THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND LIBERTY

Abstract

AbstractFor a society to function successfully beyond Earth, its scientific institutions must be capable of supporting the advancement of knowledge and technology as well as helping to secure the social conditions for liberty. For an extraterrestrial settlement to successfully produce innovations and ideas in a lethal environment, it must be capable of placing science centre stage in its institutional arrangements and encouraging the full and unrestricted development of original ideas. At the same time, the complex technical machinery that sustains people must not become a means of controlling them; instead, scientific education is essential for people to understand these complicated life-support systems and challenge decisions about them. How can science be used to benefit the social condition of extraterrestrial settlements? How should science and scientific organisations be organised beyond Earth? This chapter addresses these questions.