The ethics of bearing and raising children in micro-gravity

[Michael Bickford]

It seems a little premature to ask the question now when we're only just beginning to learn about the effects of long-term exposure to the conditions in space. Asking whether it's ethical presumes we have clearly defined arguments that are both for and against - but so far as I'm aware neither is currently being developed.

In which case, are you asking these questions simply because you want an audience for them, or are you writing this into a story (we are a science fiction and fantasy community after all).

Thank you for responding!
There is quite a bit of evidence of the damage done by long-term exposure to micro-gravity to body systems and genes. More will be known as people spend more time away from earth in micro gravity and other unique space conditions. My main point is that finding out about this probable damage by exposing children to it is unethical. Adults have full volition to take on the risks of this kind of experimental exploration. Children do not.

Participating in a discussion on this does feed into my writing. As soon as I get my 30 comments in I’ll be posting pieces of a novel I am writing. Set 100 - 150 years in the future, I want it to be as un-fantastical as possible—as pure a speculative piece as I can make it based on science as it is now and the directions it seems to be going. Extrapolation of future environments in space depend on the near-term view upon which that extrapolation is based. I’m not getting much from the agencies I’ve contacted so far, so I thought I‘d ask creative thinkers of Sci-fi what they think.

I am leading with what I think about this as a kind of provocation to engage. I do know colonization plans are being made for Mars and the moon, and I know that NASA is aware of possible physiological and psychological problems these explorers and, within a few years, colonists, will have to endure, both while deployed, afterward, and in the eventuality of long-term settlement. And I know that full data sets can‘t be analyzed until we send crews and colonists out there and collect their health data. I also know human‘s proclivity to reproduce and that the very nature of colonization in the past been one that has included growing the colonial population once there. So it seems like a natural question to consider: just because we can raise kids in micro gravity and other space environment conditions that could be problematic, should we? Would it be fair to those children raised under historically unique conditions? We would be conducting an experiment on them merely by bearing them and raising them in those condition. Would that be ethical? I think not.

In the world of my novel, there are strict sanctions against conceiving, bearing, and raising children on Mars or on the moon. That restriction has a bearing on the plot and the characters and I want to see what current thinking is about it as I write on.
People here have been very forthcoming and I am grateful.
Can’t wait to submit to some actual criticism!

 

[Michael Bickford]

The question of sex in space is a distraction - the opening post is about raising kids in low-g environments. But I don't think there's any serious argument that we should be doing this at the moment, especially with the limited understanding we have on the effects on human biology in general in those environments.

Yet plans are being made for colonization without a discussion of the ethical considerations of raising children there. Are we talking about a new kind of colonization that does not include procreation? With mixed groups of young people working on colonial, Mars or the moon for even a few years at a time, someone’s gonna get pregnant. What with waiting for orbital windows to open, it could be up to a year or two process to come back from Mars. And if we are really going to colonize wouldn’t we make provision for eventual pregnancies and births? What are the ethical considerations of this? Should we conduct such experiments with children’s lives is all I’m asking.
I’m writing a novel in which these considerations are key, so I’m interested in a wide variety of thoughts on the subject.
thanks for responding!

 

[Michael Bickford]

I think The Expanse has a reasonably astute take, in that Belters become very much second-class people in part because they can't live in full planetary gravity. They develop new, zero-g physiologies that make them stand out wherever they are. In those stories, racism seems obsolete, but this physiology becomes a new marker for discrimination and exploitation. Depressingly, this is where I believe it would lead in reality. And quickly, no more than a few generations.

thank you for responding!
Precisely the outcomes I think we need to anticipate. Somewhere along the line in the Expanse world, previous to the story, the first children born in micro gravity were essentially experiments. In the Expanse they do not deal with how this came about. In my novel I am most interested in this moment of decision for the human race. Should we begin this experiment on our children? would it be ethical, morally right, to do so? If we think not, as I do, how can we prevent it from happening? Or will moral and ethical considerations take a back seat to other considerations? Or will it “just happen” because of some kind of colossal neglect of our responsibility to the health of our children—something that has been primary for past cultures—and since we are now aware of possible longer-term, even permanent damage to our genetics, it seems like this responsibility to our progeny becomes even more critical because the damage will not be restricted to just a transitional generation, but may be transmitted to countless generations in the future. we could be releasing an evil genie with no lamp to put it back into.

