The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World

by Tim Marshall

‘When the Earth experiences this kind of crisis in Hollywood films, the hero always ventures out into space to find a new home, which is a very American approach – adventure, individualism . . . But in my film, we work as a team to take the whole Earth with us. This comes from Chinese cultural values – homeland, history and continuity.’

240 kilometres.

that's 240 THOUSAND km

Virgin Galactic is concentrating on sub-orbital tourism. At around $450,000 a flight the customer base is small, but perfectly rich. If Branson is correct, then there are enough multi-millionaires out there for the company to turn a profit and move on to lowering prices for a mass market. That might seem optimistic, but it was just over ten years between the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 and the first scheduled passenger airline service in 1914 (in Florida), and only another four decades until more Americans were travelling by air than by train.

fait accompli

fact on the ground

Among the myriad threats, the biggest is probably competition between China and America and what is called in geopolitics the ‘Thucydides Trap’. The term was popularized by the Harvard scholar Graham Allison in his book Destined for War. In it he quotes from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.’ For Athens read China, and for Sparta the USA. Allison identified sixteen cases where a rising power threatened to displace an existing one and found that in twelve war was the outcome. In the four where conflict was averted, deployment of imaginative statecraft was required – for example, an intervention by the pope that resulted in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, preventing a devastating war between Spain and Portugal, and more recently the USA–Russia relationship that gave rise to the Cold War rather than nuclear bombs. In all four cases compromises were made, often messy ones with knock-on effects, but Allison’s point is that they averted an all-out catastrophic military confrontation, and these examples can help the superpowers of the Space Age to do the same. Compromise is now required by the Big Three.

I’d argue that both governments and companies should be spending money and sending humans for several reasons. It’s probable we will need a refuge from Earth at some point, and it’s definite that we already need more resources to raise living standards here. There will be scientific, medical and technological advances as we make this journey even if we don’t yet know what they are, and now is not the time to press the pause button. Yes, robots can, and should, do a lot of this, but they cannot tell us how it feels out there and what it’s like psychologically to be so far from Mother Earth. Without the human factor, without inheritors of the mantle of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Columbus, Amundsen, Gagarin, Armstrong and others, it will be harder to persuade people that this is our future, and that the work done now is akin to the old adage that you plant a tree so that future generations can sit in the shade. Everything in our history tells us we cannot resist the call of the unknown. It is inevitable we will venture further because, as US astronaut Gene Cernan put it, ‘Curiosity is the essence of human existence.’