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This is Hotel Mars, I'm John Batch with David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show.

And we're speaking with an author of a new book, Off Earth Ethical Questions and Quandries for Living in Outer Space.

The author of the book is an author, she is also an astronomer. But she has written a book looking at ethics in colonization.

There wasn't much when the Americas were colonized. In fact, I can't find any in the 500 years of the exploitation of both the people and the environment that was here before the Europeans came.

However, one of the details I learned from an excellent review of the Americas book in Nature magazine.

The premier peer reviewed magazine on planet Earth, probably in the solar system soon enough, is that the Americas involved herself into avoiding the mistakes of colonization.

Erica, that's a wonderful ambition. How do we do it? Do we get everybody together and say we're not going to be conkeys to doors and wipe out everybody?

Well, I think one key is to make sure that everyone involved in space exploration or in planning for space exploration has actually studied the history of colonization on Earth, particularly before they want to start using narratives of colonization for talking about space.

Most of us in the US here have learned some part of it in our school history classes, but it really is important to look, take an objective view, unfiltered view of the history of colonization across the world, including in North America, and see what harms it caused and what were the, what's what are the aspects of this colonial mindset that led to these harms?

A lot of people argue that well, if there's no indigenous people in space, then colonization is not a problem because colonization was, of course, the worst for the colonized peoples.

But there's a lot of other parts of colonization that can cause harm. Colonization causes a lot of harm to the environment.

It causes a lot of harm to other people involved in the process in North America that included enslaved people and women and workers.

And so just analyzing our mindset and thinking about why we want to go to space, what we think we're owed from space and what we have a right to and what we don't.

These are all very important questions. Yes, you make a critical distinction between settling and colonizing. How so, Erica?

Yeah, this can feel sometimes like it's just quibbling over language and I tend to prefer the word settlement. I myself, I use the word space settlement instead of space colonization.

That's really just as a reminder to myself every time I say the phrase to think about the history of colonization and the ways that it caused harm and what we want to avoid repeating in our space.

Now, there's problems with the word settlement too. It's not an apolitical word here on earth today. And you can use the word settlement all you want and still conduct activities that are really colonization.

So it's not just about language, but for me, it's an important reminder in a way to show that I've thought about these issues. David, you have a question.

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