It's the year 2300, and you're on board astarship headed for distant worlds.
Unfortunately for you, you've gotten caughtcommitting a space crime, and now that you've done the space crime, it's time to do thespace time- but what in the world will
In present day Earth we have a serious problem-many of our prisons are overpopulated, and most governments are extremely reluctant togive up perfectly good real estate just to house
An easy out, it seems, is to simply put themwhere there's lots of space for extra prisoners- namely, well, space.
But building prisons in space comes with someserious drawbacks.
The first and most obvious is the sheer costof operating a prison in space.
Sure, it sounds like a great idea to put prisonersin orbit where they can't escape or hurt anyone, but with the cost of putting goods into spacestill running at
hundreds of thousands of dollars a pound, nobody is going to foot thebill for blasting off El Chapo to his new digs on the moon.
But future technology promises to make accessto space much, much cheaper.
Reusable rockets such as those pioneered byElon Musk's SpaceX are a big leap forward, but massive construction projects such asthe space elevator will make it possible to put things
As humanity expands to the stars, so too willhumanity's criminals, who'll definitely need a place to be housed at.
It's almost a universal theme across sciencefiction for prisoners to simply be frozen or placed in stasis and forced to serve outtheir time as human popsicles.
While this is an extremely cheap, and veryconvenient way to safely store the worst of the worst, it comes with one serious problem:for the frozen prisoner, a twenty year
sentence will basically be just one big, long nap.
Frozen prisoners will have not been awareof their prison stay, and thus have no chance at reformation over the course of the twentyyears they were sentenced to serve.
Other than briefly removing a prisoner fromthe flow of time, freezing prisoners serves no viable purpose, and thus is not likelyto be a punishment method for space crime.
Another popular science fiction trope is theuse of prison labor to settle or work on hostile and dangerous worlds, or perhaps asteroids.
This makes sense, as it has a huge historicalprecedent- Europe's expansion out of the continent was largely the result of exporting prisonersto exotic locales around the world.
North America was a popular and convenientdumping ground for Europe's prisoners, who would be sent to work as indentured servantsand 'serve out' their sentence alongside the early settlers.
By the end of their sentence, most decidedto simply stay, and thus America can claim the same honor as Australia of being largelyfounded by prisoners and outcasts.
In our own future though, it's unlikely we'llsee this tactic used for space prisoners.
For one, the use of prisoners to settle landswas a way for nations to lay claim to far flung territories and settle them before theircompetitors could manage it.
On earth, good land for settlement is verylimited- but that's just not the case in space.
Space is so vast, and we are discovering somany potentially habitable planets every year, that nations won't have much of an impetusto 'rush' out and colonize nearby worlds as
After all, not many people truly want to leavethe safety and comfort of earth to colonize a potentially dangerous world that could endup killing them.
But as we mentioned, we're finding so manypotentially habitable worlds that a land-grab similar to the European conquest of Northand South America is extremely unlikely.
Even with a full-blown colonization effortby all major nations, it would take centuries to fill up just one world with human inhabitants,let alone a dozen.
Some prisoners may in fact wind up being offeredopportunities to become colonists, but these will likely only be non-violent offenders.
After all, no colonists will want to hitcha ride to the stars with a murderer along, knowing that help is lightyears away.
But what about using prisoners as labor inhostile worlds, to mine up precious resources?
Well, this idea runs into several problemsright off the gate.
First, there's the fact that by the time thisis even possible mankind will have evolved to a nearly fully automated labor force, makinghuman labor both extremely expensive and extremely inefficient.
Sure, you don't have to pay prisoners, butyou still have to provide them with shelter, air, food, and water- and getting those thingsto prisoners in a hostile world would
By comparison, robots don't need any of that,making it very economically unappealing to use prison labor.
As the Soviet Union found out during the ColdWar, slave labor is a pretty inefficient way of doing things.
During Stalin's regime, he famously put theprisoners of his gulags to work, and the Moscow canal, while beautiful, was actually constructedby prison slave labor.
This goes for many other canals, bridges,and various other major infrastructure projects around the Soviet Union, and yet while thelabor is free, it ended up costing the Soviets in
For one, the sheer inefficiency of unmotivatedand largely unskilled slave labor caused significant delays, inflating the cost of the few paidspecialists required on every job.
Gulag slave labor also led to very shoddywork, further slowing down progress and requiring skilled labor to later return and fix thesloppy work done by gulag prisoners.
All in all, the use of slave labor by theSoviet Union actually cost them millions more than simply using paid labor would've.
It makes sense after all, prisoners aren'tparticularly motivated to do a good, or fast job on a project they aren't being paid for.
