive debt. The report from the US National Commission On Space, ten years later, (US Commission on Space 1986) said nothing about the Earth economy and the future risks to its biosphere from human activities as it assessed space settlement strategies. It considered the space economy only in terms of the potential for space science. Even a discussion paper published in 2015 (Ferguson et al. 2015) mentioned nothing about how the markets might actually produce the anticipated habitat in space, housing 300 people, by AD2050. NASA itself in its 2015 study of manned missions to Mars did not analyse where the investment funds were going to come from nor what returns for investors might be created to stimulate such investment and said only that it would implement them “…with budgets commensurate with economic growth.” (NASA 2015a).

A self-sustaining presence of humans in space must begin with the Earth economy and a means by which it can pass on to the inhabitants of space at least some of its powers of consumption. The question of whether the Earth can maintain its own consumption sufficiently to allow the space economy to mature has not been properly addressed. Economists recognise the threat of the Hoyle Trap (1964), a certain point in development where if growth falls back, it can never regain the same level because the resources required will have been used up or extracting the remaining ones require a level of advancement that can no longer be reached (Kennedy 2013). Hoyle simplified the dilemma, however: either we push for growth or we fail. He did not seem to consider that we might push for growth and still fail because of the damage to the Earth that growth produces.

No one doubts that we stand at risk of actual extinction from man-made threats ranging from political failures leading to nuclear or biochemical warfare to technological and bioengineering errors or from unpredictable natural events like volcanic eruptions or meteor bombardment. But the extinction path plotted from economic mismanagement, biosphere damage and in particular from the loss of resources, though complex, is easier to establish. Some economists are still optimistic about resource depletion and believe that the market will raise prices such that there will always be resources remaining. While this may be true in a rising market available resources are not the only factor to limitations to growth. During a deflationary episode, no amount of price adjustment can create a demand where there is none and economies can still fail when the cost of resource extraction exceeds funds available for investment, whether or not resource limits have been reached. Further, some resources, like phosphorous, or pollinating insects, or organic soil itself are more crucial to economic growth than others and a few strategic depletions may cause irreparable damage to the growth rate even while other resources remain. As a simple example of how at risk humans are to the side effects of growth can be seen from a calculation from the WorldWatch organisation which shows that the planet has available 1.9 hectares of biologically productive land per person to supply food and other biologically active resources and absorb wastes, yet the average person on Earth already uses 2.3 ha, ranging from the 9.7 ha used by the average American to the 0.47 ha used by the average Mozambican (Worldwatch 2013).

Hoyle’s observation, that we have one chance to make it as an extraterrestrial civilisation, seems like an imperative to maintain our economic momentum at whatever cost. Yet, there is serious concern about the negative impact on human survivability from growth regardless of any economic potential that exists from the opening up of space to human activity. Resource depletion is still only part of the story, and other effects of growth such as the damage to the capacity of humans to survive as a whole from waste, unpredicted disease and climate change also adversely affect the global economy. In this paper I shall show that the timescale of space industrialisation is unlikely to get humans well established in space before the Hoyle trap begins to close. I shall show that our ability to found space colonies is becoming increasingly remote as the relationship between capital and labour changes, making the space economy less attractive to capital for investment and inhibiting capitalist investment cycles from closing the funding gap between government spending and the private sector. It considers, in particular how both the feudal origins of capitalist growth and the natural exponential productivity of the biosphere seeded an economic system that cannot effectively produce the colonisation of space without significant changes to it. This analysis does not consider whether or not humans will meet the technological challenges of space exploration eventually, but only that the timetable for development will be far too slow and that, without first maintaining and protecting the health of the Earth’s biosphere and its biological productivity, the Earth economy will not be able to support sufficient space industrialisation to save itself or supply a safe haven for humanity. In conclusion, some solutions to this crisis will be proposed and a strategic plan for creating space colonies free of damaging trends inherited from the current competitive economic model will be derived from them.

14.2 Part 2: Space Development Timetable

14.2.1 The Next 100 Years

By looking at what the space industry is already planning, we can begin to see how seriously the development of the space economy is lagging behind events in the Earth economy, where lack of political will, of the implementation of technology and of economic creativity leaves a high probability that it is unsustainable in the long term and unable to support the necessary elements of that space economy. By plotting the timing of the most likely space economy ‘events’ against the timing of highly probable events in the progress of the Earth economy we can observe the situation more clearly.

While precise estimates of the timing of resource depletions are difficult to establish through future economic cycles, we can take a single mineral resource, phosphorous, and allow it to give us a bound to our developmental timetable. Phosphorous is reasonably abundant on Earth, though in the Solar System as a whole it is in relatively short supply. Phosphate is required by every living thing and its use in agriculture is perhaps the most critical for the future of humans. Some think that the world’s known phosphate deposits will be exhausted by the end of the century (Vaccari 2009). Other scientists are confident that reserves will last a few hundred years (IFDC 2010). Current reserves, however, are reducing in quality and many are contaminated with metals like cadmium and uranium which require more energy to clean, and there is also the fossil energy use that comes from transporting over 170 million tons of fertiliser around the world. Yet there is no coordinate plan to conserve it. It is wasted all over the world and it pollutes agricultural run off that contributes to aquatic dead zones, both in fresh water supplies and in seas, that are growing by 10 % a decade (Greenpeace Research Laboratories 2008). In the absence of efficient re-cycling, we need increasing amounts of phosphorus fertilizer to maintain food production for all other living creatures as well as humans. 100 years from now will give us the temporal range on which to plot the points of our space economy. (Other resource limits will be reached much earlier.)

14.2.2 The Space Economy Timetable in Broad Strokes

Let us consider the principle likely income generating events of the space development timetable already in the planning stages and with a greater than 50 % chance of occurring within a 5 years spread around the projected date and compare their occurrence with what is projected to occur in the Earth’s biosphere during the same period (Fig. 14.1). The timetable does not include various science missions or non-manned preparatory flights. There will be more probes to Mars and the other planets but none of these will impact significantly on the colonising ventures in the Solar system for a long time to come.

Fig. 14.1
figure 1

Activity in space compared with significant Earth environment changes over the next 100 years

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14.2.2.1 AD2015—Satellite Launches—on-Going

In LEO the single biggest source of private benefit is the Earth observation sector, with an estimated total value in 2011 of $2.24 billion. However, this revenue stems largely from civil government and military customers, and governments are expected to fund development of most Earth observation satellites during the next ten years. Aside from Earth observation, the only other meaningful revenue from satellites in LEO comes from three communications satellite constellations: Globalstar (46 satellites), ORBCOMM (26 satellites), and Iridium (71 satellites). Collectively, these firms have annual earnings on the order of $100 billion. Data from the insurance industry supports this as well: only 24 satellites in LEO are currently carrying commercial insurance, for a total insured value of about $1.4 billion, out of a total satellite insurance market of $20 billion. (Weeden 2012)

In 2015, there are almost 1300 working satellites around Earth in various stages of obsolescence, about 900 of these split almost 50–50 between LEO and geosynchronous orbit. The Satellite Industry Association give total revenues for 2015 at $203 billion, slightly down on 2014. Since 2009, the market for new communications satellites has been growing at almost 40 % fuelled by technological developments such as the spot beam system that have opened up direct satellite to home possibilities and requiring the replacement of ageing communications satellites . In spite of the trend towards cheaper ‘cubesat’ manufacture, the costs of manufacturing, launching and using a sophisticated communication satellite is still large. They require sophisticated equipment like transponders and ground stations are expensive to build and maintain. Constellation satellite proposals to bring the internet to the rural half of the world that does not have it are still uncertain financial propositions. The faster the connection the more it costs since users get a bundled service and will use more through video downloads etc. while income does not rise. This problem is less pronounced for 2G cellular networks, where the revenues for voice and SMS services, can more easily justify rural telephony, as bandwidth usage is closely linked to revenue generating and profitable voice and SMS services. This problem worsens as the band width rises and population density in rural areas falls, inhibiting the introduction of even faster 5G networks. Technical problems of latency have not yet been solved. While Space X is continuing its plans for a constellation network, Facebook and Google have scrapped theirs. The key technologies for constellation systems are still not in place. For example, the OneWeb enterprise raised $500 million from a consortium of interested parties and placed launch orders with Arianspace, and with Virgin Galactic for its yet untried LaunchOne system of launching small rockets from its White Knight aircraft. The money was declared for ‘further key technologies’ for a system that is still not yet ready. Facebook is, however, pursuing its two-tier “Internet.org” scheme to provide a preliminary internet access to rural populations in Africa who can use off-the-shelf equipment to connect to the network, and plans to launch the first satellite in 2016, while Google has plans to create a global broad-band network of high altitude balloons; the real intentions of which will become clearer in Part 3.

It is interesting to consider Australia’s $1.8 billion attempt to bring broadband to just an estimated 200,000 people in remote rural areas. The first satellite in the two-satellite plan, Sky Muster, was launched 2nd October 2015. It is one of the biggest and most modern communications satellites ever launched yet it will manage to deliver to service providers (not end users) download speeds of only 25 mbps. The network requires building 10 ground stations while its capacity remains forever fixed.

Investment in satellites is still precarious. For example, the bankrupcy of Autralian satellite operator NewSat, in 2015, caused losses in the U.S. Export-Import Bank and France’s Coface, the world’s two most-active export agencies (ECAs) in funding satellite projects. As a result satellite production has slowed. The third launch failure in the last three years of the Russian Proton system has led the commercial enterprise Immarsat to delay its Global Xpress service and drastically revise its earnings for 2015.

The reality of resource observation satellites as a conservation tool is somewhat different. Observation of resources say, forests, may reveal illegal logging but it also discovers the most productive areas and puts them at risk of intensive exploitation. To pay back investment, the advanced knowledge of states of rainfall and harvests is useful for governments and exporters to operate in the commodities futures markets which stimulates the hedge fund market. In this sense these satellites are tools of speculation as much as that of resource management and can lead to resource exhaustion rather than conservation. Weather prediction is an important source of income for satellite operators allowing savings in transport costs and provision of services. Although weather related savings for insurance, and information on short timescale loads for energy producers are real gains, surprise events like earthquakes and tsunamis cannot be predicted ahead of time, nor can precise values be put on predicted damage from extreme weather and which limits their value.

14.2.2.2 AD 2017–2020 Space Tourism—Suborbital Lobs, AD 2016–2020

Professor Impey seems to think that there is between $50 and 100 billion income available from space tourism by the time we get to orbital space journeys (Impey 2015). However this figure comes from a poll of high school students (possible future clients) asking what they would pay for a trip. There are two principal enterprises with published plans to offer suborbital lobs to the general public, Virgin Galactic and XCOR, while Blue Origin is developing a manned suborbital capsule but with no concrete timetable to when it may fly with passengers.

14.2.2.2.1 Virgin Galactic

Intending to fly 5/6 tourists to 110 km, just over the Karman line. The immediate aftermath of the Virgin Galactic tragic accident and loss of their spaceship SS1 in 2014 was that 24 passengers out of about 700 ‘future astronauts’ who paid $250,000 each for the chance to go into space demanded their money back.

The company (by the end of 2014) has 700 people committed to fly, in contrast to the 65,000 people who had apparently applied for tickets by 2013. The first 100 paid $200,000, and the last 600 paid $250,000. This produces a mere $170 million income. Compare this to SS2 development costs, estimated at over $400 million to 2012. The loss of Spaceship 2 in 2014, however, and a change of motor and construction of new craft have placed an unknown burden of cost on the enterprise. It had expected to begin flights in 2011, but the 2014 tragedy is likely to push back Virgin Galactic’s maiden commercial flight by at least another several years, if not indefinitely. That will raise serious funding issues since the business is already thought to have exhausted the initial $200 million from Virgin and $280 million capital investment for a 38 % stake provided by equity partner Aabar of Abu Dhabi (Whitesides 2010), plus the partial investment in the Spaceport by New Mexico State, as well as advanced ticket sales, and is now being funded entirely from within Virgin Group. The original designer (Burt Rutan) of the flight system has left the project and his company, Scaled Composites, that originally constructed the craft, no longer makes them and has been sold to Grumman Corporation who is planning a larger version to air-launch satellites in competition with the Virgin Galactic LauncherOne scheme.

14.2.2.2.2 XCOR

XCOR is a private company so no funding figures are available. It is planning to fly their Lynx craft in suborbital flights to 330,000 ft (100 km), the Karman boundary to space. They have apparently 300 signed up to fly at a cost of $100,000 per ticket, although they raised the price in 2015 to $150,000. The small 9 m craft takes only a single passenger but is unique in that it lands and takes off under its own power and can turn around in 2 h with minimal maintenance. They plan 4 trips a day.