 

[Toby Frost]

Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.

Democracies will probably have different points at which they consider a crime to have been committed and intervene. So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views. Basically, what does the country think that every child ought to be able to do? And then there would the social group and traditions of the people around you rather than just the law. I could imagine laws requiring citizens to take exercise to ensure that they could still function on Earth, perhaps with deportation if refusal continued.

There's also the issue of whether you can realistically ban people from conceiving children in a large, city-type colony (rather than a research station, oil rig etc). I could imagine that you might have a no-pregnancies clause in a fixed-term contract of service, but it's hard to feel that it would work as the basis for a whole lifetime off-world.

Of course, a dictatorship would just do what it wanted to its citizens, and individual misery wouldn't matter compared to the alleged benefits to the people, the race or whatever. "The Glorious People's Republic requires you to live on the moon! Congratulations!"

 

[.matthew.]

Would it be fair to those children raised under historically unique conditions? We would be conducting an experiment on them merely by bearing them and raising them in those condition. Would that be ethical? I think not.

Unique yes... but not unprecedented. Most of humanity has been born into a negative environment. Even more so when you consider colonisation. Take the colonisation of the Americas, where families set out into the wilderness with nothing more than a few tools and maybe a covered wagon, into a place where disease, famine, infant mortality - and at the time native raids - were almost guaranteed. There is even a history of entire settlements disappearing.

If we considered ethics the human race would never go anywhere.

Now, it seems clear that you've already made up your mind on your side of things and you have a reasonable point... but the question should be instead framed morally. If you or anyone else doesn't want to do it, that's a choice based on a personal moral code. However, if a couple wants to move into space and start a family, that is nobody's business but their own and labelling it as unethical would only delay advancement - much like stem cell research and gene editing today.

Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.

So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views.

That is a good point, and neglect would obviously be an issue to deal with. Although, with such limited resources and routines and everything else required to survive in space, I doubt that neglect would even be possible.

Regarding the jobs though, it doesn't make much sense. If you look at education today, most people aren't trained to work everywhere even in a single country - is that abuse?

It would be fairer to compare it to different countries. I couldn't work in China or India or France or Norway or anywhere that doesn't speak English... Does that mean it demonstrates an unjust, unethical upbringing?

We are born into the life we are given and we make the most of it to the best of our abilities or luck.

 

[Toby Frost]

It would be fairer to compare it to different countries. I couldn't work in China or India or France or Norway or anywhere that doesn't speak English... Does that mean it demonstrates an unjust, unethical upbringing?

Well, no, although it might be unreasonable for your employer to expect you to drop tools and work there, or face the sack. Learning languages is generally down to schools, which means the state in some form. I think (in the UK at least) it would be unreasonable for an employer not to tell an employee very early on, perhaps before the job commenced.

My suspicion is that, in a fairly realistic near-future society, goods on an off-world colony would be closely rationed, and there would be an unavoidable level of governmental and/or corporate control, if only to stop the year's supply of beer being drunk in the first three months or something. In a far-future society or a more fantastical one, you might end up with the kind of semi-libertarian society like that of Firefly, but I suspect that to begin with, it would be pretty regimented out of necessity.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Interesting discussion. I think colonising Mars is a bit of a red herring. Or at least, I think it'd be a mistake to go for it aggressively. Governments have plans to put manned bases I'm sure, and Mr Musk (no doubt after smoking a fat doobie) put a grandiose image of millions on Mars but I think everything will be slow to materialise. Bases will be scientific for exploration of the planet from the start and probably for a long time, and the resources that they will use will be expensive or hard won. Having a 'colony' in the sense of interpid independent farmers working hard and raising families, say, would be uneconomic and unworkable, never mind unethical. I'm thinking more like the Amundsen-Scott base at Antartica rather than Jamestown 1607.

Of course I could be way off in the pace of technology that might aid interplanetary exploration (However, I am somewhat cynical, as we get promises all the time from tech-optimists who are invariably far too soon or like Fusion, we are always '50 years' away from the crucial breakthrough)

But I said Mars was a 'red herring' and my reasoning was that I am now a much bigger fan of building O'Neil cylinders for the long long-term future of exploration and living outside Earth. The main reason is that the process of trying to terraform Mars is astronomically vase and even if we had all the right tech in place to actually achieve it, it going to be a very slow process of change. Just not a place for a thriving colony. Furthermore why escape one gravity well to maroon yourself on another one?