And, most prisoners aren't skilled experts,and thus are prone to sloppy work and making lots of costly mistakes.
In space, where the initial start up costsare astronomically larger than here on earth, it again just doesn't make economic sense.
It would be far more efficient to simply usemachines, who can work remotely and with the help of artificial intelligence, require littleif no oversight by humans.
A special type of probe, called a Von Neumanprobe, could in fact be programmed to set up an entire mining operation and ship resourcesback home all on its own.
It would accomplish this by first landingand then immediately replicating itself.
The copy would then copy itself, and thatcopy would copy itself, on and on until you have a whole army of probes all from one original.
These probes would be so efficient, it wascalculated that as long as raw materials were available, one probe could end up encasingthe entire sun in solar panels in as
There's another silver bullet for the prisonlabor colony idea though, and that's simply the fact that in space resources are extremelyplentiful.
Right now astronomers have tracked asteroidswith mineral wealth in excess of one trillion dollars, and they're all little more thana few weeks or months ride on a modern rocket away.
In fact, some companies are even now investigatingthe possibility of mining these asteroids, which are basically free-floating gold mines...in some cases literally.
It was thought that there was one resourcein space that was extremely rare, and perhaps worth mining.
That resource is water, and it was thoughtyears ago that perhaps prison labor could be used to mine water ice in other worldsand then have tankers bring it to
New observations of our solar system thoughhave shown that space is lousy with the stuff, it's practically everywhere we turn a telescopeto or shoot a probe at.
Mercury, the closest planet to the sun isroasted by our star, and yet even there water ice was discovered safely tucked away in therims of craters where the sun's
So ok, if we can't freeze prisoners, becauseit would be pointless, and we can't use them as slave labor, because it would be expensiveand pointless, and we're probably not
going to use them as colonists because that's alsopretty expensive and there's no real 'land rush', what's left?
Humans will inevitably commit space crimes,so what else can we do with our space criminals?
Well, many futurists believe that the futureof prisons is not something the prisoner goes into, but rather something that already existsinside the prisoner.
As technology advances, it is becoming clearerand clearer that soon we will have the means to interface with, and even modify our brains.
The future of prison is thus perhaps the mindof the prisoner itself.
Some psychologists believe that with timeand the aid of technology we'll be able to directly modify a prisoner's brain.
The idea kind of makes sense too, becausewe are really nothing more than organic computers, and all the chemicals in our brain and howthey interact with each other are
largely behind the way that we react or perceive tothe world.
We may still not understand consciousness,but we do understand that different chemical balances can have a significant impact onour consciousness.
So perhaps prisoners won't need to serve anytime at all, as advanced technology simply scans their brain, identifies chemical balancesthat are leading to criminal, anti-social behavior, and then simply
Coupled with some psychotherapy and counseling,there's no reason to believe it wouldn't work to completely, and very quickly rehabilitatea prisoner.
There is already evidence that this workswith prisons in Europe that have shifted from a punitive, punishment-oriented approach,to a rehabilitation approach.
Prisoners are given respect, good food, andeven some freedoms, along with education and counseling, and recidivism rates have plummeted.
Compare that with the US where the approachis purely based on punishment with none to little chance for rehabilitation, and recidivismrates are so bad that on average 3 out
of 5 prisoners return to jail within a year.
But all this takes time and money, thingsthat will be in short supply when you're living on a colony ship or perhaps setting up townon a new world.
The human brain operates on impulses sentat around the speed of sound, yet if we integrate with technology as we will likely inevitablydo, we could achieve a form of
This doesn't mean that you're smarter, butrather that with the aid of technology you can have more thoughts quicker, and thus reachconclusions and work out problems exponentially faster than
If your brain operated on an optical networklike fiber optics, you would think 800,000 times faster than you currently do!
So much thinking will not only make us superintelligent, but could also work to affect our perception of the flow of time in veryinteresting ways, ways that could beA prisoner could simply have their perceptionof the passage of time accelerated within a simulation of a prison, and thus they could'serve' a thirty year sentence in a matter of hours.
In the simulation the prisoner will feel likethey're living out thirty years of their life, but in fact their brain has simply been 'frame-jacked'to dramatically increase their perception of time. The cost of running a prison like this isbasically just the cost of the hardware, and you'd need no guards or staff other than themedical staff overseeing the brief procedure.
The benefits are huge: a hopefully reformedprisoner will wake up from unconsciousness an hour or two later, and have the experienceof three decades of reformation, counseling delivered by an artificial intelligence, andthe regret over their crime. In just half a day, you could turn a killerinto a productive, and safe, member of society. And aboard a starship, virtual prisons saveon space and get crew back to their jobs quickly, something that would be critical for a longvoyage through the stars.
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