Frontiers

In 872, the outlaw viking Erik the Red spotted a rumor on the horizon. Exiled from resource-constrained Iceland, he had rallied several dozen followers into wooden boats and set sail after whispers of a land far to the West. Instead of the most likely outcome — disappearing in the North Atlantic — he established a settlement on Greenland and his better-known son Lief would go on to be the first European to set foot on North America.

If they didn’t have pressing issues like “how will we eat tomorrow?” on their minds, Lief and Erik might have reflected on the fact that they were continuing a tradition older than humanity — leaving behind the comforts and conflicts of an established world to strike out into the frontier. That tradition already included Polynesian seafarers, who, driven by the same forces — potential fame, social tensions, and resource constraints — packed families, chickens, and taro seedlings onto massive catamarans and set out into the Pacific. Indeed, we can draw the thread right back to the first hominids who left the Rift Valley and ventured out of Africa.

Is the tradition of frontier-opening defunct? People no longer go truly new places; satellites overhead map the earth several times a day; many people reject the 19th century idea that the frontier was critical for American flourishing and think it smacks of colonialism. It’s easy to see frontiers as an antiquidated idea like phrenology, human sacrifice, or reading the future from bird flocks.

And yet, Erik the Red would see many parallels between our world and 9th-century Iceland: an environment strained to the limit, tensions over a fixed pie, and power struggles over all of it that erupt into violence.

To think of frontiers as a relic of the past is a grave mistake.

Pressing issues of inequality and environmental degradation are not new. Erik the Red’s Iceland had been farmed to the brink of disaster — almost every tree on the once heavily-forested island had been felled for homes, forges, or longboats. The population had exploded, leading to the very crowding that culminated in Erik’s crimes and exile. For the residents of Iceland, frontiers weren’t a distraction from problems at home: they were an outlet for tensions, a training ground, and a source of resources. In addition to the Greenland settlements that provided hope for a better life, voyages into the frontier brought back resources and made Vikings highly employable as far away as distant Constantinople. (The Byzantine Emperor’s Varangian Guard was an elite unit composed solely of Norsemen.) Of course, for the Vikings, the rich coasts of America and Europe that were their frontier were also other people’s backyards. We have the chance to create a frontier that doesn’t involve other people’s land or lives.

According to the sagas, Erik was forced into exile by a series of tit-for-tat killings kicked off by a fatal farming accident made almost inevitable by the overcrowding on the tiny island of 9th century Iceland. Farmers could only expand their holdings at the expense of their neighbors. You see this pattern throughout history: the only way to get more gold or farmland was to take it from someone else in a zero-sum game.

New frontiers broke us out of that zero-sum game, enabling positive-sum growth in material well-being, knowledge, and ethics. In turn, the deep-seated feeling that there is plenty to go around and that there will be more tomorrow than there is today enables people to treat their neighbors as friends and allies, not competitors over a fixed slice of pie.

On a frontier your enemies are starvation, cold, broken equipment, rivers, and wolves; not just other people. Power and popularity are meaningless when everyone will die if you don’t repair the mast or the airlock. Waves and reefs didn’t care if an explorer was a prince or a peasant. Frontiers force us to play absolute games against nature and physics instead of relative games against each other.

Frontiers also create cohesion by giving those who want to see a different society an option beyond a vicious battle for the reins of power. Erik took this option, as did the Puritans. We don’t have written records, but evidence suggests that the Polynesian seafarers and African explorers were taking the frontier option as well.

Erik and other adventurers weren’t the only ones who reaped the benefits of the frontier. There are many upsides for those who stay behind beyond the obvious ones like more resources and less conflict. Frontiers create objective demands that drive inventions and uncover discoveries with benefits far beyond the frontier: sailing techniques; food preservation. Potatoes and corn provided nutrition for millions of Europeans who would never see the Western Hemisphere. Frontiers even inspire new art and philosophy: Shakespeare’s tempest and Rousseau’s romanticism both owe their existence to the frontier. The hard lives and frequent deaths of frontier openers makes it unclear that they even get more benefits from frontiers than those who stayed behind.

You can’t just call anywhere a frontier. True frontiers have a set of properties that cascade into these benefits.

Frontiers are permissionless. If all the ships in Iceland were owned by a small, powerful group which would inevitably include Erik’s political enemies, Erik’s expedition would have been doomed before it started.

