Imagine running past them asteroids on a state-of-the-art spacecraft, calculating the speed you will gain by passing a massive planet, navigating the dangers of cosmic radiation and developing plausible and speculative technologies for rocket propulsion and screening for valuable resources. It’s not just NASA scientists studying such things; with the latest board games anyone can.
Board games have come a long way since the Catan settlers appeared on the scene a quarter of a century ago. Space-themed games, in particular, have multiplied in recent years, and while some of the new generation of games really look like classics, something like Risk or Monopoly in space, many others are completely different. Candidate for the most complex game is certainly High Frontier, which released its fourth edition in 2020 and has more extensions or “modules” to come. He encourages people to play as space agencies like NASA or Roscosmos (or companies like SpaceX) while designing fast and agile or loaded rockets that take crews to distant worlds where one has to extract water for fuel and extract minerals to build more missile components.
Other board games include Leaving Earth, for space agencies competing in the early space race, SpaceCorp: 2025-2300 AD, for companies exploring the inner and outer solar systems and then establishing interstellar colonies, and the Gaia Project, where factions of different species compete to terraform neighboring planets to your liking.
In Terraforming Mars, players acting as corporations – some environmentally conscious, others not – are vying to bring the world back to life. They work to generate a greenhouse effect to warm the planet, improve plant growth conditions, increase oxygen levels in the air, make surface water flow again and even build cities for settlers. If one day people try to turn Mars into a convenient place for people, where walking outside without a spacesuit would not mean certain death, the technologies they use could be similar to those in this game.
These impressively advanced games, most of which have been released in the last five years, really bring the future of space exploration to the coffee table. But in doing so, they circumvent conflicting ethical issues.
Now this real world the exploration of space outside our atmosphere is finally happening, we can imagine how all this could play out in real life. The long-term visions of space agencies and space billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos include astronauts who visit, if not establish and upgrade, other worlds. Humans are likely to return to the moon within five years, thanks to NASA’s Artemis program and Chinese missions and companies such as Blue Origin, Moon Express and Astrobotic. Using these lunar posts as intermediate stations on the way to deep space, they will set foot on Mars in the next two decades. The extraction of water and building materials will probably come in our lifetime, while the journey to the asteroids and moons of Jupiter and Saturn may take decades more, as they are complicated by the vast distances from our home world and the need for non-solar energy. so far from the sun.
Some space games today involve such technical and logistical complications, and they cause very real tensions between international rivalry and international cooperation in space. But they do not commit to broader issues, even as experts begin to discuss: Is terraforming a good idea? Whose decision should I make and who should take responsibility for the risks involved? On Earth, the ideas of transforming our climate and climate change climate, called geoengineering, remain controversial (although one day they may become necessary). But terraforming is even more complicated and has a high chance of not working. And as the Gaia Project shows, terraforming means different things to different species and cannot be inhabited by aliens with opposite needs at the same time. Most planets cannot be turned into an ice world and a greenhouse at the same time.
People have also begun to discuss the dangers of space digging and the challenges of doing so sustainably and without damaging the surfaces of other worlds. But who decides they can take space resources just for themselves? And since these resources do not replenish themselves, how sustainable can they be?