14.2.2.3 AD 2020–2040 Space Tourist Trips to Space Stations or Orbiting ‘hotel’

There are a number of craft being developed to take humans into orbit and perhaps for stays in the ISS, namely, SpaceX and its 7-seater Dragon capsule; Sierra Nevada and Dream Chaser; Boeing’s CST-100 for max 7 astronauts, Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus (no NASA funding) and the Orion capsule designed to sit atop NASA’s SLS. No figures have been released by any company about the costs and likely price of such orbital trips. It is assumed only that these trips are a logical evolution of the space tourist trend. But this proposition is not simple. There are only two space stations that we expect to be available over the next twenty years, the ISS and the Chinese Tiangong system, which will be smaller.

Currently, training visitors to the ISS takes at least 6 months. The issues of safety and capability are significant. One expects that visitors to the ISS should be able to read Russian and to have familiarity with the escape craft and how to fly them. But the ISS astronauts will also have to be familiar with the tourist craft as well so that they will be able to use it in an emergency. This must reduce the launch frequency, so the actual numbers of tourists reaching the ISS will be limited for some time. In the past tourists to the ISS went up as a single member of a government funded crew, their costs were reduced in proportion. For a full crew of tourists without government funding, the launch and retrieval costs will be very large. There are no figures available to analyse quite how this venture will be profitable. Even billionaire philanthropists are likely to baulk at participating more than once and there are limited numbers of those.

14.2.2.4 AD 2015–2030 Space Stations in LEO

The question of whether the ISS will survive to welcome these tourists is a genuine concern. The Russians are backing the ISS TO 2024 even though they have declared it is getting old, and there’s no more science to be done. For a space station of mass around 460,000 kg, habitable volume of 388 cubic meters, it still requires launches of servicing modules supplying several tons every month. The ISS is a space station of two halves: a Russian series of modules and a US series of modules, and they are not very compatible. Russian cosmonauts tend to stay in their ‘half’ and where a rescue Soyuz is berthed permanently. Problems of compatibility with the many national programs have not yet been solved. Micro cracks are appearing in the structure and more and more small systems break downs are occurring—like false alarms. Apart from work on the health of astronauts and the effects of microgravity on longevity, the ISS’s major role is as an educator. In terms of science, NASA has placed US astronaut, Kelly in the ISS for a year early 2015 to study physiological differences between him and his twin remaining on Earth, and there is a proposal to attached a centrifuge module to try out sleeping in artificial gravity, though loss of station keeping due to gyroscopic effects and the difficulty of manufacturing a rotating collar seal that will enable an independent module to rotate while attached to a space station make this proposition unlikely. Bigelow systems wants to put up more inflatable modules (having already tested two). But there is not much science on the horizon for the ISS.

The Chinese intend to place a somewhat smaller space station, the Tiangong project, in orbit by 2022, but with almost half the ISS volume it is projected to support only 3 astronauts with short term capacity for 6. Other orbital tourism projects have come to nothing. So the maximum number of tourists accommodated by current projects may be just 3 in the ISS and perhaps 1 or 2 in the Chinese station (Sample and Branigan 2011).

14.2.2.5 AD 2018–2020 Asteroid Sample and Return

The Japanese space agency JAXA launched Hayabusa 2 spacecraft last year, intending to arrive at asteroid arrive at the asteroid Ryugu in 2018, collect samples and return to Earth in 2020.

14.2.2.6 AD 2017–2040 Moon Mining Facilities

Google’s Lunar X Prize, an offering of $20 million for landing a lunar rover, and other prizes up to $30 m in total. Google has just extended the deadline a second time to 2017. Currently (2015) there are 16 teams in the race. Astrobotics Technology, founded in 2008, has booked a place on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for a lunar rover called Polaris. Originally it was to launch in October 2015, but this has been set back to 2016. Polaris will embark on a one-way mission, carrying NASA instruments to hunt for water, oxygen and methane at the Moon’s north pole. Polaris benefited from $3.6 m of NASA contracts. But the plan has mutated somewhat and now places on their mission are being sold to others. Moon Express has contracted with a New Zealand rocket maker, Rocket Lab, to launch robotic missions planning eventually to return material to Earth. Lunar Mission One has raised $1 million through crowd funding to build, launch and land a probe at a Lunar pole and drill down below the surface to study its composition and leave personal digital records behind. This sum falls well below even the cost of a launch. It seems improbable that crowd funding could approach the billions needed to perform the full specification mission, even if a launch is shared with others. Moon ores are composites not typically found on Earth requiring investment in new techniques. For example, low gravity is a problem for the convection of molten masses typically required with Earth-based refining. New approaches have been proposed, but all need vast quantities of energy and supplies of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, requiring at least a two stage treatment process of the regolith to first obtain the reducing gasses needed and then use them in the refining process.

NASA has no concrete plans to return to the Moon or develop a Moon base, although studies have been done that suggest a commercial/NASA mix of funds could develop one for creating propellant stocks in about 10–12 years after first landing on the Moon again (Miller et al. 2015). Since their heavy lifting rocket version required for a Lunar Mission is unlikely to be ready before 2023 (first flight of the Orion/SLS combination has been put back 2 years from 2021 to 2023), any date before 2035 for a US Moon base is extremely optimistic. In its own documents NASA is planning only one flight per year of its new SLS rocket throughout the 2020s.

The question of crew safety during moon missions has not been addressed. Up to now manned space missions include a means of returning to Earth in an emergency for all the crew. Since the Soyuz capsule takes only three people, when there is a full complement of 6 astronauts in the ISS, a second Soyuz remains docked so that all could escape in an emergency. This principle will have to be abandoned in any Moon base scenario since the costs of providing escape rockets for all the base personnel will be prohibitive. In any event, where does the Moon base crew go in the event of a critical emergency? Staying in Moon orbit is not a permanent solution until a station in Lunar space has been built, so they would have to return to Earth which means a craft would need to be ready for them to do this either in Moon orbit or in Earth orbit, and this provision will be way beyond the mission parameters of any country for some time to come. The impact of this difficulty is clear. If human colonists are simply to be abandoned in emergencies on the Moon or on Mars this implies a huge loss of investment return, further inhibiting the deployment of funds for such missions.

14.2.2.7 AD 2020 Space Hotel

There are expectations that an LEO space ‘hotel’ will be in place by 2050, but no concrete plans have been laid. Questions of escape capsules and the enormous re-supply cost problem have not been solved. Consider the ISS. Originally planned for 2004 completion, the first module was launched in 1998 on a Proton system. It took 27 Shuttle launches, 7 Soyuz and Proton launches and some half dozen others to date to assemble the station as it is now. (Other shuttle launches did not bring any station hardware). At around $1.5 bn total of investment averaged per Shuttle launch we are looking at say $50 bn round figures in 2008 dollars. Development and running costs over ten years comes to $100 bn. Bigelow Aerospace has a 330 cubic metre inflatable module B330 with which it plans to construct space stations with occupancy for 6 and a 20 year lifespan. With a NASA grant, they will test a smaller activity module to be attached to the ISS in 2015 but this date is uncertain. A space hotel will need be a more complicated structure than the ISS if it is to be attractive enough to justify the high cost of flights to it and the high costs of maintenance.

14.2.2.8 AD 2021–2040 Asteroid Capture and Mining

NASA plans to bring back 2 kg of asteroid material in 2021 using robotic systems. Planetary Resources plans to launch several small satellites to survey the near Earth asteroid population. So far they have launched Arkyd study probe which is currently at the ISS for launching into LEO some time later in 2015, and it plans exploratory missions in the 2020s but has no concrete missions to extract value from them. Even though on Earth readily accessible supplies of even ordinary metals like silver, lead and platinum are already running down, the actual cost of space resourced metal is likely to put it well beyond the reach and need of the Earth economy. If a resource becomes too expensive then devising alternatives or ways of doing without it are going to be cheaper and probably quicker to develop. The case for off-Earth mining makes sense for off-Earth construction only, and this will be investment money lost to Earth. The return to Earth of metal payloads is unlikely to make any economic sense. Even a re-usable vehicle is unable to carry much by way of payload through re-entry since heat generated during it is proportional to the mass.

14.2.2.9 AD 2035 Mars Short Stay

The problems with going to Mars are well known. With current and foreseeable technology the most dependable and economic minimum duration stay Mars trip gives 3–4 months on the surface using Hofmann transfer orbits. A return trip to Mars would take about 21 months: 9 months to get there, 3 months on the surface, and 9 months return.

Mars crews will need to bring enough food, water, clothes, and medical supplies in addition to all the scientific instruments, and all the fuel they will need for the return. It is not known even how fuel stocks can be maintained for such long periods of time. Unless cryogenic capabilities are among the first facilities constructed on the surface of Mars, then solid fuel rockets will have to be brought from Earth and landed on Mars. For a nine month voyage the crew needs a lot of radiation shielding. Water, and even cement, make good shielding but they are very heavy and eventually their utility falls as they become transmitters of radiation themselves. It is estimated that for a crew of six, you would need around 3 million pounds of supplies. At a launch of say 50,000 pounds of payload, that is 60 launches alone (next generation rockets will lift 100,000 lbs but will fly less often). The spacecraft itself has to be launched in bits and then assembled, with separate launches for the crew. Assuming some form of craft along the lines of the minimum volume of the ISS + surface craft and living modules, we can expect there to be at least twice the ISS all up weight of 465 tons or say another 1.9 million lbs given the added weight of a nuclear power plant since the solar radiance at Mars is about 250 times less than at LEO and solar panels will be insufficient. The ISS required 40 launches for its assembly and fitting out. So it seems that between 100 and 140 minimum launches depending on the heavy lift capabilities of the SLS (which will not be available until at least 2023, and NASA’s own projections appear to have only one launch a year), to get a craft ready for the Mars trip. The Space Shuttle did only 135 launches over its entire 30 year life span. Reusability of rockets is intended to improve upon the economics and turn around time of this output but the various technologies are yet to be proven in the field.

14.2.2.10 AD 2040 Microwave Energy Stations

Plans have been sketched out to manufacture orbiting facilities that collect solar power convert it into microwaves and transmit a narrow beam 24 h a day to the Earth’s surface for conversion into electricity to boost the Earth economy manyfold with ‘free’ energy. None of the technical difficulties associated with this idea have been solved. The lack of stability of focus of the microwave beam is a known problem without a solution. Interference with other satellites, especially with the vast numbers circulating all over orbital space required by constellation systems will make these plans almost impossible to put into action. The square kilometres of solar panels required, or vast mirrors for turbine generators all require maintenance, requiring launches and human workers, while on Earth maintenance of receiving stations makes this ‘free’ energy anything but free.

14.2.2.11 AD 2040 Mars Long Stay

No concrete plans have yet been produced, except NASA has published a plan to use Phobos as a staging post for Mars exploration in preference to a Mars surface station (NASA 2015b), but surface missions with human explorers designed to stay months or years on the surface have not been outlined in any detail. The Dutch Mars One project originally planned to add 4 people every two years after 2030 has not provided details of how the project will be fully funded but the CEO, Bas Lansdorp, claims that its $6 million budget and income from investments will be sufficient since return trips are not required. Already the planned missions have been delayed by 2 years and further delays seem likely. In the long run staging points on the way to Mars and the outer planets will be required, supplied initially by a Moon industrial base, but this will not come about until the second half of this century.

14.2.3 Space Investment Economic Multiplier

It is generally considered that there is an economic multiplier effect from each dollar spent on space activities which is certainly one of the reasons why there is a growing number of countries entering the space economy. Yet the question must be asked why, if this is true, investment from the private sector is not larger than it currently is, and why the space development timetable has a short and uncertain horizon. We shall examine the role capital economics and its relationship to labour plays in creating this uncertainty, but it is also instructive to consider the validity of the multiplier effect in understanding why investment in space activities has still not been fully embraced by the markets.

The $7–14 of economic gain for every dollar spent (Gurtuna 2013), commonly quoted in the press, is controversial. In earlier years, many supporters of the space program placed great stock in the benefits of technological spinoff from the space effort for the American economy. Later estimates claimed $7 in return from every $1 spent (Lyttle 1991). While a Chase Associate report suggested a $23 billion gain for $1 billion spent by 1986, they also said that $21 billion of that could be attributed to other factors and that overall it reported that (the multiplier) was,

… not crucial to deciding whether more or less money should be spent on NASA R&D, because similar effects could be obtained by other forms of government spending – such as defence procurement or energy R&D. Tax cuts are, of course, a comparable alternative… (Chase Econometric Associates 1977).

