Community is always part of a system that we sometimes can or cannot see or recognize. And in Gerard O’Neill’s proposals for these islands in space, those communities…were supposed to perform a very specific function in a larger system. They were supposed to be experiments.
How Will We Govern Ourselves in Space?
What Do Community and the Social Landscape Look Like in Space?
presented by Alex MacDonald, Craig Calhoun, Erika Nesvold, Fred Scharmen
Law & Order, or Game of Thrones? The Legal Landscape of Space Exploration
presented by Amanda Nguyen, Erika Nesvold, Henry Hertzfeld, Yuliya Panfil
I personally am not worried about settlements. I think they’re so far in the future that we can’t predict what they’ll look like. We can’t even keep human beings, particularly a lot of human beings, alive in space or have real settlements, the way we envision a colony or a settlement. I don’t think the lack of sovereignty is going to hurt any of this.
What Could be Unsettling about New Settlements?
presented by Andrés Martinez, Armstrong Wiggins, Bina Venkataraman, Russell Shorto
I think we’re already moving into a very—uncomfortably for most of us, into a place where nation-states, governments, are being forced to cede authority to corporations. And that is going to, I assume, happen faster and faster. And if you throw in space, if you throw in the limitlessness of space, then I mean…the sky’s the limit so to speak. I don’t know what the…where that takes us.