Frontiers are dangerous. If a catamaran’s navigator was off by a fraction of a degree, they would miss their target island completely, drifting off into the open Pacific and death. Such high stakes are how nature can work as the great equalizer and force people to play absolute instead of relative games.

Frontiers are controversial. If opening a frontier was clearly possible, valuable, and generally a good idea, it would already have been opened! The people who open frontiers are, by definition, deviants. Erik the Red was an outlaw. Ernest Shackleton was a crackpot. Brigham Young was a heretic. The puritans were jerks. We don’t know the flavor of their deviance, but people who first left Africa or launched catamarans into the Pacific probably weren’t well-liked either. These aren’t the people who win spots on hype-filled space flights, top the lists of a rigorous astronaut selection program, or convince people with power to give them a shot.

Opening a frontier is different from simply visiting it. This distinction is why the Apollo program has ultimately been so disappointing: it was an exquisite technological tower (both literally and figuratively) that launched people into space who were intimately lashed to the entire military-industrial complex. Astronauts couldn’t poop without clearing it with mission control first. Opening a frontier requires self-sufficiency. Not the naïve self-sufficiency of the radical individual: “I need nobody else!” But the ability for small groups to function independently of a civilizational lifeline for extended periods of time.

The old zero-sum feeling that frontiers can pressure-vent has crept back into the world: the narrative that (pick your group of choice) gain at the expense of everyone else feels all too real. Almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century, nobody is opening frontiers. The seas are large and unexplored, but finite. Retreating inward to explore our minds or a metaverse is a poor substitute for a real frontier. People have gestured for decades at space as “the final frontier” but that’s laughable. Nobody can be self-sufficient in space. For every astronaut there are dozens of support staff monitoring every heartbeat. Space is dominated by a handful of governments and billionaires. It’s the opposite of permissionless. But for better or worse it’s the best we have.

There are many good reasons to avoid space. Space demands resources that could be used to address the many problems we have here on Earth. Furthermore, space is just hard. In the words of author and historian Ada Palmer, space is the path of long pain — opening the space frontier will involve more net suffering over time than other options. It would be much easier and safer to send mechanical emissaries to other worlds and look deeper into the universe with ever-better telescopes. We could stay on Earth in ever-increasing comfort and explore deep into our own minds, eventually living entirely in worlds of our own making.

But is that the path to actual flourishing? No more catamarans plying the pacific, no more first flights across the Atlantic, no more Marie Curies unveiling the workings of the universe at great personal cost. On our current trajectory, we will continue to engrave the patterns of a frontierless world.

On 19th September 1991, two German tourists stumbled upon the site of a murder in the Alps. They called the police, but it was a job for archeologists instead. Ötzi, “the iceman,” died more than five thousand years ago. His remarkably well-preserved tools are not so different than those that the first human frontier openers used to spread across the world. Ötzi’s stone knives, woven grass-and-skin clothing, and fire lighting kit are a reminder that without technology, most of our planet is as deadly as the vacuum of space.

Fire, hand-axes, and clothes may barely register as “technology,” but they were powerful tools for opening the first frontiers because they have several properties:

• You can make them from ubiquitous materials — dried organic compounds, rocks, animal skins, and fibrous plants.
• They’re easy to fix — clothes can be patched or mended, hand axes can be sharpened.
• They can be repurposed — a shirt can become a bag; an ax can carve wood or fend off a saber-tooth tiger; fire can alter the landscape, cook food, and keep you warm.
• They degrade gracefully — stone tools dull, clothes fray and tear but don’t suddenly go from keeping you warm to exposing you to the full blast of an Alpine winter.

The self-sufficiency required by true frontiers is impossible without these properties we might call “robustness.”

Today’s technologies hamstring self-sufficiency. Manufacturing core technologies like semiconductors, motors, and materials from steel to fertilizer now require scale, convoluted supply chains, and legions of specialists. Everything from computers to engines to seeds (yes, the things plants come from!) resemble sealed boxes that are hard or illegal for their owners to tamper with. When they fail, you have the choice between throwing them away or taking them to be repaired by specialists. Robustness has been sacrificed on the altar of the deity named "efficiency".

Of course, these robustness-eliminating trends have many benefits: our tools have become more reliable, cheaper, and generally better. A 2024 MacBook makes a 2013 MacBook look like a whale out of water (and this example will doubtlessly feel dated quickly!) Growth through specialization and trade has improved the lives of billions. But it wouldn’t have created self-sufficiency for the first people to leave Africa and it won’t unlock the stars.

