What Living on an Asteroid Taught Me About Living on Earth
It wouldn’t be outlandish to think of an asteroid as a lifeless rock floating through space. But, in the base-building survival game Oxygen Not Included (ONI), made by Klei Entertainment, asteroids are staggeringly diverse and surprisingly full of life although, most of that life doesn’t live on oxygen. It is here, on this tiny space-rock, where I would learn unexpected lessons that completely reshaped my paradigm.
The game’s objective is simple, survive long enough to build a rocket and escape. With no hordes of enemies, no lack of building space, and an overabundance of resources the game finds itself with an absence of conflict. Something like this is no different than a story without a villain yet, the game manages to find an aggressor in the most unlikely of places. It is through the player’s conflict with the environment, the laws of thermodynamics, and the economics of decision making that the true enemies emerge. The game utilizes heat exchange formulas to map heat expanding across the asteroid. Known gases and minerals populate the eight biomes of the asteroid. Surprisingly, all the plants and animals have evolved in such a way to benefit the colony should their needs be met. Lastly, the many resources found on the asteroid, i.e. gasses, liquids, metals, and minerals, have unique properties that serve a variety of functions. Each resource is better or worse at transferring heat, some resources are necessary for high-tech machines, and others are overly abundant making them perfect base-building materials.
When laid out on a table, ONI looks less like a video game and more like a civilization petri dish. These tiny colonies, usually no more than 10–20 people, will start as gatherers quickly jumping through 10,000 years of human development. The time it takes to go from an agricultural society to an industrial one is roughly two hours while the distance from gathering to agriculture is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, a single save file can last for hundreds of hours and this expanse of time is meant to simulate the continuation of one generation to the next. This file serves as a timeless human experiment on a planet with finite resources. Sound familiar? Over time, the player gets to see the colony grow and expand in the same way one observes an ant farm. Players don’t interact directly with their citizens but, they can influence the structure and efficiency of society through a variety of buildings, policy decisions, and priorities assignments.
Along the way, players will encounter challenges that they are probably unprepared for. But the game only offers simple lectures about the sensitivity of plants and animals to their environment, provides no discussion on the management of resources for a multigenerational colony, and certainly no explanation of the many heat transfer formulas scattered around the user interface. There are only the lofty aspirations of success, the slow and steady march of time, followed by the usual failures of a short-sighted colony and through these experiences, ONI gave me valuable perspectives.
I noticed right away that the plants my colony depended on for food were highly sensitive to their climate. For example, the most accessible food can only be harvested if its internal temperature is between 50–80 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures any more or less, even a single decimal point, can cause that entire food chain to disappear instantaneously. This can easily throw the entire colony into a starvation spiral it never comes out of. Players learn that it’s extremely easy to create heat but find that it is much harder to cool areas becoming too hot. Therefore, the relationship between colony and ecosystem are completely interdependent. For managers, there is no other solution than to foster climates that support the growth of a sustainable climate. Every decision must be made concerning the effects on the ecosystem because any attempt at retroactively fixing problems immediately embarks upon a doomed enterprise.
I noticed that the logic necessary to survive in ONI was slightly different from what we Earthlings are comfortable with. Initially, the game creates a philosophical vacuum for players to fill with their assumptions of success. This is because the only real metrics for failure and success are the death of the colony and the player’s access to a series of locked technologies. Through this open platform, players are deceived into following their earthly assumptions that progress is a simple climb up the industrial ladder. After hours of playtime, players regrettably find that sustainably conscious choices are the only solution to the impermanent march of time.
New players will usually race through the tech tree to build the next coveted technology. Additionally, players will bring in more citizens to meet the increasing labor demands of a steadily growing colony and industry. The players build larger and more power-intensive industries that speed them towards the advanced building materials, e.g. plastics or refined metals. This whole process serves to accelerate the consumption of materials and the expansion of consequences tied to it. Think of it this way, if I were to build a house as fast as possible, I couldn’t trust it to stand up after years of wear and tear. In this same way, how can I expect a colony to survive many generations if the industry-first economy ruthlessly consumes without any regard for consequences? But, on an asteroid with an overabundance of resources, no human neighbors, and no natural enemies this continues to be a seductive perspective.
On Earth, we typically use the gross domestic product (GDP) of an economy to measure the success of our societies. GPD, simply put, is the market value of all economic activity for any society created over time. While this tool can turn complex economies into digestible data points, there are serious limitations to the power of this value. Most importantly, GDP does not directly account for any consequences created by economic activity. Health problems incurred by a local community directly exposed to environmental pollution from a company are an example of externalities not tracked by GDP. This value only serves to illustrate the raw commercial potential of an economy, information only useful to businessmen.
In ONI, every single building has some negative externality, usually in the form of heat. Even an essential process like the splitting of water molecules-creating oxygen- produces enormous amounts of heat and hydrogen. If left unchecked, these consequences can run rampant through the colony. New players tapping into this amazing technology may ignore the heat and pump the air into the colony out of desperation. Air coming out of these systems can be anywhere between 120 degrees to 160 degrees Fahrenheit which is relatively harmless when pumped into an enormous space. Take the air from a single hot shower and pump that into an office, chances are you won’t even notice a change in temperature. What happens to that office if hot air is pumped into the office over several hours or days? First, the area around the vents warms; then that heat will slowly travel in all directions. If allowed to continue the whole office will end up being an infernal hellscape, uninhabitable by any stretch of the imagination.