More recently, the European Space Agency has quoted a familiar multiple on its public web site,

The economic impact of space spending is boosted by a multiplier effect: every €1 invested in space returns an average €6 to the wider economy. So space contributes to growth, employment and competitiveness across many economic sectors, while also being largely immune from outsourcing: (ESA 2015).

However the OECD has leaner figures for its multiplier,

In the United Kingdom, the space industry’s value-added multiplier has been estimated to be 1.91. Finally, the most recent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) study on the economic impacts of the US commercial space activities has also shown a rather stable multiplier ratio since 2002. In 2009, for every dollar spent in commercial space transportation industry, USD 4.9 resulted in indirect and induced economic impact. (OECD 2011)

While NASA currently has a spin-off web site (NASA 2015a) which furthers these kinds of figures and where one can read about the specific benefits to the economy spun off from its activities, the spin-off arguments in favour of this investment may be flawed since it is hard to separate general economic growth and innovation from NASA-created growth. Such growth depends on markets rather than pure technology solutions. A closer examination of the spinoff record would provide little comfort for space advocates. One German analysis of space spinoffs concluded that,

The overall conclusion to be drawn from this is that the spin-off rate is very low in highly specialized space projects – a conclusion which coincides with the finds of other investigations. The concept of a decisive spin-off in the narrow, real sense of the term cannot therefore be validated on the result of these findings… many standard examples of spin-offs may be traced back to the first R&D boom in the Sixties… only in the rarest of cases do the spin-offs prove to be identifiable as classic cases in which the source can be associated exclusively with space technology and the diffusion be associated with a sector unrelated to space technology. In the majority of cases, both source and diffusion can be associated with multiple purposes both within and outside space technology. (Schmoch et al. 1991)

The most comprehensive review of the impact of NASA technology benefits to the commercial sector was conducted for NASA by the Chapman Research Group in 1989. This study evaluated the benefits derived from technologies identified in the annual NASA report Spinoff during the period from 1978 through 1986 (the deployment of Skylab and introduction of the Shuttle era), and quantified the benefits from the total NASA investment of $55 billion as being $5 billion in true spinoffs (that is, a product or process or company that would not have existed without NASA) suggesting a very poor 1:10 payoff and about 100 times worse than the commercial economy as a whole (Chapman Research Group 1989). Even though these calculations are for past performance and that NASA has changed its spending and management model, this broadly agrees with our attempt to calculate a deployment of capital per employee ratio which we will discuss in the next section of this paper.

The economy of space activities is likely to be dominated by government funds for some time to come with an impact on the speed of advancement of the space economy. Certainly, space has become a worthwhile investment for governments to help their national social, economic and technological development but also to develop national defence and security programs where there is no dividend to pay to investors, and the number of space programs is growing. 26 countries reported a space program in 2001, 42 in 2006, and 57 countries own and operate at least one satellite in 2012. As a result, governments around the world seed advanced research projects where there appear to be fundamental science pay offs, like the Hubble or Rosetta, or things they can immediately sell like satellites or launch capability or to possess an independent capability in communications. Even so, current government budgets of the principle actors in the space economyFootnote 1 represent a mere 0.043 % ($46.71 bn) of world GDP of $107 trillion in 2015. Even supposing a stimulus multiplier effect of 1:8 is in operation for all national programs, this government funding would add only 0.35 % to world GDP. Even if the proportion of private to government investment changes radically, the impact of technology on the timing of the events of the next 35 years of space activities will be small.

14.2.4 Earth Environmental Timetable

What will happen to the Earth’s biosphere and global economy during the next 100 years, however, is much better understood. By the year 2050, Earth will be struggling with a population of 9 billion or more (UNDEA 2015), with an average global temperature rise of perhaps 2 °C along with a sea level rise of as much as a metre (IPCC 2014), and while extractable stocks of metals available in the long run cannot be easily calculated (Graedel et al. 2011), in the short run, within 35 years, there will be depleted or exhausted stocks of readily extractable tin, copper, zinc, and gold, few fish in tropical waters of the oceans—a recent study suggests complete food chain collapse (Nagelkerken and Connell 2015)—water shortages in important agricultural zones and crop failures on a large scale (you cannot have genetically engineered high yield crops without water) and exacerbated by widespread monoculture, massive environmental damage and the loss of perhaps 1/3 of useable topsoils through erosion,Footnote 2 loss of organic and mineral matter and contamination by salt (Amundson et al. 2015), and subsequent loss of nutrition (for example Davis 2004) although this may be mitigated to some degree by the northward creep of agricultural production due to global warming (IPCC 2014), and global loss of biodiversity.

14.2.5 Space Development Timetable, Summary

Beyond the year 2040, there are no concrete plans drawn up for any space activity. As far as 2040, however, these projections above are rooted in what is currently being considered by players in the field. For example, NASA director Charles Bolden talked about the first Mars occupants arriving by 2040 during a question-and-answer session after his speech at Ohio University as part of an International Space University summer session, 1 July 2015.

It is instructive, however, to examine previous predictions about the speed of space development. The NASA study previously cited from 1977 thought that 10,000 people could be placed in a viable colony 20 years from the go-ahead. Jesco Von Puttkamer, responsible for long range planning for NASA in the 1970s produced an evolutionary path tree diagram for these large space projects beginning from Skylab where a lunar base of 12 men was in place by 1995, a space station manned by 100 people at the same time, a Mars landing and permanent Lunar base manned by 200–300 people by the year 2000 (Brand 1977). Fifty years on, people living for long periods off the Earth number from between 3 and 6, occupants of the ISS. As a general operating parameter, numbers of occupants in off-Earth sites will be limited to the size of escape craft that can return them to Earth during a systems failure. It will be many years before properly established facilities with their own safety back-up systems can allow numbers of space centre occupants to grow without there being a means of escape for them.

Scientists, futurists as well as writers and cinema directors have all missed by many decades the points at which the particular phases of space development appear. One of the most important reasons for this is that the realism of the markets is never included or is ignored in these extrapolations. Many of the projected plans to exploit mineral resources in space make no sense to an earth-bound capitalist. Moon excavations and asteroid capture and mining are relying on the continued expansion of the Earth-based economy such that the rising Earth demand for metals such as titanium, aluminium, cobalt and manganese will pay for the development of off-Earth sourcing. The simple observation that whatever materials are discovered in space, the absolute minimum cost per kilo to Earth will be the cost of the launches required to retrieve this material which even the most optimistic of enthusiasts, Elon Musk, believe may come down to perhaps $2000 per kilo per launch (Messier 2014). Space activities are still not a self-sustaining economic sector and require continued government funding in various proportions to stimulate the private sector. There are no investment or hedge funds in rocketry, for example, even though rocketry is the essential component on which all investment in space relies. Returns on investment in satellite use are possible as long as the launch cost is brought down by government intervention, both currently and as a result of historic investment in space. There are no other space activities likely to provide sufficient returns for old-fashioned capital investments that are seeking higher and higher returns for less risk on its mobilisation, nor will the slow pace of space exploration provide material input into the Earth economy in sufficient time. The expectation that space exploration within the next hundred years will save humans by providing off-world reservoirs of individuals is way beyond what seems likely to happen in reality and completely ignores developments in robotics and AI which will be the preferred occupants of space for industrialists. Optimistic projections may have around 300 individuals working off the Earth in 70 years or so, and these would have to be able to sustain themselves without the presence of Earth to fulfil that expectation. The realities will be that most tasks in space will be performed by robots and most voyages will be automated. Human personnel will occupy bases or perform transitory maintenance in orbit but high numbers will not be needed.

Given that the occupation of space is humanity’s long term objective, then clearly the preservation of Earth needs to happen first. It is therefore right to ask if capitalism is the economic means with which we can conquer space and build settlements in its own image since it has so compromised humanity’s current situation. To answer this question let us first examine two components of the capitalist economy namely Capital and Labour and analyse whether the recent changes observed in the relationship between them will inhibit or stimulate space industrialisation and off world colonisation.

14.3 Part 3 Capital and Labour

14.3.1 Capital

The question of the origin of capitalism may seem arcane, but it goes to the heart of assumptions deeply rooted in our culture, widespread and dangerous illusions about the so-called ‘free’ market and its benefits to humanity, its compatibility with democracy, social justice and ecological sustainability. Thinking about future alternatives to capitalism requires us to think about alternative conceptions of its past. (Wood 2002)

14.3.1.1 Feudal Fief, Responsibility and Money

While many thinkers have followed Marx in identifying the birth of capitalism with the feudal barons separating the peasants from contact and control of the agricultural resources (Marx 1867), this simple notion does not explain why capitalism is so wasteful and so disregarding of labour and the environment. The observation that owners of capital try to pass on costs of capital growth to others is not explained simply by the seizing of the ownership of the means of production by those who already had legal power over it. So let us briefly consider the feudal state anew.

A feudal settlement in the early years was a benign place, described succinctly by Mumford (1938), and confirmed in drawings of such medieval settlements all over Europe from the period. An outer wall enclosed houses and gardens, common orchards and grazing lands. There were common resources like wash houses and mills (in 1086, the Domesday Book noted 6000 water mills). There was clean water and sanitation. Very little waste; dung was returned to the soil. It was a barter society with very little coin. Studies such as have shown that the medieval population generally lived well with a higher than average calorie intake (Singman and McLean 1999).

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the amount of coin in circulation in Europe fell significantly and as a result, urban populations fell as people returned to the land (the Domesday Book Survey of England in 1086 mentions just 6 towns). In England, for example, the number of coins fell to a half between 900 and 1100 (Bolton 2012). The Feudal system of obligation began in a response to a lack of money. The hierarchy of duty and obligation passed from king to Baron and his knights to Lord of the Manor to serf and the produce of the land passed upwards in the opposite direction. While local centres of trade could flourish with barter, a year of poor harvest meant that some Barons could not supply the king with the expected produce; he was in debt to his obligation. Similarly if a Baron was unable to supply the number of knights he was obligated to supply (through loss in battle or low birth numbers of suitable candidates) he was in debt. But since poor harvests were region wide, and knights could not be produced in any short time span, the only way the Baron could fulfil his obligations was through coin, either by giving it or using it to buy outside his fief. Thus coin began to be exchanged for obligation. Barons paid the kings in coin where they could not supply knights, and the kings bought mercenary soldiers with coin. Both the Church and the King demanded coin for projects not sustainable by local fiefs and so the feudal obligations were converted into money. With the monetary economy, coin represented a freedom from obligation to those who had it. Freedom from obligation meant that Barons became divorced from duties to the land and to their work force, a feature of capitalist economies, while debt replaced the previous social control of feudal duty, acquiring a moral dimension that it has to this day. Individuals found a freedom from obligation to their Lords in the urban setting, fuelling its growth, but which, being outside the barter system, also required coin. The importance of this was profound because as the population grew so did the numbers of free men who lived outside the barter system existing between serfs and their Lords of the Manor. Free men paid for their land use in coin, and Barons subdivided the amount of land under rent in order to get coin (for example, by 1298, long before the Black Death , 74 % of English tenant farms were under 5 acres (Dyer 2002) and so also reducing agricultural efficiency and thereby increasing the demand for coin even further. This interpretation is confirmed in the reforms of England’s Henry II (1160–1170) which actually codified the separation of land title for freehold land from personal obligations, allowing a market for land to arise.

Coin was also needed to buy goods from far beyond the trading and mutual obligation confines of the Baron’s fief so a demand for foreign luxuries also drove the need for coin. It is no coincidence that freedom, money and urban growth are interrelated and are indeed interchangeable. Where before the wealth of the Baron was measured in his labour force, labour freedoms became a drain on his coin, and his wealth was measured by what he could keep (memorably written down as demands in the Magna Carta of 1215). With the loss of obligations, Labour became a cost, and is accounted for as such in company balance sheets to this day. In this new function of money as a means of laying off responsibilities we find the birth of the moral power of interest, the classical separation between capital and labour and between freedom and the destruction of the environment.

If we jump forward to today, we can see this system of converting responsibility or duties towards the state and to the people in it into money as reaching its end game. In the economic crisis in the world economy nominally marked as beginning in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman brothers financial firm in New York, the strategy for fiat currencies run by central banks was to sustain asset growth but to keep money out of the hands of the consumer to avoid inflation. Early in 2015, there was $3.6 trillion of government debt around the world with negative interest rates (Moore 2015). Two-year government bonds are negative in Germany, Finland, Austria, Denmark, France, Holland, Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, and Japan. It is worth noting that the Swiss government has become the first ever to issue a 10-year sovereign bond at a negative yield. While several European countries have sold government debt at negative yields up to five years of maturity—which means investors effectively pay for the privilege of buying it—no other country has previously stretched maturity this long. At the beginning of 2014, Bank of America said 56 % of global GDP is currently supported by zero interest rates, and so are 83 % of the free-floating equities on global bourses. Half of all government bonds in the world yield less that 1pc. Roughly 1.4 bn people are experiencing negative rates of return in one form or another on the safest places to keep one’s capital.