Need more space - build a nice big O'Neil Cylinder - hell, let's start making a Dyson swarm! Problems with microgravity? No problem, design it to give near 1g. Want to hop on a spacecraft and travel places? No problem, we are not stuck deep in a gravity well. There will be bases on the Moon and other worlds, but they would remain temporary quarters for visitors rather than permanent cities. (I think ) There, I don't have your problem...well, not the micro-gravity problem.

With regards to SF and Mars colonisation, I assume you've read the trilogy Red/Green/Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson? It does cover the period that you are dealing with. It's been a while since I've read them, but I think he assume that when you goto Mars you are 'exiled' i.e. it is not expected that you would return to Earth - you become Martian. I'd put his story definitely on the tech-optimistic side of things rather than realistic as they progress very quickly and build up a growing society (and atmosphere and oceans!)

I agree with you that virtually all other writers have gone past your moment of the first children born outside Earth. Generally from my reading it is assumed that humans will have to alter, either evolutionary (assisted or not) or via technological aid to thrive in different conditions and we see the fruits of these changes rather than the start of them.

I think it's a question of viability at first. You would not bring another life into the universe if you were living in a fifty metre square habitat on a hostile Martian surface, where space, oxygen, water, energy and food are precious. But if vast covered areas are constructed and there are plentiful supplies of all of the previous, people will, no doubt, think of families. Also the first ethical decision is not whether to give birth on Mars, but it will be the first colonists who decide to become Martian permanently. They will be the first experiments (albeit one assumes they do so willingly).

 

[.matthew.]

My suspicion is that, in a fairly realistic near-future society, goods on an off-world colony would be closely rationed, and there would be an unavoidable level of governmental and/or corporate control, if only to stop the year's supply of beer being drunk in the first three months or something. In a far-future society or a more fantastical one, you might end up with the kind of semi-libertarian society like that of Firefly, but I suspect that to begin with, it would be pretty regimented out of necessity.

Yes, that's what I meant by there being no room for neglect. Everything would be accounted for down to the gram.

I will say though, that I doubt any future will exist in which true spaceflight will exist outside of government control. The reason can be summarised as a black ball technology. Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic practical amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city - or station - in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would also be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands. All it would take is one crackpot with a ship to kill millions, and if regulations didn't exist before that they most certainly would afterwards.

Need more space - build a nice big O'Neil Cylinder - hell, let's start making a Dyson swarm! Problems with microgravity? No problem, design it to give near 1g. Want to hop on a spacecraft and travel places? No problem, we are not stuck deep in a gravity well. There will be bases on the Moon and other worlds, but they would remain temporary quarters for visitors rather than permanent cities. (I think ) There, I don't have your problem...well, not the micro-gravity problem.

This x1000! Artificial gravity on spinning stations makes way more sense than going to Mars, and the Moon I think would exist as purely an industrial base, maybe refineries or fuel depots dug under the surface for security and cheapness compared to stations.

 

[Toby Frost]

Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands.

Very good point. I suppose that, if some other form of rule appeared (super-corporations, say) it might be possible for spacecraft to exist outside government control, but it would still be really risky without something that could override the crazy humans - ie a powerful computer. I suspect that serious space travel might not happen until there were suitably sophisticated computers and robots to do the heavy lifting and make sure the humans didn't do anything self-destructive.

 

[Montero]

The implications of growing up in other environments is often hinted at in SF - passing comments about someone having the muscular-skeletal development of a high grav world or a low grav world and the like, but it is usually handled at the level of an interesting bit of colour rather than anything more scientific. Though you do then get additional bits like a high-grav person with more muscle needs more calories. Bujold has people making egg and sperm donations before spending a long time in space, to freeze their genome before damage.

As to the ethics - well as others have said many children are already born into far less than ideal environments which can adversely affect their long term development. Whether this is rickets from lack of Vitamin D, heavy metal poisoning, insufficient food, damp, mildew - all of these have an impact and there is no prevention of child birth if the environment is less than ideal. You also get into arguments over what the definition of ideal is. I'm not going to take that line of thinking any further, especially not with real world examples, as we don't discuss contentious world affairs issues on SFF Chrons - we used to but there were some bad rows so now it is banned. So we do discuss things in the abstract, but if it gets too close to an area which might cause raging arguments the thread is closed.
By the way, are you separating out the impact of the environment on the child from the impact on their descendants if there is permanent genetic change? Would you consider permanent damage to the genome to be more serious than damage to the individual? I think some things in your posts implied you were thinking that way - just not entirely brainy today so wanted to check.

