Anti‐capitalists, post‐colonialists, and the controversy about the ‘colonisation of space’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The successful Apollo programme, which achieved the first (and later five more) moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was followed by several lost decades for manned space travel.Despite NASA's accomplishments in unmanned space exploration such as the development of the Webb Space Telescope, progress in manned space exploration ground to a halt for decades.The shuttle programme, which ran from 1981 to 2011, failed to live up to expectations.A new study from Matthew H. Hersch arrives at a sobering conclusion: "By every measure, the shuttle had fallen short of even the modest hopes that had surrounded it.And the shuttle remained flying only because every effort to replace it with a better-winged, reusable craft also failed" (2023, p. 7).Only the emergence of private space companies such as Elon Musk's Space X and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has brought a new dynamic to the space industry.According to a study by the World Economic Forum (2024), the space economy is expected to grow to US$1.8 trillion by 2035.Chad Anderson from the US investment firm Space Capital estimates: "Over a quarter of a trillion dollars has been invested into nearly 2,000 unique space companies over the past decade alone" (2023, p. xx).However, with the emergence of a new, dynamic private space industry, criticism is also growing. | THE GOAL: TO COLONISE OUTER SPACEElon Musk argues that mankind essentially has a duty to colonise other planets because sooner or later an asteroid impact could lead to the extinction of our species.Researchers today widely concur that the dinosaursalong with 75 per cent of other life on Earthwere wiped out by a meteorite strike 66 million years ago.There is plenty of evidence of past asteroid collisions; our
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".