Earth, the moon, and Africa's place on it

I didn't really know which sub-zyke to post this on. I might as well leave it here on z/general.

I guess we've all watched the movies; Star Trek, The Expanse—with James Holden and his crew, Halo—with the human-covenant war, and Avatar… you know, the one with the blue-aliens.

All of those are movies, series, and franchises that I’ve watched and enjoyed watching, and like-wise they are all set not too far into the future—only a couple of centuries at most.

They all also have similar themes; space exploration and geopolitics, and [in some cases] war.

But in all of that, there’s somethings I can’t help but notice. For one, there is an almost absolute absence of Africans.

For me, the absurdity of it is that these storylines—more often than not—include institutions like unified global governments and are set in a time where Africa should hold a supermajority of the world’s human population.

But I’m not here to criticize the works of other people and decry the absence of my people from their stories—how dare I? If Africans want a proper sci-fi movie made about them and their exploits, they’d fund their own studios.

I guess I’m here to present what [in my opinion] is a more plausible future for humans and our relationship with space.

Africa is projected to reach a staggering 4-billion-person population (40% of the world) by the turn of the century (2100) while still remaining the youngest region on earth. UNICEF projects by 2100 ~50% of all human children will be African. Meaning, even if Africa’s fertility rate drops to replacement levels (2.1 children per woman), population momentum alone could carry Africa across the 5-billion-person mark sometime in the 22nd century, and we could reach a global supermajority status (>50% of the human population).

In the backdrop of this, almost all other major regions would see their populations decline. India’s population is projected to peak mid-century (2050’s), China is already seeing decline and will fall to about 600-700 million people by century’s end. Europe? About 390 million people.

Beyond just demographics, another scenario that is commonly depicted in today’s discussions about space exploration is a biological exodus. A scenario where humans maintain a large off-world population (like a large-scale Martian colony), or even a large extra-solar human presence—like in the ‘Halo’ series or James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’.

 I think, we’re going to see a reality where the bulk of the human population will remain earth bound, with some specialized industries like high-end semi-conductor manufacturing, biotechnology labs, habitats (space hotels and the likes), and some computing infrastructure in earth orbit.

The moon would be mostly industrial and heavily automated, practically all of the in-space infrastructure [including those orbiting the earth] would be manufactured on the moon and assembled in orbit. We will run an almost entirely closed loop space ecosystem where the only things we’d still have to launch out of earth’s gravity well will be people and specialized equipment—but mostly just people. Every industrial input can be sourced from the lunar surface itself or from automated asteroid mining. At any given time, the moon would host hundreds to a few thousand humans, all the rest of the labour will be automated.

As for Mars [and the idea of a sprawling Martian colony], we’d likely have outposts, with dozens to a few hundred people. Most of those people would likely be in Martian orbit rather than on the surface of the red planet. The thing is, once we’ve built the capacity to build habitats in space [which give us control over comfort, gravity—through centrifugal rotation, and mobility], descending into gravity wells would be… inconvenient, to say the least. An unnecessary hazard.

Mars has 38% of earth’s gravity, a global average temperature of -63°C, its surface receives about 40-100 times the background radiation on earth, its atmosphere is only 1% of earth and is 95% carbon dioxide, and its soil is toxic—literally. Any human settlement on mars would be living in a bunker [not an aesthetically pleasing glass dome], in a freezing desert, where you can’t birth and raise children, because any generation born there would be permanently physically disabled, and would be unable to ever visit earth because their organs will fail.

In conclusion, the most plausible future I see is one where the human condition and its drive to abundance is implicitly an African story. Humanity will remain on earth for the most part, establish industrial capacity on the moon and outposts throughout the solar system, and our expansion into the cosmos will happen primarily with automated systems rather than biological bodies—and all of that will happen with Africans at the fore as opposed to the periphery.

human history is driven by human agency, and the future is explicitly African.