From the nuke-scarred Battlestar Galactica limping across the galaxy to Apollo 13’s jury-rigged air filters and manually aimed reentry, both fictional and real space stories revolve around technology-enabled self-sufficiency. Even if the Enterprise is part of a galaxy-spanning Federation, the reality is that each spacecraft is like its own little settlement in the vastness of space. Spacecraft as frontier settlements isn’t just a trope manufactured by science fiction writers to evoke an aesthetic: the best-case scenario for any near-future technology is that it will take days to get to the Moon, weeks to reach Mars, and longer to get anywhere else. Even with yet-unimaginable systems, it’s still likely that we’ll be limited by the speed of light. It takes at minimum three minutes for light (and thus information) to reach Mars. Even the Moon is one light-second away. Try having a normal call with one second of lag! The near-seamless interconnectivity we’ve come to expect will be impossible. Robust technology is critical when nobody is coming to help.

Robust technology isn’t just important for frontiers. Many people across the world live in situations where they can’t just Amazon a replacement when their blackbox breaks. They’re forced to use older, more robust technologies. But! It’s possible to create new robust technologies that can break the tradeoff between using cutting-edge technology and the need to be in a wealthy developed country.

Climate change creates an imperative for new robust technologies. If Earth becomes a more hostile place, the tools for surviving and thriving in hostile places become ever more important. Dependence on thin-stretched supply chains and specialists become an increasing liability if high-variance disasters become more frequent. And eventually the same tools we can use to tame alien worlds could be used to save our own.

What are our fire and hand-axes for space? Precisely predicting new robust technologies is a fool's errand, but we can dream. 3D-printed microelectronics could both create replacement parts out of the resources on hand and decouple a critical component of the economy from precarious multibillion-dollar fabs that require the longest supply chains in history. General-purpose telerobotics that let you physically interact with anywhere in the world through a robot could both enable remote work for everybody (not just the laptop class) and enable someone to mine an asteroid or repair a spacecraft without leaving an airlock. Until we discover new laws of physics, cryosleep is the only way that individuals can travel between the stars. On Earth, the same technology could hold patients in stasis until a life-saving medicine finishes development or a (manufactured) organ is ready. Molecule-scale manufacturing could bypass massive factories. Ultra-productive vertical farms could enable more local food while reducing climate impact; put an airtight seal on the door and you have a space farm.

There’s an implicit aesthetic embedded in all these robust technologies. It embraces imperfection — the chunky cassette players of the 1980s over the silky-smooth UX of an iPhone or Tesla. It rejects efficiency in favor of slack — having more available capability than absolutely necessary not just in devices, but in supply chains, organizations, and our lives. Of course, we can’t just wake up tomorrow and decide to embrace this change.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest thing on earth, spanning 165 million square kilometers from the coasts of Taiwan to Peru. It is dotted by 25 thousand islands, many no bigger than a hectare. Reaching one of these islands is like trying to hit a grain of rice in the middle of a football field. Yet, by 1200 AD, Polynesian seafearers had landed on almost all of them. Entire families set out in multi-hulled canoes stocked with everything they needed to establish a new settlement anywhere from Easter Island to Hawaii. These canoes weren’t specialized tools of exploration — they were everyday tools used for fishing and transport; they could be repaired with simple tools and the arecacaeae that grow on almost every sliver of beach across the Pacific.

While we don’t have written records of their exact motives, research suggests several possibilities: conflict between rival leaders, population pressures, or the desire for glory and adventure. The fact remains though, that culturally embedded was the idea: "this is something many people do." It wasn’t simply that the conquerors of the Pacific had the technology to get the job done, but that technology was embedded in a culture that normalized permissionless aesthetics.

The Polynesian’s ability to get up and go stands in stark contrast to stories of car owners having their cars remotely downgraded or deactivated; a friend of mine who builds brain scanners tells me how half of his company is devoted to FDA regulation and they had to redesign their entire product around the pandemic-induced chip shortage. We have collectively prioritized smooth experiences, efficiency, profit margins, and specialization — at the individual, company, and country level — over slack and autonomy. This “Smithian Growth” has been a prime driver of prosperity, but it hasn’t been without tradeoffs: declining manufacturing expertise, especially in the developed world, and resulting tensions; the concentration of key industries like semiconductors, both geographically and economically; the stagnation of several areas of science and technology.