 

[.matthew.]

I suppose that, if some other form of rule appeared (super-corporations, say) it might be possible for spacecraft to exist outside government control

The words form of rule there still implies some sort of control. Super-corporations would themselves be a form of government unaccountable to democratic ideals and with the wealth to match that of many world powers...

I suspect that serious space travel might not happen until there were suitably sophisticated computers and robots to do the heavy lifting and make sure the humans didn't do anything self-destructive.

That would be the best way to ensure control but even then, the computers would need to be infallible and at the end of the day, all technology seems to become vulnerable to hacks with time, meaning that even if you make a perfect failsafe today, there's no guarantee it would work tomorrow.

Even self destructs or space-based defence systems probably wouldn't do much good.

Take the primary example of space traffic, freighters, moving refined metal ingots from the asteroid belt back to Earth. At 3.2AU closest distance (nearly 500 million km) it would have to be travelling at 55,000 km an hour (15 km/s or 15,000 metres a second) to make the trip in a year (not accounting for acceleration or deceleration). That is only 0.00005% lightspeed which is stupidly slow compared to sci-fi - this conversion might need checking for maths errors but isn't used in the below calculations anyway.

In fact, NASA has gotten a probe up to 69 km/s using slingshot manoeuvres.

If we take Panama sized freighters on Earth as a model (the smallest of all classes except feeder ships), they can hold around 165,000m3 of cargo. In terms of a sphere (as I'm using an asteroid collision calculator) that has a diameter of 64m. Steel weights 7,900 kg per cubic metre so that is the density I'm using and targeting fairly solid rock surface.

15 km/s. Even if it was destroyed as it comes down (which at this speed is likely) there's unlikely to be anything capable of stopping the thousands of tons of metal shotgunning the surface.

This would result in a 1.77 km wide crater, 600 m deep (though it would expand and grow shallower as it collapses and settles) and result in a 5.5 magnitude earthquake at a 100 km distance along with shattering glass.

At a 10 km distance, most wall-bearing multistory buildings will collapse - which I'd say would kill most people within that zone.

69 km/s. A 3.3 km initial crater, 1.1 km deep. At 100 km, the fireball will appear 3.8 times larger than the sun, with a 6.4 magnitude earthquake.

At a 10 km distance, the thermal blast will cause third-degree burns and pretty much set most burnables on fire. The pressure wave will cause steel-framed skyscrapers to suffer extreme frame distortion leading to incipient collapse. Most bridges would also collapse and cars/trucks would be blown over.

All this purely with speeds we are currently capable of obtaining with vessels that are far smaller than we can already build.

Note: I went a wee bit crazy with the research here but I thought it was interesting...

 

[Montero]

Definitely interesting.

 

[paranoid marvin]

It's quite possible that when people sign up for colonisation of another planet, they accept that they and their family are on a one-way trip. This new world would be their home, and for that of their family (and potential children in the future). It's conceivable that travel back to Earth (especially for their children) would simply not be an option. They would have bodies conditioned for living on the planet that they live on, and Earth would be as alien to them as Mars is to us.

 

[paranoid marvin]

As has been mentioned earlier, no doubt NASA have plans for colonisation of Mars, the Moon and potentially other planets. But when we are still not in a position to send an astronaut safely to Mars, the possibility of normal human families living their lives there seems several generations into the future.

As well as the issue of gravity, there are also likely to be lots of other health implications involved in travel to and life on other planets; things that we haven't even considered yet. As a species we have quickly moved away from taking chances; those pioneers of the old West, or those who travelled across the seas to new lands with unknown (and known) dangers. It just doesn't happen any more.

And is there really any point in people living in confined communities on a planet with no breathable atmosphere for their entire lives; in fact for generations of lives? I just can't see it. Scientists and maybe even employees of industrial firms for fixed contract terms maybe, but not colonists looking for a new life there.

 

[Michael Bickford]

Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.