Therefore, managing these externalities, such as heat, is important for multigenerational living on the asteroid. Effective countermeasures to these externalities could mean the difference between life and death for the colony.
On Earth, if our office is too hot, we turn off the air system and open some windows. But what happens when existence is entirely defined by one system, even if that system is slowly harming us in the process? In space, it is the generation of oxygen; on Earth, it’s the oil industry. The only real solution to these externalities is by designing systems that mitigate, recycle, and restore as much of the cost to the colony and ecosystem as possible. For someone not formally trained in these skills, this can be a difficult task. Yet, after meeting the challenge, I found conclusions that were surprisingly applicable to life on Earth. How can we expect to lead multigenerational civilizations if the economics of everyday life can’t identify the externalities created by our activity?
Over my many hours playing ONI, I began to grasp just how applicable the game was for real life. A simulation of life millions of lightyears away never felt closer to home. I started to see my colony as a compact human society complete with cooks, builders, ranchers, trash collectors, distributors, repairmen, and even powerplant workers. Each worker served as an extension of the important systems that kept the colony going. As time went by, I would oversee the construction of many intricate systems that all of society was predicated on: oxygen generation, water purification, energy production, food production, industry, temperature management, and even entertainment. Each system became an indispensable cog in the perpetual motion of the colony. Like a tower of plates, any given system relies on the continuation, and sometimes expansion, of existing systems to function. If one of the cogs stops working for too long the collapse of society through cascading problems will not be far behind. Any of these systems can collapse for any reason: overheating, insufficient materials, lack of resources, loss of power, or the depletion of necessary gasses. After a few failed attempts it becomes clear that survival over multiple generations on a planet with finite resources is dependent on systems that are regenerative and future-oriented.
These systems not only have to rely on each other, but they must also be able to replenish and support unrelated systems. In the game, waste from the toilets can be purified into water and sent to supply the creation of oxygen. Metal refineries, which take enormous amounts of power and produce a great deal of heat, can use heat stored in coolant to boil saltwater. By itself, the metal refinery is incredibly costly but, the saltwater boiler attached to the system can absorb the heat created to produce extra table salt and steam. The steam can then be used by a turbine to literally delete some excess heat, give power back to the power grid and produce fresh water to be used to create more oxygen. I hope this illustrates the profound benefit of system cooperation, which further mitigates and replenishes the costs of economic activity. Additionally, these benefits are compounded when useful automation is applied.
After reaching this level of know-how, I started to consider the ways Earth could learn to see economics from a multi-generational lens. I started reading books like The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph and The Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin discuss different ways society can organize itself.
Peter Joseph has many suggestions for the future of society, but I found the most appealing to be his vision of a shared economy. Essentially, it takes the philosophy of a public library and expands it to a societal scale where access becomes more desirable than ownership. Communities would be incentivized to share their assets rather than individually own them. Some examples include toy libraries, tool libraries, community public transportation, local do-it-yourself shops, and even commissioning unused cars to serve a public rideshare service. Further building on this idea of community sharing, he believes that projects crowdsourced are more effective and develop faster than any projects stymied by intellectual property. Despite lots of discussion about the benefits of shared economies affecting human organizations, the real focus of the book is on mitigation of externalities run rampant.
Jeremy Rifkin mainly focuses on modern-day economics showing how much waste exists in our decisions to consume. He envisions a world where houses, offices, and government buildings, are retrofitted to be as power-saving as possible while outfitting these same structures with renewable energy, i.e. wind, solar and geothermal. Additionally, he wants to connect every building to a micro-grid to so any excess energy can be shared across the society. Through smart design and information technologies, any structure can create enough renewable energy to run the building and have power left over for a neighbor, local shop, or office on the other side of the world. He believes, these changes on a global scale could dramatically change our relationship with power as we know it. The power saved, generated, and distributed, could utterly reshape societal bonds for all human society. Instead of siloed pillars of totalitarian power distribution, e.g. massive power plants owned and powered by a single government; society could distribute power through the expanding micro-grids that laterally feed power to those who need it. This remodeling could, theoretically, eliminate hostile foreign polices to secure scarce oil resources. A policy that has been instrumental to American geopolitical strategy over the last few decades.
In the wake of the last IPCC report, claiming we have only 10 years to make headway against a warming planet, and the constant outpouring of disasters that are supposed to be a 1 in 100 chance; I’m inclined to imagine the bright future ahead of us, should we dare to aspire for it. I’m confident that these authors are a drop in the bucket of forward-thinking individuals; if only I had time to explore them all. Can you blame any of them for trying? We have a real chance to radically depart from the status quo, a standard that has wrought profound prosperity for some and enormous consequences for others. But, none of this will matter if society doesn’t want change, the climate certainly doesn’t care if we refuse. Someone once told me that to hold onto what you have is no different than holding your breath. If you hold on for too long you lose everything.
ONI helped me see in real-time what a failing climate looks like and how a society can either live or die through its ingenuity or rigidity. This perspective is something no other form of media has been able to provide for me, especially in such subtle ways. The overall lack of content like ONI, e.g. content that subtly helps individuals form conclusions rather than conclude for them, is why I think many people are lacking the imagination to dream of a better future. At the end of the day, I expected to learn none of this while living on an asteroid so far from home, but I suppose that is the beauty of educational software cleverly disguised as entertainment. I hope to be clever enough to follow in their footsteps, to create media that drives curiosity but until then I hope this suffices.