Previously, rich economies had high levels of debt (though not as extreme) after the Second World War. In the UK, debt fell from 124pc of GDP then to 29pc by 1973, but has since been rising at a compound rate of 2 %—doubling every 36 years. There is now so much money from State issuance supporting assets in the form of deposit accounts that returns from assets beat any other kind of investment. This vast amount of monetary debt represents a freedom for the class of asset holders that has perhaps never been seen before. Following our reasoning, negative rates of return should indicate a reversal of the moral power of the issuing authorities whereby those organisations and non-state actors that accept such negative returns from the State acquire greater moral authority over it: they are, in effect, buying more control and demanding greater power and freedom from sanction in economic negotiations. This state of affairs is represented in the secret economic agreements currently being negotiated in which enterprises can force changes in government policy and local laws such as labour union representation where such policy and law reduces profits (for example the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which is considered by some to be anti-democratic for this reason). As States lose their authority over national economic interests, they lose the power or right to divert resources to the capital intensive low return space activities we considered in the space development timetable, lengthening achievement dates still further, and generally braking long term investment in the ‘common weal’ of space industrialisation.

This creation of debt to support assets reflects a systemic change in the utilisation of capital. In the past, banks lent out from their cash deposits against the value of an asset or promise of a later but higher cash return. But with government purchases called ‘Quantitive Easing’, an asset is created out of a liability by the central bank who takes the liability of a favoured bank (usually arising from buying government debt but not always) prints money and creates a deposit in a favoured bank in return for the debt. The favoured bank then uses this deposit as the basis for loans that increase asset values or purchases of more debt, but not to go into production for that would raise the inflation rate. As a result banks loan to companies who buy back their own shares; the earnings per share automatically rises and by shedding workforce, the productivity metrics also rise, even as there has been no actual contribution to the overall economy. Assets purchased with the central bank cash, at low risk because interest rates are low and the Central Bank is the buyer of last resort, rise in value in the market. The existence of this debt, however, is a real danger to the health of the Earth’s biosphere since for repayment to be possible, it requires eventual growth in consumption, in inflation and in waste to reduce the burden of cost on capital. The cheap interest rates are thus divorced from the real risks of investing (where returns are supposed to reflect risk), while the loss of consumer power also restricts investment in job-making industries. (This process can be confirmed in other ways, for example, where we see company bond yields rise well above those of government, and where pension and insurance funds fail to reach historic rates of growth.) Such returns are not present in the foreseeable space industrialisation timetable and as a result, investment in space activities will fall further if this current economic situation continues.

The risks in new industrial investment cannot compete with risk-less asset value gains resulting from the strategy of the central banks. As asset values rise, the only business that makes any long term sense is to live off rent or to invest in the new-tier economies that don’t employ much labour. And thus we are drawn inevitably into differentiation and inequality in the consumer economy and this has an impact on the capital available for space investment.

14.3.1.2 Inequality

The wealth inequality in the world also nicely confirms the turning away of capital from industry. The concentration of wealth into the hands of a few seems to have produced none of what orthodox economists expect from surplus capital which is to be an engine of growth and innovation. The inequality is not the result of innovations or entrepreneurship of the highest order—although of course there are some true entrepreneurial individuals in the top say 400 (who have doubled their share of wealth in the last five years). Nor is it a pure consequence of stratospheric salaries paid to executives. This inequality is derived from rent.

…In 2014 there were 1,645 people listed by Forbes as being billionaires. This group of people is far from being globally representative. Almost 30 % of them (492 people) are citizens of the USA. Over one-third of billionaires started from a position of wealth, with 34 % of them having inherited some or all of their riches. This group is predominately male and greying; with 85 % of these people aged over 50 years and 90 % of them male. There are a few important economic sectors that have contributed to the accumulation of wealth of these billionaires. In March 2014, 20 % of them (321) were listed as having interests or activities in, or relating to, the financial and insurance sectors, the most commonly cited source of wealth for billionaires on this list…Between 2013 and 2014 billionaires listed as having interests and activities in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors saw the biggest increase in their collective wealth. Twenty-nine individuals joined the ranks of the billionaires between March 2013 and March 2014 (five dropped off the list), increasing the total number from 66 billionaires to 90, in 2014 making up 5 % of the total billionaires on the list. The collective wealth of billionaires with interests in this sector increased from $170bn to $250bn, a 47 % increase and the largest percentage increase in wealth of the different sectors on the Forbes list. (The Oxfam issue briefing 2015)

This briefing lists a mere 9 % of the list having acquired their wealth from industrial companies. The Harun web site that keeps watch on wealthy individuals attributes the wealth of a mere 11 % of billionaires to technology (Hurun Research Institute 2015) The rest lack direct responsibility for their wealth accumulations. The richest sector of society is living off the interest from a narrow range of other people’s activities and not from industrial production or their own entrepreneurship in technology. In addition the global expansion of the middle class (Kharas and Gertz 2010) will not only intensify world consumption, but will strengthen a two-tier market with asset-less ‘serfs’ at the bottom and a higher income band of consumers supporting the growing assets of the elite (Schor 1999).

14.3.1.3 Changes in the Movements of Capital

Changes in capital functions fall into two parts: capital mobilisation and the distribution of holders of capital.

14.3.1.3.1 Capital Mobilisation

We will consider a single metric, the ratio of market capitalisation to employee in enterprises. As the simple plot below shows, old fashioned enterprises where workers interact with the real substantial world remain limited in their ability to increase the returns on capital employed in the enterprise. There is a new economy based on information that is learning how to make use of both the consumer’s capital endowment as well as the dark capital that individuals possess. It is yet another way of transferring enterprise costs away from the capitalist and to the common tax pool by cutting down on workers and what they have to be supplied with to perform their functions. I call these enterprises the new-tier economies and they support increasingly fewer households globally which can be seen in table 14.2.

Fig. 14.2
figure 2

Linear plot of market capitalisation per employee against numbers of employees for selected companies. Data source: Forbes May 2014

Full size image

Traditional enterprises all fall in the MCPE band of between 1 × 105 and 5 × 106 dollars of market capital per employee. Each enterprises employs thousands of people and manipulate real objects. They are engaged in material society in a much greater way that the new-tier enterprises. They are, as it were, providing for many households in the economy. Wallmart (off this chart), by this metric, does an enormous amount of social good since it mobilises capital to provide for 2.2 million households, giving it a MCPE at the bottom of the band of 1.12 × 105.

But when we look at the new-tier enterprises like Twitter and Facebook we see the opposite trend. Enormous amounts of capital mobilised to provide for very few workers.

On this plot, Uber is over to the left and way above even Facebook. Its market capitalisation of $40 bn sustains just 1000 employees, with an MCPE of 4 × 107, similar to the crowd labour enterprise of Instacart. Instagram had an MCPE of 8.3 × 107 when bought by Facebook for $1 bn. But this pales in comparison to Whatsapp which, with an MCPE of 34 × 107, supported just 55 employees when Facebook bought it for $19 bn.

It is instructive to apply this same metric to NASA. If we consider NASA as an enterprise with its 18,000 employees and 40,000 contractors as its labour force and consider its yearly budget of $18.3 bn (in 2015) as equivalent to its earnings, and if the 1:8 stimulus multiplier commonly assumed can be applied to its earnings to derive its total value in the market place we find a typical MCPE of 2.5 × 106, in the middle of the band of traditional enterprises. Equivalent to AT&T or General Electric, though supporting fewer households.

And if we look at the MCPE ratio of Space X, at 3.0 × 106, we can see current space industrialisation cannot compare with the new-tier economy. Mixed industries involved in space activities have an MCPE of even less, such as Boeing, at 6.5 × 105; Lockheed, at 5.6 × 105. Indeed these figures are so low that one is tempted to speculate about how much longer these two companies can stay involved in the space economy without continuous government support (other enterprises dedicated to space activities are private companies and figures are not available). The conclusion is that NASA’s activities in the long term are not especially beneficial or attractive to modern investors, and, by direct comparison with space industry enterprises, that there is little reason for capital currently to be drawn into making rockets or investing in planetary missions.

These new-tier enterprises are making use of a new phenomenon to get their high MCPE ratios, the mobilisation of the ‘dark capital’ of consumers. It is in the utilisation of dark capital that we see the consumer economy separating into two levels of engagement, with implications for space investment. These new tier economies are leveraged on a specific level of asset accumulation in our consumption, and on what is euphemistically called ‘big data’, whereby individual consumption is mined for specific behavioural characteristics which can then be applied as sales techniques (see also, Odlyzko 2003). For example, Facebook’s business model relies on its users' purchase of a computer or mobile device, but it also relies on a user’s phone contract, and contract with a server network; it needs not only a user’s personal data, but that of friends and family and the user’s efforts to connect with people and finding and posting material, including raw witness images of events, all of which Facebook profits from. It needs a user’s time, judgements and tastes, a whole life. Facebook doesn’t have to have journalists in the field, information researchers, graphics departments cropping photos, sub-editors or any of the workers like one might find say in a newspaper office. Its effective workforce consists of programmers and a support department, the material input is all supplied by the consumer.

An individual also has yet more dark capital in his or her state of health, in his or her genome, his or her immune system, his or her gut microbes, his or her organs and a nervous and perceptual system that can be connected directly to machines or computing devices, none of which he or she owns the instant any cells, organs or limbs items have left, or been removed from his or her body (not including their whole DNA which is natural resource and cannot be patented). The era of the transhuman heralds another shift in the worker/capital relationship where labour and capital become intertwined and the individual no longer exists as a separate independent worker ‘soul’ with its own rights but is owned in certain degrees by whomever initiated the transhuman changes.

In this new economy of the dark capital exploiters, where consumer behaviour is the essential data, the exploitation of dark capital by enterprises must necessarily move up the consumer earnings spectrum for their investment to make long term sense. There will be privileged consumers and entry point consumers and the experiences of each will be different because the earnings power of each will be different. Entry point consumers will belong at the lowest end of supply and will only provide a limited amount of interest to the new-tier enterprises, which means that not only will this group have access to poorer goods but also to poorer services, resources, education, health and the rest. Facebook has already put forward the idea of a two-tier internet so that internet usage can be more closely tied to consumer behaviour (the Free Basics program). Internet server companies have been trying to instigate a two-tier internet access for some years,Footnote 3 and many server companies informally ‘choke’ off demand from non-enterprise consumers when traffic increases, creating a de facto privileged user. This then, highlights the problem for those companies wishing to provide internet services through satellites. Half the world remains to be connected to the internet and yet this half, mostly rural populations, do not yet purchase enough goods or services to develop their dark capital and provide the promise of further consumer involvement.

14.3.1.3.2 Distribution of Capital Among Owners of Production

But even among capitalists there is a concentration of power in fewer hands and less sharing of the returns of capital among the asset owning classes. We have seen how the new-tier enterprises support fewer households than traditional capitalist enterprises by exploiting human dark capital. But even among capital owners there is very much less sharing of capital returns with investors through shares and other corporate democratic means. A recent Economist report explains that,

…In business, too, family companies continue to thrive, as our special report in this issue explains. More than 90 % of the world’s businesses are family-managed or controlled, including some of the biggest, such as News Corp and Volkswagen, a carmaker in the throes of a boardroom battle between its two main family owners. The Boston Consulting Group calculates that families own or control 33 % of American companies and 40 % of French and German ones with revenues of more than $1 billion a year. In the emerging world the preponderance of family control is greater still… (Economist 2015)

The Economist study study found that the richest ten families controlled 34 % of market capitalisation in Portugal and 29 % in both France and Switzerland. In a previous study The Economist noted that around 85 % of $1 billion-plus businesses in South-East Asia are family-run, around 75 % in Latin America, 67 % in India and around 65 % in the Middle East (Economist 2014).

Some of the worlds great multinationals are family controlled like Walmart, Mars, Samsung, BMW, Ford. Foxconn and many more. VW is 51 % owned by the Porsche family and its chairman Mr. Piech. Even Warren Buffet is grooming his son and grandson to continue the Buffet Enterprise culture. Private companies also enjoy similar benefits. Dell, the paragon of schoolboy entrepreneurship took back public ownership of the company he founded so he could better manage it as a private concern.