Democracies will probably have different points at which they consider a crime to have been committed and intervene. So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views. Basically, what does the country think that every child ought to be able to do? And then there would the social group and traditions of the people around you rather than just the law. I could imagine laws requiring citizens to take exercise to ensure that they could still function on Earth, perhaps with deportation if refusal continued.

There's also the issue of whether you can realistically ban people from conceiving children in a large, city-type colony (rather than a research station, oil rig etc). I could imagine that you might have a no-pregnancies clause in a fixed-term contract of service, but it's hard to feel that it would work as the basis for a whole lifetime off-world.

Of course, a dictatorship would just do what it wanted to its citizens, and individual misery wouldn't matter compared to the alleged benefits to the people, the race or whatever. "The Glorious People's Republic requires you to live on the moon! Congratulations!"

Yes, this brings up the related question of off-world governance.
The previous US Prez feebly and unilaterally tried to impose a "space force", making this kind of discussion topical, even urgent. Should any one earth government impose force in space? Shouldn't it all be international in some way, ideally?

In connection with this current topic of the ethics around rearing children in micro gravity, it's probably true that governments which impose their will more on their people on the surface will do so in space as well. (hence the importance of the space-governance question). But there are long-standing concepts of human rights that are international. IF international control predominates in space, that's one thing, but if national interests, governance, and political cultures dominate, that's another. But either way, we do have world-wide standards that governments, in the long-run are judged against. If the Chinese, for example, build a colonial structure on the moon that yields a generation of children who have health problems that make them unable to choose to return to earth as adults, or, worse have genetic damage that could threaten to spread back into the greater world gene pool, it seems they would be widely condemned and, in the case of genetic changes, attempts would be made to isolate those individuals and change China's future behavior, as it could impact the rest of the world population. In this scenario their behavior goes to practical considerations, and not just ethics. Do the nations of the world allow a neo-race of genetically damaged individuals to be raised and just say, Well, it's their people, we don't have anything to say about it? I hope not. And if we can see this problem coming, shouldn't something be done to mitigate it sooner rather than after it has real victims?

In the world of my novel these problems, and others I've not mentioned yet, have been dealt with in particular ways and their "solutions", for better or worse, are central to the story and the characters' motivations and actions.

 

[nixie]

Guys, remember we don't discuss current affairs or social politics here.

 

[Michael Bickford]

Thanks SO much for your thoughtful response.

A couple points.
Yes, I have developed a POV about these questions for the novel I'm writing, but I want it to be a POV based of logic and facts, so I really appreciate you other writers here pushing against what I'm asserting about humanity's medium-range future in space.
I haven't been this excited about responding to an discussion thread in my life!

I really am making a distinction between all other big changes in the culture of child-rearing and what I anticipate will be the results of raising children in micro-gravity. Compared with all the other things, many of them horrible, we have imposed on new generations throughout history—through colonization, war, disease, tech advance, religion, and more—though extremely impactful on the lives of the next generation, and none of it of their choosing, the probable physiological and genetic damage caused by micro-gravity is fundamentally different and unique. Never have we been able to completely remove individuals from the gravitational environment in which all life has evolved. Biological evolution being an unbroken chain connecting the past to the future, we are altering that connection for those individuals irrevocably, and we may be embarking on genetic alteration for the entire species that is unprecedented in the history of earth biology. This kind of exploration has no historical parallel in a biological sense.
We can bring along with us much of the biological and cultural environment that has been our history as we can—just as past explorers and colonizers brought their cultures with them as best they could. We can simulate the earth's environment as much as we need to in order to survive and thrive—but we cannot change the gravity, or lack there of, present on the surface of Mars, the moon, or any other natural celestial body, as gravity is a property of mass.
The only way we can simulate earth gravity would be in artificial structures.

 

[Michael Bickford]

Guys, remember we don't discuss current affairs or social politics here.

Point well taken. Thank you.

 

[Michael Bickford]

Interesting discussion. I think colonising Mars is a bit of a red herring. Or at least, I think it'd be a mistake to go for it aggressively. Governments have plans to put manned bases I'm sure, and Mr Musk (no doubt after smoking a fat doobie) put a grandiose image of millions on Mars but I think everything will be slow to materialise. Bases will be scientific for exploration of the planet from the start and probably for a long time, and the resources that they will use will be expensive or hard won. Having a 'colony' in the sense of interpid independent farmers working hard and raising families, say, would be uneconomic and unworkable, never mind unethical. I'm thinking more like the Amundsen-Scott base at Antartica rather than Jamestown 1607.