It’s hard, but cultural shifts are possible. We could create a culture that embraces permissionless exploration: one that values self-sufficient small groups, empowers generalists to MacGyver in the face of adversity. One that prioritizes creating lives for our children that are better than our own. Optimistically seeking new horizons. Chunky, fixable technology. Energy too cheap to meter. New paradigms in manufacturing, near-magical materials, and technologically-empowered human capabilities we can scarcely imagine. A culture of permissionless exploration is at the root of what Derek Thompson and others have called an abundance agenda.

This shift wouldn’t just benefit those of us in the developed world with the luxury to turn our eyes to the stars. The dominance of capital-intensive, high-skill processes — semiconductors, car manufacturing, precision machining, chemical and material manufacturing — has made it incredibly hard for newer entrants to get ahead in the global economy. Many countries are trapped doing low-value-add pieces of the supply chain like extracting raw materials, clothing, or final assembly. New technology paradigms are how regions gain positive-sum wealth and influence: the long-distance cattle markets enabled by refrigeration and railroads turned Chicago into a metropolis; semiconductors built Silicon Valley and Taiwan; petroleum as a prime mover (despite its downsides) transformed countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway. New paradigms that reduce dependence on specialized expertise and infrastructure are especially valuable in places without those things: whether it’s a developing country or another planet.

To a critic, these arguments may sound like other limpid reasons for going to space like: “space catalyzes new technologies like computer chips and tang”; “we need shared goals to unite us”; “we need a backup plan for humanity.” Many of those technologies would have developed regardless; the idea of a shared goal is a historic fiction — even as Apollo 11 launched towards The Moon, attendees of the Harlem Music Festival called out the American government for the massive expense of the space program while African Americans were being displaced into oppressive projects; on our current trajectory, space settlements aren’t even self-sufficient.

The fact that we have too many problems here on Earth to frivolously waste resources on frontiers is a powerful point. Political tensions and inequality (both in the US and across the globe); climate change; human health and wellbeing; a plethora of other existential threats; all of these pressing issues demand attention and resources. The zero-sum game for attention and resources between space and Earth is real when space is the domain of governments and billionaires as it is now.

Our current aesthetics, culture, and technology paradigms mean that even if the cost of going to Mars or beyond becomes cheap enough that a small group of outcasts could afford it, they wouldn’t survive without a massive support structure back here on Earth. That’s the state of the world more broadly: daring and curiosity doesn’t matter if you can’t get power on your side. Erik the Red would need to play politics now. Hand axes and fire don’t need supply lines. You can repair your catamaran with wood you find along the way. The goal is human flourishing, abundance, and adventure; permissionless technology paradigms that enable curious and driven outcasts to go to space and thrive are simply the best tools to get there.

Creating new industries and society-shifting technology paradigms can be dual-purpose, creating abundance on Earth and permissionless frontiers in space. But to subvert the tradeoff between inward improvement and outward striving, we need to reinvent the culture and aesthetics of space and technology more generally. The outlines of it are already visible: something that embraces both abundance and grungy rebellion.

An outline of that transition might like like a shift from...

• ...being driven by existential threats to being driven by wonder and optimism (and later, yes, greed).
• ...space exploration dominated by a few people and organizations to many, parallel, permissionless efforts.
• ...massive organizations of specialists to small groups of generalists.
• ...cool toys to dual-purpose tools.
• ...hierarchical to egalitarian.
• ...grim and cynical to hopeful and earnest.

It’s disallowed in modern arguments, but there's something beyond all the legible reasons for why frontiers drive human flourishing. Frontiers are important because they are. Call it our telos, meaning-making, destiny, or what have you. Close your eyes and think about the achievements that stir your heart. How many of them involve individuals or groups doing something hard, overcoming obstacles and going beyond the possible? Those obstacles can be created by either other people or a frontier. Let’s choose the latter. Adventures stir the heart. Exploration opens the eyes. Frontiers enable curiosity and drive.

I want to enable curiosity and drive to matter. I want to enable the outlaw Erik to gather a small group of followers and set off towards a rumored land. For Ötzi and those who came before him to expand across the world. For Polynesian seafarers to conquer the Pacific. For those past, present, and future who don’t fit in but have the will to strive. If curiosity and drive are going to matter again, we need to open the sky gates and turn the stars into a true frontier. Robust, permissionless technology; hand axes and fire for space. It will not be easy or comfortable. It might not succeed. But I can guarantee it will be an adventure.

Thanks to Nadia Asparouhova, Andy Matuschak, and Martin Permin for reading drafts of this essay.