Family run enterprises by-pass the problems of the share-holding democratic management where secrecy and compromises are open to public scrutiny. Publicly traded companies more easily mutate and change from their original conception. This is especially true of companies started by inventors. Whereas family run enterprises can maintain their desired focus regardless of cost. Decisions about how much to take out of the company can be kept secret and they can avoid take-overs and attempted coups by shareholders (internal feuds notwithstanding). They can play a long game and not worry about shareholder needs. (The world’s longest-lived enterprise is a family run bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, headquartered in Sienna, Italy, which has been operating continuously since 1472.) They answer to nobody but themselves and often invest more in reputation than in plant and innovation. In this way at least, family-run enterprises mimic the feudal barons and fief holders of old. Just as capital is no longer being spread around labour, a share in the ownership of capital is no longer being offered around potential capitalists as much as one might have expected. The lack of broad representation of capital owners in the management of enterprises is also figured in the basic inequalities between sectors of the economy, and family dynamics are also beginning to play a significant role in governments. Even in the financial corporate world, however, a shadow banking system has arisen in which many unregulated banking functions are done outside the markets and across national boundaries not by banks but by hedge funds, pension funds, securities brokers and other kinds of investment vehicles that usually take assets rather than monetary deposits as the basis of deals. The value of the shadow banking system is thought to be as much as half the traditional overt system, and plays a hidden role in determining asset values. It is specifically designed to create leverage without regulatory oversight. Again the system reduces the orthodox sharing in capital, and the utility of true risk.

It is well-known that family dynasties play a role in the politics of underdeveloped countries, undermining all attempts to open up the political process to democracy and to reduce corruption. For example, in the Philipines 70 % of Congress belongs to dynastic families (Yousingco 2015). In India, it is said, every member of Congress under 30 years of age belongs to a political dynasty. The dynastic idea is so strong in India that when Rajiv Gandhi, son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, herself daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was killed, his retiring wife, Italian-born Sonia was forced to become head of his Indian National Congress party, and her son is now heir apparent. The US has seen the Roosevelt and Kennedy dynasties, and the next US presidential election in 2016 may well see a battle of the Clinton/Bush political dynasties. Hilary Clinton is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, and a Republican hopeful, Jeb Bush, is brother to one President and the son of another. The Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, is the vice chair of the influential Clinton Foundation and is working in Hilary’s Presidential campaign.

A brief list of recent leaders around the world includes: in the United States, a republican former president George W Bush is son of former president George Bush; in Argentina, president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is wife of former president Nestor Kirchner, (and let us not forget the earlier Peron attempts there); in Japan, former prime minister of Japan Yukia Hatoyama is grandson of former prime minister Ichirō Hatoyama; in Thailand, prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra (recently deposed) is sister of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra; and in the Philippines, former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is daughter of former president Diosdado Macapagal, while the current president, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, is the son of the former president Corazon Aquino; In Malasia, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is the son of the second prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak: in France, the current president, Francois Hollande is former partner to Sergolene Royal head of the socialist party and former Presidential candidate. In Canada recently elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Family continuity in politics and economics is a strong indicator that democratic movements are faltering, where economic and political power are no longer being shared in true democratic fashion, and where, in practice, we are entering a realm in which fiefs dominate the economic decision-making process of the State. An additional indicator of this loss of State authority is the idea previously discussed of corporations gaining a moral ascendancy over the State as a result of low or zero interest rates. A third indicator is also given by the growing involvement of the richest individuals in political organisations. Not only do the rich fund political candidates and their organisations, they head lobbying organisations to steer decision-making their way. During the run up to the 2016 US Presidential elections NY Times researchers revealed that just 158 families had provided nearly half the early money of the candidates campaigns (Confessore et al. 2015).

14.3.2 Labour

Since the end of Feudalism and the beginnings of the industrial revolutions, where resources came to be wholly owned and workers could be divorced from the bounty of the land, a worker in an enterprise has been accounted as a cost. Workers are a cost such that even where the balance of income to cost of an enterprise is zero (that is where all wages are paid for), the enterprise is considered not profitable for capital. An enterprise’s natural disposition is to increase profitability, not to create jobs. The unemployment dilemma is revealed in government action that tries to create jobs through spending and other stimulus and to simultaneously make capital more profitable (the private sector), and is undoubtedly the most confusing problem for economists. The numbers of workers, with their rising health care and other non-work related costs; who represent a huge percentage of business costs and overheads, need to be cut for companies to increase profits. Productivity and profitability all imply cutting jobs where possible, and certainly in static or slow growth situations. The nascent two levels of consumer can be found emerging in the period of time, 2008–2015, where low interest rates and reduced consumer demand allowed companies to buy back shares and lay off labour at the same time, producing improved earnings and productivity without investment. Higher share values enable take overs and thus reduce competition between enterprises further deflating wages. Price inflation is rising while at the same time the purchasing power of the lowest levels of labour has shrunk and its wage negotiating power has almost disappeared.

This situation for labour has been described quite forcibly by Standing (Standing 2014) where the global labour market will suffer from insecurity, downward pressure on wages and the loss of entitlements and protection, and this is in spite of the recent fall in populations, (and thus in workers) generally lauded by economists as a relief from Malthusian disaster. There are a number of deflationary pressures on the consumer economy which increase the imperative of capital to find activities that will provide a return from the consumer sector that retains purchasing power, and thus making a long term investment in space activities less attractive.

14.3.2.1 Urban Population Growth

All over the world national populations are growing less fast, although as shall be seen, the reasons for this are not clear. In many countries the overall fertility rate is below replacement. One of the current explanations for this is urbanisation, where the labour of children cannot increase the productivity of parents as much as they can cover the children’s extra consumption in an agricultural setting. There are family businesses of course that can do that, but in general a typical city worker cannot afford a big family. This ignores the fact that in many rural societies, agriculture is already at the margin and cannot increase productivity thereby forcing people off the land rather than absorbing them. For example, In India, the average size of small farmer holdings is being continually reduced. Of the total land holdings in 2000 nearly 63 % were operated by farmers having less than 1 ha of land (2.3 acres). It is also estimated that farmers with less than 4 ha are not financially viable Singh (2009) such that agriculture does not provide for population increase as expected and thus urbanisation becomes more supportive of population growth, not less. As A. Darrat, and Y. Al-Yousif, unravelled in their paper (Darrat and Al-Yousif 1999), population growth can be positive or negative depending on economic freedoms available especially on the rights to private property and to engage in trade with minimal interference. So the cause of local population growth rate decreases tend to be due to problems with local land ownership, property rights and productivity rather than the long term overriding trend in fertility.

This has happened before. Similar processes ended the Feudal period where gradual urbanisation was the symptom and encourager of population growth. As the Roman era ended, people left the cities and went back to the land because the cities lacked money. Life could only be sustained through agriculture and barter. During the period from 1000AD to 1400AD, urban centres were actively created all over Europe as centres of trade and points of distribution, while more and more land was brought under agriculture. The city state flourished particularly in Italy and Germany and was an important engine for the subsequent Renaissance. During the later feudal period where feudal agricultural productivity remained low the continual subdivision of agricultural plots due to higher populations failed to sustain families living on them. Free farmers were absorbed in urban centres which also gave an opportunity for bonded labourers and serfs to find their freedom and to engage in economic activity, and provided places of refuge from the continual turmoil of the later Middle Ages.

Even 400 years later as the industrialisation of the cotton trade produced large factories in England, population growth allowed urban centres like Manchester to draw people in because the mills employed women and children and whole families could find work (Beckert 2014). Manchester alone, at the height of the cotton boom employed nearly half a million workers in its factories (almost 10 % of the country) and was the inspiration for Malthus’s work in the early part of the 19th century. Between 1700 and 1800, England’s population grew from 5 million to nearly 9 million, so the excuse that urbanisation now is the principal cause of general population decline is a partial one at best. China’s urban growth, for example, has been put at 2.5 % p.a, as it makes the transition from a predominantly agricultural society to a predominantly urban one. By 2050 it is expected that 2/3 of all humans will live in cities and this will impact on population estimates.

Where there is urban decline, mostly in the developed world, we can see this as an example of Zipf’s Law, a general power law (plotting rank vs frequency), which states that in freely competing populations, the most populous city will be twice as big as the second, and that twice as big as the third and so on. This holds for those cities that are better integrated into their environment. Smaller cities with less integration will tend to leak population to the larger better linked ones. Which agrees with historical changes at the end of feudalism that we have mentioned. The conclusions are, supported by recent studies, that far from peaking at around 9 billion in 2050, the world population will continue to grow to 11 + billion by the end of the century (UNDEA 2015).

Urbanisation growth has another consequence in predominantly rural societies in opposition to the reason that children are less required as they cannot increase family productivity as easily as they can in the rural setting. As agricultural workers leave the land, they put downward pressure on urban wages of working parents, the pressures on children to join the labour force to improve urban family fortunes is increasing. As wages stagnate, child labour rises and forms of slavery and bonded labour are increasingly putting children to work around the world both in cities and in agriculture.

14.3.2.2 The Growth in Slavery

Slavery had a good run in the past and it seems to making a comeback. Both ancient Greek and Roman cultures were built on it. It wasn’t until the 1770s that the movement to abolish slavery took hold. The British Parliament abandoned slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Serfdom was not eliminated in Russia until 1861, around the same time a civil war was fought in the US to eliminate slavery there (the constitutional amendment to make it so was passed 1864–65). Brazil ended it in 1871, but informal slavery carried on in parts of Africa while modern political enactments of feudalism like communism and its variants sprung up around the world, where individual rights were completely subordinated to the political will of the state.

Yet, the ILO estimates that modern-day slavery is $150 billion per year business, and 20.9 million or more people are working as modern-day slaves, victims of forced labor, trapped in jobs into which they were coerced or deceived and which they cannot leave. This figure is a conservative estimate, given the difficulty of measuring this disguised crime that includes an estimate of human trafficking and sexual exploitation (ILO 2014).

The question of whether slavery was profitable is long discussed. When we consider the question of dark capital we can see that the entire trading value of the person is his or her dark capital. A person buying a slave is buying not simply labour but the skills and knowledge such a person may have, the ability to pass them on as well as to reproduce. In addition, the dark capital includes the will and instincts an individual may have to survive in adverse conditions. Children as slaves have much less dark capital and as a consequence their price is very low. In 1850 it has been calculated that a good adult slave could fetch as much as $40,000 in today’s money. Whereas today a child slave can be found for a little as $90 (Willamson and Cain 2011). Slavery is important to include in our argument because it depresses the value of labour and reduces its capacity to extract value from capital but which leaves capital even less able to gain returns in a consumer economy.

14.3.2.3 Demographic Time Bomb

It’s not only absolute numbers of consumers that matter but also the proportions of ages. Deflationary pressures come from the fact that the working population is ageing and while half the world’s population may be under 30 years of age and over a quarter are 15 years old or younger, the numbers of workers has peaked. Some developed countries like Japan (where 30 % of the Japanese are over 65, topped only by Finland) have too many old who demand high standards of living, while others have too many young who need to be fed but are not yet productive.

As an example, in a mere 20 years the ratio of worker to retiree in the UK has gone from 3.15 to 2.6 and it is expected to continue to fall. Quite how a youthful population can support both a quality retirement of the aged and the consumption of the new generations when wages generally rise to a peak late in life and as the availability of resources is also declining, is, at the moment unknown. It may require a different economic system, although it is hard to envision one that maintains the benefits to holding capital as well as encouraging technological development.

From now on there will be increasingly more people to be looked after than there are people to work to pay for them. Fewer workers should mean higher wages but more retirees requires a higher return on capital, which tends to depress wages, lowering consumer power. The massive debt burden of governments can only technically be paid off with rising inflation but this is difficult to manage as the numbers of workers and their total consumer power decreases.

14.3.2.4 The Shrinking Work Force

The labor force is shrinking in many countries. The US labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio (USBLS 2014). The numbers of individuals participating in work in the US has fallen from a peak of over 67 % of the population in 1998 to 62.8 % at the end of 2014 and is not projected to improve. The 5.7 % reported US unemployment rate is achieved by not including discouraged workers as part of the work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find a job and has given up looking.) The US government stopped including long-term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994. If the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate in the US stands at 23.2 %. A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term (less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported, stands at 11.2 %. Not surprisingly, wages have not risen in the last decade.

Not only is the world’s labour force shrinking both through demographics and through discouraged workers who exit the workforce and don’t come back, the new-tier economies don’t need as many workers as they once did. Technology, through the computer, has given capital a chance to reduce the claims that labour traditionally make on capital both by creating enterprises that exploit the individual dark capital of humans and by those that eradicate workers with automation and sourcing employment by the hour.

