Economics needs to get a life

There's a difference between rationality and reason, and I believe the Age of Rationality may be coming to an end. Hopefully, what replaces it will be a new chapter in the larger Age of Reason, what I like to call the Age of Sense, in which people will be sensible enough to act with the long-term consequences of their actions in mind. This may go against our immediate rational interests, but is certainly not essentially unreasonable, even when some of the consequences will only occur after the "sensible actor" is dead.

This is all very difficult, of course, but not impossible. After all, humans are mammals, and mammals care for their offspring. This is one of several important factors that the abstract "rational actor" model of self-interested behavior favored by most economists leaves out. In fact, if economists were willing to look at people as living things rather than economic automatons, they might see the implications of the drive to reproduce for any organism: the organism doesn't just want what's best for itself, but what's best for its descendents and, to some extent, for its entire species as well.

The emergency backup society

"The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars," says religious leader Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler's novel, Parable of the Sower. It's an old idea in science fiction: by carrying life to other worlds, humans can serve as the seeds, the reproductive mechanism, of Earth's biosphere. Some take this literally, referring to the hypothetical planetary superorganism called Gaia; for others it's merely a useful analogy.

But there is another important reason to establish space colonies, also alluded to in Parable of the Sower: "It's a destiny we'd better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs." To be a bit poetic about the analogy, we need to evolve into what a Star Trek fan might call "the Great Bird of the Galaxy" (which was actually a nickname for Gene Roddenberry).

More prosaically: at this point, we have to acknowledge that terrible things may happen to Mother Earth no matter how hard we try to prevent them, and while a catastrophe that kills off the whole human species is unlikely, it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. As SF authors also like to say, "humanity has all its eggs in one basket," but we can change that if we choose. Ecologists may see this as a misguided attempt to escape the natural cycle of species birth and death, even though humans will probably continue to evolve wherever we may be. But coupled with the first rationale, I think there is a very compelling ecological argument for human expansion into space.