Of course I could be way off in the pace of technology that might aid interplanetary exploration (However, I am somewhat cynical, as we get promises all the time from tech-optimists who are invariably far too soon or like Fusion, we are always '50 years' away from the crucial breakthrough)

But I said Mars was a 'red herring' and my reasoning was that I am now a much bigger fan of building O'Neil cylinders for the long long-term future of exploration and living outside Earth. The main reason is that the process of trying to terraform Mars is astronomically vase and even if we had all the right tech in place to actually achieve it, it going to be a very slow process of change. Just not a place for a thriving colony. Furthermore why escape one gravity well to maroon yourself on another one?

Need more space - build a nice big O'Neil Cylinder - hell, let's start making a Dyson swarm! Problems with microgravity? No problem, design it to give near 1g. Want to hop on a spacecraft and travel places? No problem, we are not stuck deep in a gravity well. There will be bases on the Moon and other worlds, but they would remain temporary quarters for visitors rather than permanent cities. (I think ) There, I don't have your problem...well, not the micro-gravity problem.

With regards to SF and Mars colonisation, I assume you've read the trilogy Red/Green/Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson? It does cover the period that you are dealing with. It's been a while since I've read them, but I think he assume that when you goto Mars you are 'exiled' i.e. it is not expected that you would return to Earth - you become Martian. I'd put his story definitely on the tech-optimistic side of things rather than realistic as they progress very quickly and build up a growing society (and atmosphere and oceans!)

I agree with you that virtually all other writers have gone past your moment of the first children born outside Earth. Generally from my reading it is assumed that humans will have to alter, either evolutionary (assisted or not) or via technological aid to thrive in different conditions and we see the fruits of these changes rather than the start of them.

I think it's a question of viability at first. You would not bring another life into the universe if you were living in a fifty metre square habitat on a hostile Martian surface, where space, oxygen, water, energy and food are precious. But if vast covered areas are constructed and there are plentiful supplies of all of the previous, people will, no doubt, think of families. Also the first ethical decision is not whether to give birth on Mars, but it will be the first colonists who decide to become Martian permanently. They will be the first experiments (albeit one assumes they do so willingly).

We are thinking similarly on many things.
O’Neil cylinders, or something else that simulates 1 g is where I’m going with my world building. I see the Robinson series and others with a similar “tech-optimistic” slants to be like cautionary tales: we see that possible future, so let’s not go there even if we can.
And—for reasons both ethical and practical I began this thread with—I also see planetary and asteroid occupation by human individuals as happening only in limited shifts as needed to operate robotic resource extraction, with off-world emigration being only to artificial structures with simulated gravity. No terraforming, as we can never reform the gravity of other worlds to make them truly habitable anyway. I’m going with the conceit of that being a massive deal-breaker.
Maybe in the distant future some humans may choose to become Martians for reasons I can’t fathom knowing the changes it would wreak upon them and their progeny, but for now I am much more interested in the human emotions experienced by people involved in the social and cultural changes brought on by near earth exploration. What will it be like for people involved in making decisions about the changes I see most likely to occur, rather than imagining things that I don’t see as likely or desirable. Even a best-case scenario with no mutants or wars will be challenging for the individuals involved. Just imagining the lives of characters who are part of this next chapter of human outreach into near space presents exciting situations for story-telling possibilities.

 

[.matthew.]

In this scenario their behavior goes to practical considerations, and not just ethics. Do the nations of the world allow a neo-race of genetically damaged individuals to be raised and just say, Well, it's their people, we don't have anything to say about it? I hope not.

With the other options being war or economic sanctions? either of which would cause more death than the alternative.

Plus governments don't like it when people butt into their affairs and many international treaties are based on the very idea that each country has self determination and territorial rights.

What will it be like for people involved in making decisions about the changes I see most likely to occur, rather than imagining things that I don’t see as likely or desirable.

In this case, I'd follow the money. In general, the people making the decisions base their opinions on what is most profitable.

There is also the major issue of (as mentioned above) territorial rights. These rights are often granted and maintained on earth through habitation. Scientific or industrial occupation doesn't count towards them - such as with Antarctic expedition bases. Therefore, it would be in the interests of governments to take the health hits to claim what could later turn out to be valuable land.