Furthermore trends of land purchasing in many parts of the developing world are turning agricultural workers into migrant workers with only seasonal work and no stability or opportunity for advancement as agriculture looks to increase its return on its capital. These classic ‘land grabs’ as they are called are disenfranchising land users and, in Africa and South America, sometimes privatising areas of communal use (that have the undesirable effect of keeping poverty-driven population up but economic growth down). Changes introduced in India this year will permit precisely the same concentrations of agricultural land in the hands of enterprises that will mechanise production and reduce workers. Some areas of Africa land is leased to businesses by governments who have also newly created rights to a water supply, thus further displacing farmers from their local and ancient arrangements. These ‘clearances’ have the same ring that the clearances and fencing off of common land had in the 16th century in England, although that process had already begun earlier in the 12th century. While higher production may be the target of such deals, according to Oxfam, at least 60 % of produce grown by international concerns is exported and fears of monoculture ruining ecosystems for the benefit of the export trade are a genuine concern.

14.3.2.5 Automation

Continuously advancing technology is disrupting many of the very industries it helped build—and in many cases, those rapid advances are proving to be real net job killers. Traditional enterprises that cannot derive increasing returns from their capital are driven to automate the workforce. Martin Ford has described the disruptions sweeping through industries like publishing, where robots can write and deliver news stories on-line to web sites, whose sole job is to capture readers’ interests and to display advertising, and also in music, retail, and manufacturing, health, and even in higher education, where studies show that robots can score essays in exams better than humans (Ford 2015). Robot tutors are taking over on-line education and will undoubtedly supply almost all undergraduate education in the near future. Robots are short order cooks putting at risk millions of advantageous jobs in fast-food outlets. They are diagnosing health problems like cancer or dementia, mixing the pharmaceuticals for them and administering them. They will drive delivery trucks and taxis and almost certainly will be the only permitted vehicles on dense urban motorways before long.

3-D printing is expected to reduce employment in many normally labour intensive industries like construction, while at the same time giving a few new opportunities in areas like design and personalisation of output—sometimes called the market of one. There is no way to predict the social consequences of this technology except that loss of jobs in the near future in many sectors of the economy is assured. In earlier decades, just-in-time information has been reducing the need for warehousing staff and the wastages of stocks of parts, and now the 3-D printing revolution is reducing them even further. Very few manufacturing systems would be immune from the automation revolution, as still another trend appears on the horizon, distinct from automation, that of biological manufacturing systems, creating not only drugs and foodstuffs but also human body parts, protheses and plastic objects.

The interconnection of devices—the Internet of Things—will also become more widely used in industry and manufacturing in order to streamline manufacturing from design to delivery. Developed economies will benefit the most from new technologies, which will destroy some jobs and create new ones, but developing countries will suffer as the need for cheap labor in low-end manufacturing declines. Cybersecurity will become a greater problem as “smart” technologies become more integrated with manufacturing. People will be needed less by armed forces and even the ordinary soldier that is employed will have to have higher skills in information technology reducing the need for the basic soldier—the grunt—of armies, and the loss of a route out of poverty for many.

Along with automation, a secondary effect of the information revolution is to enable individuals to exploit their own accumulated resources for gain. We have discussed a consumer’s ‘dark capital’ previously but we can describe another trend in the growth of mobile and information technology allowing for the employment of low grade labour, namely, zero hour contracts, just-in-time distribution which does away with warehousing and even packaging, and crowd-sourced labour, where groups of dispersed individuals are organised to perform a service. Science projects have been using crowd labour to work on distributed processing for a while now, like searching for planets or comets or nova in stars, or using individuals’ computer’s rest time to compute functions. Now we also have commercial enterprises connecting with these group capacities. For example, Instacart, a shopping service employing hundreds of people to do its users’ shopping, ordered online, and to deliver the produce using their own transport. It was recently valued at about $2 bn with only 50 full time employees, not counting the crowd labour. This is a market capitalisation per employee of 4 × 107, about equal to Uber. Traditional work forces are now seen to require so much management in-house, taking too much time, space and organisational effort that the minimum wage work force has mutated into a minimum hours work force, further depressing the capacity of labour to participate in the consumer economy to the fullest.

14.3.2.6 Loss of Representation

Unemployment rates in America, Britain and Japan—all of them at or below pre-crisis lows—rose to high levels between 2008 and 2014, and would previously have triggered rising wages. The fact that it did not is a testament to the success of years of government legislation undermining the power of unions. Collective bargaining has almost vanished from the developed countries, which is curious since there is a wage premium for union membership—around 7 % for UK workers (UKONS 2015) for example. 20 years ago 60 % of wage levels arose out of collective bargaining in the US, now only 6 % of wages paid are the result of collective bargaining. In the UK union membership has halved since 1979 and trades unions membership in the private sector is now 14.2 % of the workforce though a higher density than the European average (UKONS 2015). In the US in 2010, union membership was 11.4 % of workers and a mere 7 % in the private sector, while in 2014 total full and part time workers representation by unions was 6.6 % (USBOS 2014). Some countries e.g. Saudi Arabia, still have no unions at all. Where there is growth, however, it has been in insecure forms of employment: part-time work has risen, as have the ranks of the “underemployed”, who would like more hours if they could get them. As looser contracts have helped create flexible workforces, casual work—from drivers for Uber to day labourers in construction—has boomed. Temporary jobs may be up, but workers’ bargaining power is not, further depressing wages. This pattern is repeated around the world. Ironically, the lack of union power has led the shift into self-employed or autonomous workers which means a problem for governments who need regular and consistent employee contributions to fund pension programs. Governments will undoubtedly start to control the levels of cash in the economy further disadvantaging the lowest levels of labour who rely on the black economy to survive.

14.3.2.7 Part 3 Conclusions

At the start of the Feudal period and through the industrial revolution labour was the means of realising wealth for owners of capital. This is no longer the case and workers tend to be rewarded only in so far as they contribute ‘capital’ of their own. Professor Angell of the LSE is one who similarly predicts that society will come to be strictly divided between those contributors to society who possess assets (like sufficient dark capital) and from whom wealth can be created and those without assets and who will receive no or few social benefits (Angell 2000). Capital has found a way to use information technology to increase returns from capital while depressing labour involvement at the same time. These changes in labour support the recent changes in the way capital is employed in the economy and appear to be systemic rather than temporary. Earth’s population is slowly being divided into those who can participate in high level consumerism and a labour force that remains outside this economy and is divorced, in the main, from opportunities to enter it. There are two forces at work concentrating the differences in each sector, the increasing failure to employ capital in ways that distributes the benefits of its mobilisation among the population, and demographic changes and loss of negotiating power in the labour force. Labour has less and less power to demand a share in the returns from the mobilisation of capital and it is unlikely that it will be able to acquire this in the future without radical political changes. In conjunction with the loss of agricultural tenancies, loss of menial and factory jobs, the loss of cash economies and the rise of automation in all spheres, a further trend is the trend towards the transhuman worker who will give new meaning to labour, especially in the space environment, and to the traditional marxist class divide by being both an expense to an enterprise and also a capital asset. This additional separation of labour from capital is well documented in the wealth inequalities of the present day.Footnote 4

The well-off young gain even more benefit from the inequality in education and opportunity. The gap in test scores between rich and poor children is 30–40 % wider than it was 25 years ago, firmly fixing the inequalities in successive generations since the intangible social value derived from privilege in education makes social mobility even less accessible. Migratory and immigrant workers tend to lack education for the surviving blue and white collar jobs and this coupled with social prejudice suggests that large pools of unskilled workers will gather at the bottom levels of the social pyramid with little opportunity to rise into the middle classes, and as a consequence will be of much less interest to capital and to the new opportunities for capital growth.

We can see that changes in labour populations, changes in the way capital is employed with less labour than previously, and the loss of broad ownership of capital in conjunction with loss of authority of the State over the deployment of capital is already leading to a narrowing of goals and shortening of horizons to future economic development here on Earth and lengthening still further the space development timetable while climate change and biosphere damage will continue to undermine the space economy and the risks capital needs to take to invest in space. By the middle of the century, space activity will not have advanced while Earth economy may still be mired in difficulties. The idea of ‘escaping’ into space seems morally reprehensible under these conditions.

14.4 Part 4 Space Colonies

14.4.1 The Space Economy Dilemma

Having gone into some detail about critical factors to the delay in the space industrialisation process up to at least 2050, we can see more clearly that the capability to colonise and to establish off-Earth settlements is far in the future. Given the rate of development we have outlined, where colonisation is unlikely to occur unless the damage to the Earth’s biosphere is minimised and solutions for a healthy, growing but sustainable consumer economy are in place, it is highly likely that the methods of colonising space will be part of the solutions. But where will these solutions come from? NASA still believes that its competitive funding model will stimulate the private sector to take up more and more of the research and manufacturing load yet the competitive model and the competitive impulse between nations for space resources and territory belong with the extreme capitalism that is currently in crisis and looks increasingly unable to sustain the pace of space development. Further, the surplus of debt created to produce industrial production in space will undermine the very market it needs over time since it must be Earth that supplies the markets for space industrialised production as well as the capital, of which a great deal will be lost to the Earth economy by way of structures, spent rockets and fuel and other material being left in space.

Corporations and nations seem to have already recognised that the space economy is not working and, as we might have predicted from the earlier analysis, in requiring less risk and shorter timescales to their returns, are giving all the classical signs of subverting political processes by undermining past UN treaties and agreements that tend to contradict profitability in a space venture. For example, attempts are being made to undermine a 20-year old UN agreement to share internationally meteorological data by US enterprises wanting to receive a return from the launching of a new generation of weather satellites. The UN Committee of Peaceful Uses for Outer Space set up in 1959 recognises that a number of issues need urgent attention such as space debris, nuclear power in space, the filling up of the geostationary orbit and other issues, yet no agreements on these issues between nations have been reached. In spite of the US being a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty where nations agree that the development of space should be conducted to the benefit of all nations whether or not they are space-faring nations (matters of defence are not included), the US Federal Aviation Authority has given the go-ahead for US enterprises (like Bigelow) to own installations on the Moon, and US legislators (under intense lobbying by Space Resources and Deep Space Resources) are introducing the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 to give anyone who captures an asteroid ownership of it, and indeed to give a probe a zone of ‘ownership’ 125 km radius around it as this is the zone of the right to non-interference referred to in the Outer Space Treaty. If this US act remains unchallenged in the International Court then it effectively turns any manned solar system landfall into a territory grab for any nation, and we can look forward to Russian, Chinese, US nation territories on the Moon by 2040 and with their separate legal systems in operation. The US national space policy is committed to the principles of a “robust and competitive industrial base” in developing space (The White House 2012). One expects that every nation will have a similar attitude.

Supporters of this essentially capitalist manner to space development underpin it with the classical model of exploration and risk and which many commentators think will characterise space settlements. Two significant features of life on Earth are generally ignored in this model, however. First, space is not analogous to the surface of the Earth, and second, growth on Earth relies on free biosphere productivity. Taking these facts into account gives us a different background to space colonisation.

14.4.2 The Biosphere Productivity and Human Exploration

An obligation to obey the human exploratory drive is often quoted as one of the reasons space should be colonised. It is certainly a fact that the human species moved out of Africa and spread out over the surface of the Earth to occupy almost every habitable region and even inhospitable climates like the arctic, and deserts. Such expansion was done in a complicated way with groups overlapping, traversing the ground at an average rate of around 1 km a year, hardly an explosive rate of exploration by humans who are claimed to have a genetic disposition to move at whatever cost. Space exploration is not analogous in any way to this expansion. Thanks to the Earth’s biosphere almost all voyages, whether on foot, by sea or land, were made over a productive surface that could sustain the explorers with little cost. Deserts may be the most inhospitable regions on the Earth, but Bushmen were quite able to survive in the Kalahari deserts of their ecological niche. The open oceans are not equivalent to space, and are, or certainly were, teeming with life. Captain Bligh, abandoned in an overcrowded open boat with few provisions, sailed almost 4000 miles across the Pacific by collecting rainwater and capturing fish and birds. At virtually any landfall, repairs could be made to vessels with resources to hand, and food and water were plentiful. But more than this, explorations were made to where human societies were already surviving in those environments and had even refined resources for trade or appropriation. The initial profits for the exploratory voyages to the New World came from already mined and refined gold and silver. Similarly voyages to the East relied on cultures that had already harvested and made ready for consumption the spices of the region. Even in adventurous explorations to extreme environments like the polar regions humans had free air and water, and even game to hunt as a backup to supplies they carried with them. The adventures of Colonists off the Earth have no analogy with human expansion over the Earth, and, as I discussed in an earlier paper (Kennedy 2013), will have none of the biosphere productivity implicit in the Earth economy as a free foundation to the costs of colonisation. Our colonists will be operating under the most severe constraints of sustainability and without the exponential growth of the natural world to supply basic needs. This backing to human growth from the integrated exponential growth inherent in the biosphere is the most disregarded calculation in efforts to imagine a sustainable settlement in space where there is no such foundation.

As Jared Diamond showed (Diamond 1997) the desire to move and explore is dependent upon a certain level of sustainability provided by the biosphere and where this sustainability is lacking societies do not expand. Moreover, any sustainability needs to embody the exponential growth factor of life if a society is to develop. The greater than replacement numbers in each generation is an essential requirement for a steady state minimum because of unexpected losses that arise from accidents and rises and falls of predators and resources. This last point is perhaps the most critical of all. It is precisely here that the distinction between the functions of growth is most in evidence. Exponential growth is damaging to the Earth because it is wasted whereas exponential growth is essential for a space colony because simple linear growth will not allow it to survive in realms where there are no costless integrated autonomous systems to support every component.

14.4.3 Creating Colonies

Any individual component of life is a derivative function of the whole, and human life is no exception. The lack of natural environmental growth rates will have consequences not only on the effectiveness of solutions to the problems of life in space, be they technological or biological, but on the structure of any space society because linear growth leaves no room for error, or failure. In this respect, then there is no liberty in space in the sense of freedom of choice, because there will be no planned excess available to absorb options. Given the capitalist model, every activity in a space colony will be at the margin, and similarly dissent will have little or no excess with which it can shift to other means.

Thus, when it comes to space where there is no on-going support from the biosphere growth function nor any life on which to start building, successful colonisation will have to begin with a foundation that mimics such exponential support where possible. The particular game theory strategies of this reproductive principle of life that concern us are,

  1. 1.

    local maximum use of resources (i.e. no waste).

  2. 2.

    local maximum of resource availability in each trophic level while sufficient excess is available to all levels. (Unallocated resources available for use.)

  3. 3.

    repetition of sites to protect the system since one stands for all at any location the system covers.

From these principles we can draw some conclusions about how a successful colonising project would proceed whether or not the processes are conducted mostly by automatic and robotic systems namely,

  1. 1.

    Complete modularity in design features for all colonies and craft such that any craft can dock with any other craft or colony. This also means common flight communications, common navigation systems and protocols. The notion that each nation should create their own space systems without relation to others is as absurd as it is likely. Further the idea of patents and copyright will have no place in such an environment. Research and development will be shared freely and innovations would be distributed as upgrades.

  2. 2.

    Complete free flows of resources and people between colonies which implies common command and control systems (like computer software) and common language. This is a basic requirement of safety such that any group can come to the aid of any other with minimal interference. There is already an example in the commonly agreed language for aviation, but space systems will require much more than a common language of communication and where say, all labels are in one language, they will need a common interpretation of problems, solutions and their implementations involving design details like wiring colours and mechanical operations and means of attachments. All airlocks should function the same way, for example; all energy generating systems should have the same controls, and so on.

  3. 3.

    All settlements must be geared towards producing stores of equipment and modular systems surpluses, and including labour, to be freely available to any other to fulfil the excess requirement for growth mentioned above. Any settlement should have personnel in excess of that strictly needed for planned work, and redundancy in automation.

  4. 4.

    Facilities for care and hospitality such that all groups can integrate freely and provide each other’s replacements when in need, and most of all during unpredictable events. Let us accept too, that due to automation and artificial intelligence, a good part of colony life will be simply the voyaging and connecting with each other, and a ‘touring of the boundaries’. The idea that colonies and the colonists in them will be operating like factory workers in the industrial revolution is archaic. Libertarian and dissenting behaviour will not be predicted upon that past.

  5. 5.

    Free supplies of oxygen, water, fuel and energy to be freely available to all (a component of every colony will be to contribute to the general stores of these resources above and beyond what they need for themselves) and sited at various points around the solar system with all the necessary systems to keep them viable.

  6. 6.

    Complete openness of data and decision-making processes. Without secrecy, society balances itself, and leadership is prevented from becoming authority.

This last point needs expansion. An initial criticism of this list of principles will undoubtedly be what has come to be called ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Common resources get overused because selfish users compete to profit the most out of them (Hardin 1968). This portrayal of the users of a common-pool resource has been widely accepted as an indication that government structures are required to impose decisions since resource users are the least capable of managing the resources themselves. However, widespread collection of data shows this concept to be far too simplistic, and communities around the world do manage their commons effectively without authoritarian command and control where allowed to do so, as I can personally testify. Years ago I came to live in a (relatively) remote Basque farming community in the French Pyrenees. Much of the land in use is common land. Woods and summer grazing are all resources owned by no one (except the State) and are governed by the community. All the citizens have rights to the common resources (like wood and grazing) but use and distribution is governed by custom and practice as detailed in the anthropologist Sandra Ott’s doctoral thesis about this very community (published in book form, Ott 1981). What is so interesting about the sharing customs is that where an individual behaves selfishly for some reason, or goes back on his word, there may be no sanctions at all. The individual selfishness is just absorbed and a spread of similar selfish behaviour does not result. An example described by Ott (op.cit., pp. 146–147) of where two individuals of a team sharing work on the high pasture for their flocks of sheep decided to quit early. The others did not feel it right to continue to make cheese for themselves, the milk from the ewes was spilt on the ground, even though they were forced to look after the combined flock. There was no sanction against the two individuals. The brother of a neighbour to me, who lives on the coast and who returns to his natal house almost every weekend to hunt regardless of the season, has not been denounced by anyone, and the other hunters of the village who hunt in teams still obey the regulations. In game theory terms, in this community at least, defectors are trounced by generosity and defection does not spread.

A mountain village may be small scale, but colonies will be such small communities for a very long period of time. All the same, there is no reason why the open agreements between users applied at the point of use cannot be scaled up to larger communities. The millions of Twitter and Facebook users manage to apply narrowly focussed pressure on decision-makers without any centralised power structure at all. Theories of selfish behaviour derived from the Prisoner’s Dilemma are entirely artificial since the heart of the problem is the matter of authoritarianism. Full information about the situation is withheld from the players who try to maximise their outcomes based on history or guesswork. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is only a dilemma because there is an authority who has arranged the payoffs and keeps each player guessing about what the other has done. In the real world, cooperation does not need to arise in guesses about the other player’s intentions. In fact, fuller game theory analysis shows that cooperation trumps every other strategy as long as there is full information shared between all the players. In this way the commons can easily be administered by self-interested groups who share all the information and where the ‘obvious’ solution becomes evident. Thus, the tragedy of the commons need not be an excuse for first creating authority to rule over a settlement, and there are alternatives which humans naturally create in the absence of a single sanction-based authority.

Regarding these principles listed above, it is important to realise that this implies a fundamental common society since no society can have special rules, beliefs or practices that would interfere with the flow between settlements. This would in principle rule out competitive expansion and extreme cultural divergences, often the source of dissent and restraint of liberty. The organisation of space settlements will necessarily be a counterculture of political uniformity not imposed from above but agreed upon among the individualistic elements that make them up.

A particular class of alternatives has been called ‘polycentric governance’ (Ostrom 2010) which consider that the socio-economic setting and more importantly the motivational climate can manage resources better than single authoritarian structures. Lon Fuller developed this idea of polycentricity to show that some disputes, resource allocation being a prime example, are inherently unsuitable for definitive adjudication due to the complex issues and interdependent interests involved, although he did believe in creating a ‘rule of law’ to which citizens should adhere (Fuller 1964). True polycentric decision-making, however, is more discretionary. Where webs of interdependent relationships are so complex that no external or anticipatory rule can be devised to extract a decision or solution, solving problems requires discretionary rules and local agreements that are realised to be non-binding forever but have time limitations on them. Polycentric decisions are made as inclusive as possible and that the grades of benefit to all parties are acceptable for the conditions as they stand but do not necessarily create precedents. They are also flexible in allocating benefits, such as cyclical bonuses, which are much more accepted by individuals than fixed allocations. Provisional allocations are less readily thought of as confrontations between classes or between privileged and non-privileged groups and can benefit political and economic decisions precisely because they are provisional. In space colonies where there will be a mix of humans, thinking machines and physically adjusted transhumans, there cannot be a set of rules established in advance that accommodates all views all the time. Polycentric decision making processes realise that fairness is mutable, and this removes an excuse for much dissent.

In fact humans are very good at working at complex tasks under these kinds of conditions of informed but non-preemptive decisions, and, when allowed, seem to naturally tend in this direction. The growing phenomenon of the civil society sector, called variously nonprofit, voluntary, the ‘civil society’, the ‘third society’, the ‘social economy,’ ‘NGO,’ or the ‘charitable’ sector, includes within it hospitals, universities, social clubs, professional organizations, day care centres, grassroots development organizations, health clinics, environmental groups, family counselling agencies, self-help groups, religious congregations, sports clubs, job training centres, human rights organizations, community associations, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and many more. These are groups set up by private individuals to perform often vital services especially in health, education, and care as well as philanthropy. Each individual entity is generally small scale and are unique structures privately created by individuals coming together entirely on their own initiative but,

…Because of their unique combination of private structure and public purpose, their generally smaller scale, their connections to citizens, their flexibility, and their capacity to tap private initiative in support of public purposes, these organizations are being looked to increasingly to perform a number of critical functions: to help deliver vital human services, such as health, education, counselling, and aid to the poor, often in partnership with the state and the market; to empower the disadvantaged and bring unaddressed problems to public attention; to give expression to artistic, religious, cultural, ethnic, social, and recreational impulses; to build community and foster those bonds of trust and reciprocity that are necessary for political stability and economic prosperity; and generally to mobilize individual initiative in pursuit of the common good… (Salamon 2010)

These associations are not designed to make profits for investors save only to support whoever does the work and to return to the work as much of their income as possible. Nonprofit employment in the eight countries for which time-series data were available grew by an average of 24 %, or more than 4 % a year, between 1990 and 1995. By comparison, overall employment in these same countries grew during this same period by a considerably slower 8 %, or less than 2 % a year (Salamon 1993).

These are not new social inventions, but the conditions are right in the modern era for them to have a strong presence. They were noted in the US in 19th century by the observer Alexis de Tocqueville, who considered “…voluntary associations a uniquely democratic response to solving social problems…” It is tempting to think of their growth in the modern day is, too, a response to the loosening of the obligations of citizens to the State invoked by zero or negative interest rates we discussed earlier. While we are considering these social forms as more belonging to space settlements where the state influence is naturally less, it is the case that non-state actors are gaining control of features of everyday life from governments on Earth, and this includes the multi-faceted enterprises of the space economy. Since competition between nation states will only reduce the rate at which colonisation can proceed rather than assist it, deeper levels of cooperation and coordination, using the polycentric model of decision-making, between space development bodies on Earth will be needed. We can expect that NASA and other State organisations will become less and less important in the years to come and will be regarded only as components of a complex system of industrial and social effort in space. They will have authority in science perhaps but not necessarily in other areas of activity.

If we take, therefore, the existing adaptable polycentric collective model as the foundation to our social and economic structures in space, it only remains to find what economic instruments will support and encourage them, deliver preferable returns to the normal capitalist deployment of capital, and support both more rapid expansion into space while keeping to sustainable industrial and technological practices on Earth.

14.4.4 SpaceCoin

The economic instrument we are seeking will have to do four things, support polycentric decision-making, provide investment instruments, act as collateral and provide for wages and interpersonal currency among space settlements, while at the same time be as independent as possible of the fluctuations of fiat currencies.

So will colonies have money? How will individuals be paid and how will they store their income? Analogies with Earth-based trading voyages of the past may not provide a solution to the difficulty. Traditionally, merchant ship crews shared in the profits of the voyage in terms of a percentage of the value of the landed cargo. Navy crews received pay but also shared in the value of captured ships and other prize monies. It is unlikely that astronauts will have any opportunities to share in profits from space industries in similar ways in this century. Further, it is unlikely that human passengers in a space mission could contribute anything but a tiny fraction of the cost of such a mission so distributing shares in the equity to them makes little sense. Similarly the concept of ‘sweat equity’ where the labour that participants do during the lifetime of the project becomes their investment in it makes no sense when the costs of these voyages vastly outweigh what individuals have to contribute (unless, of course, all colonisers are billionaires) and would thus require that labour be re-evaluated enormously highly. ‘Sweat equity’ is perilously close to bonded labour and I do not imagine that it will have any serious role in space development. People have talked about setting up space banks, or using cryptocurrencies for space voyager payments. Some have proposed setting up a bank that offers interest free loans to stimulate space endeavours but this is no different to today’s climate of zero or near-zero interest rates. It also misses the point about debt. The interest rate on its own cannot encourage particularly longer term activity if the returns from the activity for which the loan was taken out are too low. Furthermore since interest rate reflects risks in the returns, zero interest rate implies no growth. Gold does not serve the purpose of a universal currency; the general user cannot test its purity or easily subdivide it as its value rises, and most of the time it is undervalued with respect to other currencies. The problem with using Earth-based currencies is that interest earned on loans or dividends payable to share capital of a space venture simply cannot be calculated, which means that wages are unlikely to be fair, a possible cause of dissent. PayPal announced in 2013 that they were setting up PayPal Galactic in order to be ready to process payments that future space workers will make among themselves. This initiative seems to have since disappeared from the PayPal web site, with good reason. Such a proposal seriously misunderstands the space economy of this century. There will be no shops in space. Food and personal items will not be sold there. It will never be cost effective to ship and stock in space objects of anything other than essential food, hygiene items and perhaps clothing items. There might be room on re-supply missions for objects ordered from Earth, but the idea that a ‘trading post’ might be one of the components of a settlement on Mars is not practicable this century and 3-D printing would provide for many needs, in any event. So if astronauts do not buy and sell to and from each other, will they need money at all? Clearly they can buy and sell objects on Earth through electronic trading. So astronauts and colonists can be paid into Earth bank accounts and they can handle transactions relating to their life electronically from those accounts just like astronauts in the ISS do today. Colonists who have taken a one-way trip will presumably be paid either in a lump sum or a regular wages. They, too, are likely to prefer to put their money to use on Earth for the foreseeable future. But what can a colonist’s life actually be worth? Certainly there will be declining value attached to each new colonist. Later arrivals will have different calculations applied to their ‘pay’. These differentials can easily be causes of dissent. How can colonist wages, or indeed any space activity, be related fairly to the Earth economy?

There is such an economic tool already in existence namely, crypto currencies. The original purpose of a currency was to reflect the productivity of the community and to a certain extent its seriousness in paying debts. Since the world came off the gold standard, the value of a national currency has been divorced from actual values of productivity or precious metal holdings and has become related instead to trade balances which can be manipulated almost with impunity through interest rates. This has happened in part because, in exponential growth situations, productivity is a ‘past measure’ and cannot provide enough riskless future potential for investment or for the rising costs of government expenditure on wars and social services. As a result fiat currencies do not reflect true values in the economy. They are a construct and are vulnerable especially to a falling velocity of money.

There is a modern alternative to this namely, electronic currencies derived from the invention of blockchain verification and they all share similar features. The blockchain is in principle an unbreakable encrypted record of every single transaction (hence crypto-currency). The values in these electronic creations reside solely in the numbers of transactions made rather than the absolute values; its value deflates if people hoard it. This is reflected in the fact that coins are created every time the transaction list has to be verified after a transaction and which therefore contribute to its availability. Furthermore there is an actual limit to the whole numbers of coins that can be created so the subdividing of a cryptocurrency (essentially inflation) is in complete control of the users and is in direct relation to the need for it in a transaction. A transaction in a cryptocurrency does not pass through an intermediary like a bank, so there are no levies on top of the transaction inflating its value for the user, and there is no central control to manipulate its value. It makes no sense to have a debt in a cryptocurrency since a promise to pay cannot be recorded in the blockchain system, so debt cannot accumulate and alter its value. Yet there can be contracts to pay a sum in cryptocurrency bought with cryptocurrency. The difference between this contract to pay and a traditional fiat currency money note (I promise to pay the bearer…) is that the liability of the contract is not recorded in the blockchain only the fact that seller has received payment, and the contract has a term to expiry. Until the seller of the contract has acquired the coins of currency that he is expecting (say from the sales of goods) and paid off his contract does the multiple of the contract appear in the blockchain and thus in the value of the currency.Footnote 5 The contract is a legal instrument (it can be bought and sold) but its promises cannot be verified or accounted with reference to the block chain. Thus, in principle, a cryptocurrency value reflects something of the total concrete productivity of the arena in which the currency is used. It is this advantage in particular that is of interest to space development.

If the entire arena of space activity, including all the various groups and associations involved, from NASA and other national programs to the lowliest amateur group were to use a crypto-currency—let us call it SpaceCoin—then, as space activities rise over time, the value of the currency would also rise over time in direct relation to the total of transactions required. In this way SpaceCoin would reflect the value of both the industry and social activities, of scientific groups both professional and amateur, research and development, congresses and periodicals, tourist trips and so on. Any expansion in the space activity arena would increase the value of the currency automatically. Any resources discovered say, metal on an asteroid or alien microbes with genetic potential, sold in SpaceCoin would automatically raise the value of the currency for every holder. Each individual in the SpaceCoin economy would benefit without needing deposit accounts and interest rates, just as in the Feudal era, where a successful harvest profited everyone. Where in the capitalist system, borrowings can inflate shares leading to bubbles and collapses, with a cryptocurrency no bubbles of this sort are possible. SpaceCoin would be stable, capable of ever rising value but always be in proportion to the ‘GDP’ of the space economy arena. Eventually, any organisation wishing to enter the space development arena would prefer to use SpaceCoin for its stability rather than risk the variable values associated with fiat currencies. As more organisations buy into the arena the value of everyone’s holding rises. But further, the most attractive aspect to SpaceCoin is the fact that since the background value to the currency is the numbers of transactions rather than any asset, asset losses in space would not move the value of the currency by large amounts since their value is already written into the currency (by way of the transactions) and cannot be removed.

As far as the Earth’s economy is concerned this use of a cryptocurrency is, in effect, a return to feudal-like resource allocation where labour and capital are not distinguished in the wealth creation, and where waste is a loss for everyone. For the same reason that debt cannot be turned into an asset (outside of specific contractual arrangements), waste cannot be passed on to others. This makes the SpaceCoin arena a very attractive proposition for environmental groups and for sustainable industries. Members of the arena would find warfare a losing proposition and government spending could not exceed the resources available for it. As the benefits become clear to Earth-based groups one might expect a flight into SpaceCoin and away from fiat currency economies, braking destructive capitalist tendencies on the biosphere without any political domination.

So who creates SpaceCoin? Bitcoin, already in existence provides the model for SpaceCoin. BitCoin, an advance on earlier electronic currencies, was created in 2009 by a mysterious person or group of people who have remained crypto themselves, but all the software necessary to create the blockchain verification (mining) and the digital ‘wallets’ used to hold bitcoins is open source. There is no central agency controlling this process, only a group of dedicated individuals who run a web site to make available the software and who have created help forums to discuss its use. Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million units because the bitcoins generated by proving the blockchain are regularly halved such that there is a limit of 21 million reached by around the year 2140. The software allows for subdivisions of a bitcoin to the 8th decimal place ultimately producing 2100 trillion bitcoin fractions which compares roughly with a 2.5 % growth of world GDP to 2140 from $107 trillion today. There are theoretical risks to creating a cryptocurrency. For example if one miner or group of miners acquires more than 50 % of the mining capacity (this has already happened with BitCoin), they could in theory alter the blockchain in subtle ways to eliminate some transactions or repeat them. Some commentators say that this ability would actually depress the value of the currency and so automatically provide checks and balance to nullify such cheating. But even if not, the costs of doing these small ‘cheats’ continue to rise as the computing power needed to perform the blockchain verification rises. Like BitCoin, SpaceCoin would require an agency to write the software and run a distribution and troubleshooting. But where SpaceCoin would differ from BitCoin would be in its relation to the ‘GDP’ of the space economy and may require a larger projected quantity to take the space development economy through two centuries.

The UN seems to be the obvious choice to create SpaceCoin, although in fact it could be produced by any group of interested parties. SpaceCoin would give us,

  1. 1.

    A space economy that avoids the pitfalls of traditional and orthodox Earth-based economic management by government regulation of debt. One whose returns compete with traditional interest bearing instruments but whose value is generated apart from any fiat currency. An economic system built on value rather than debt.

  2. 2.

    A space economy that participates in the struggle to keep Earth’s biosphere whole and as undamaged as possible. For example resource observation should be used to conserve biodiversity and not for developing successful monocultures.

  3. 3.

    A space economy that fosters mutual cooperation and horizontal decision-making rather than as simply a further outpost for government controlled asset allocation and capitalist waste economies.

  4. 4.

    Further initiatives to the study and management of space as a resource to preserve and enhance the Earth’s Biosphere, as distinct to thinking of space just a common good to exploit apart from it. To clarify the treaties that recognise the commons of space and push for a new one that confirms the protection of Earth first.

14.5 Conclusions

The world economy is undergoing systemic changes in the relationship of capital with labour. Demographic changes and the political decoupling of capital from labour have led to an appetite for higher investment returns from the use of capital, and where labour no longer has a reasonable share in wealth derived from its mobilisation. Traditional enterprises in manufacturing sectors of the economy are more socially beneficial to labour, but new enterprises have emerged, aided by governments who have supported the debt-laden economies with rising asset growth over rising wages, which profit in particular from the details of individual consumer behaviour, including life and spending preferences, to manage their output more efficiently. A two-tier consumer world is being created which will actively hinder future innovation and do little to reduce the consumption that is damaging the world.

The implications of this are significant to the future of the Space Economy since its long timescales and lack of returns are very much less attractive to capitalists looking for the average higher returns now becoming the norm. The paradox is that capital will only turn to the space economy when either Earth’s consumer economy becomes too damaged to provide the high returns for them, or when Earth economy has grown so large that any solution on Earth to substitute essential resources with other strategies do not work and it needs the resources the space economy can provide. It is unlikely that this point will ever be reached given the damage of such growth to the Earth’s biosphere, and nor will a sustainable space economy be in place before this critical time since it will have to rely upon the purchasing power of Earth long into the future. A healthy Earth is necessary for any form of sustainable space economy to develop. Otherwise the current funding model of space activities where governments seed private enterprises to develop solutions to their requirements will leave a space economy pursing scientific studies and experimenting with almost whimsical colonising projects between the Earth-Moon system and Mars, without any coherent purpose except only an expectation that the Earth economy will catch up eventually and give these projects true purpose and an economic effectiveness. The investment multiple that supplies benefits here on Earth for every dollar of government funding will not continue to benefit the Earth economy unless the spin-offs are directed deliberately towards making the Earth sustainable.

This paper proposes a solution that will release the space economy from the restrictions that its dependency on old fashioned capitalist practices produces, and allow it to grow effectively without the biases of a central authority. I have shown that the consequences of high levels of debt around the world, a decline in labour as a consumer force, a decline in the sharing of capital, have led to a loss of authority of the State in controlling the economy, and a rise of the non-state actor in its place. I propose that in particular we give strength to the non-state actors by binding together all aspects of the space economy, industrial, social and spiritual, voluntary and professional, with a space economy cryptocurrency, SpaceCoin, in order to separate the space economy from the perils of this late stage capitalism, to quicken the pace of space development and to provide a non-political biased impetus to saving the Earth’s biosphere. Such a program would mesh well with the UN’s new initiative for sustainable development goals as defined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit of 2015 (UN 2015).

I conclude that these proposal will provide the appropriate growth foundations to future space colonisation, and, with polycentric decision-making and a space-wide currency in place, there will be few reasons to worry about liberty, dissent and revolution in future colonies that will naturally grow in value as the space economy grows in value.

We shall in effect be making a quasi-feudal ‘space fief’ where labour and capital join together to save the Earth and make a home for humans in space.

14.6 Final Word

We have a strange sense of risk in the western world. It has two components. One notion, to which we give investment value and which has come to create and dominate our modern monetary-based society, is the relationship of monetary gain to risk; the greater the risk greater the return. But this is far from a world-wide appreciation of risk. The other notion, which we celebrate more where we can, is the human individualism in risk, where someone risks all for personal fulfilment. Wade Davis mentions Polynesian historians who estimate that half of all Polynesian voyages risked in the Pacific were lost (Davis 2009). That is perhaps the finest expression of risk—the toss of a coin. The Polynesian adventurers were not seeking their own wealth or even to set up long lasting trade lines between islands. They went to express themselves; they went for status; they also went to confirm the knowledge that other human settlements, although dispersed, lived within reach, and even though well beyond the horizon, those settlements could be bound into one sphere by a voyage of risk. The whole community was involved in the voyage, provided the resources, and the whole community gloried in its success. This expression of risk seems the most adapted to the Space adventure, where settlements will communicate with each for little reason but to confirm their presence in the life stream, their extended family bond, their humanity. The future of humans in space should not be interpreted as an escape path from a dying Earth or as simply a natural extension of human economic and political structures, but as an expression of what humans value most about all human life. Space is ultimately not about Earth’s economics but about human consciousness and about the experiences the underlying cosmic realities of life induce within the whole human community. It only has meaning with respect to our origins.