The values of family in space (op-ed)

Rick Tumlinson is the founder of SpaceFund, a venture capital firm investing in space startups. He also founded the Space Frontier Foundation, Earthlight Foundation, and New Worlds Institute and is a founding board member of the X Prize Foundation. He contributed the following piece — an edited essay from his upcoming book “Why Space: The Purpose of People,” to be published in the spring of 2025 — to Space.com’s Expert Voices section.

The societies and macro-social structures of space will be products of their founding purpose. From corporate company towns to crypto-democracies to religious or philosophically based communities, their smallest unit will still be the family. While for most of human history, the family was defined by literal bloodlines, this is no longer the case. Today, family can mean any number of permutations, combinations of genders, definitions of parents, siblings, and relationships. On the frontier, this will still be true and likely expand in its definition as new variations of relationships evolve. Whether by blood or simple relationship, the concept of the family is one of extreme closeness, tolerance of personal differences, and a willingness to put one’s own life on the line in defense of the unit or its other members — often in spite of any differences — because they are family.

In today’s world here on the surface, much has been made of the fragmentation of the nuclear family — even as other forms of family have come into vogue. Yet all of them have suffered the industrial disease of disassociation. While groups of people of different ages may all live in the same house or apartment, often there is little shared value and commonality between them.

More recently, the COVID-19 experience, in some cases, brought people together as schools and jobs closed, and people found themselves stuck in the bubbles of their homes together, sometimes for the first time in their lives. For some, this was traumatic, but for many, it meant the birth of new and deeper relationships. After all, the last 300 years have, at least in industrial societies, created social walls within the walls of what used to be homes, oftentimes turning them into simple dwelling places in which a group of people live. The idea of willing sacrifice in the name of one’s blood kin has dissolved in many places, to be replaced by… well… nothing.

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While the odd communal or intentional community may have taken hold here and there, the ties between people in such groups are usually loose, and the commitments felt between members are weak. Yet, at a very basic level, there is a deep and human need to feel such closeness. It is a craving and a means of completion often denied by the material and wealth-driven demands of today’s society. But what is a family? If one removes the blood argument, perhaps it is nothing more than people who share common goals, who have such bonds that they are willing to give their fortunes and even their lives in support of or to protect one another — people who simply enjoy one another’s company, be it in good times or bad.

As a kid, I read the classic Victorian novel “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which Charles Dickens traces the life of a young man who is left an orphan by his parents. As a ward of his evil uncle, he is abused and used as his uncle tries to manipulate him and take over what turns out to be his fortune. Even as his genetic family treats him badly, along the course of his life, as he navigates the cruel and debasing systems of early industrial England, he encounters people of great kindness — people he finds in the darkest moments and who find him when he most needs help, people who save his life and some whose lives he saves.

The story ends as Nicholas, finally vested with the wealth his parents left him, brings together those souls who helped him survive to join him in the formation of a new family. This family is one based on love and caring — not lineage. It has the bonds of shared experience and dependence to hold it together rather than artificially enforced concepts of belonging. As Dickens says: “Family need not be defined merely as those with whom we share blood, but as those for whom we would give our blood.”

A similar cultural structure is found in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic “Stranger in a Strange Land,” in which a young man raised by aliens and brought back to Earth becomes the nucleus of a group of very different people of various kinds. Here the social unit is made up of those who have “shared water” and thus joined into a unit in which everything is shared, be it physical space, wealth, or simple comfort. In this book, as one enters the family compound, everything one owns goes into a community bucket by the door, and even one’s clothes vanish. Meanwhile, those heading out into the world dress appropriately as they go, taking what they need from the bucket — car keys, credit cards, cash, whatever. In the community, there are no lies, only truth, and no jealousies, only love, and an attack on one is an attack on all. They are a family. They are a tribe.

They say there is no closer bond than that of people who have fought side by side in war. Throughout history, the “foxhole” experience has created relationships far exceeding distance and time. In the military or other professions where one’s life is in the hands of a small group of others with whom you’ve trained, lived with, and shared hardships, it’s a given that those relationships are as close as family. It is, in fact, one of the tenets of war that, while they might be motivated to fight for their country, they will die for their squad mates. It is not about blood but shared danger and life-or-death interdependence that creates the bond. If we share fear, hope, sadness, hardship, and celebration, and if my actions can keep you alive or your actions cause my death, and within that framework, we share a definition of success, you are, in many ways, my family.

The brief history of humans living and working together in space has proven this is the case out there as well. No matter where they came from, after a few months of living, working, and staying alive together, Russians, Americans, and other crew members develop incredibly close bonds, even love for one another. Formed by their proximity, this caring and unity is born of trust, the kind of trust that comes from repeatedly allowing someone else the power to keep you alive or, if negligent, kill you. In many cases, these bonds remain for the rest of their lives.

As we move out onto the High Frontier and transition to a time when humans actually “live” and begin to spend their careers in space, those who will inhabit new life bubbles will, in many ways, be in a war together. Outside the wall of your ship, dome, cave, or other habitat lies death, and although it holds no malice, it is inexorable, constantly oncoming, and ready to attack at any moment. The only things protecting you from that death are your walls, your machines, your systems, and the people around you. And when the walls and machines fail, all that is left are those people — and you had better trust one another completely.

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In space, within and beyond any larger communities, small human groups will inevitably form similar units of their own variations. Whatever their form and location, their shared ingredients will be those necessitated by survival. Families, no matter their genetic or social form, will be those who share immediate space with one another. These new families may even include their AIs, their robotic members, and other variants in between, such as OIs (Organic Intelligences). The social orders of such small groups will range in form and be appropriate to their founding and function. While some may be based on patriarchal or matriarchal structures, they will vary, including crews of vessels and habitats. Especially in more isolated cases, the frailty of these small groups will also engender the need to care for everyone, no matter their age or capability to perform, which is different than willingness.

Pioneering groups in space will quickly realize that out there, waiting outside the airlock, is death — above, below, and surrounding them — and only people who are willing to shoulder their share of work and responsibility can be part of their unit. There will be no room for prima donnas, gamers, players, or layabouts. Members of those groups will be required to understand these harsh realities. Indoctrination and education will become critical for anyone new. And they will not be “family” until they have long proven themselves worthy of the trust of all aboard.

Everyone aboard had better care for you, and you had better care for them. And so everyone in your habitat, your bubble, your ship, becomes a single unit, a single family. You learn to tolerate each other, or you die. The way you act, eat, play, sleep, talk, express yourself, take up your own space, or allow space for others — there is no room for intolerance. There is no door to leave by and slam behind you; only the void, the enemy, awaits out there. So you better learn how to get along. And this is the beginning of family, for in all families, we are all different, and yet we live together — if we can. In space, we must. Or we die.

These new families will have to develop the means to work together, to knit themselves into caring and loving groups of people with shared goals. They will need to have methods for social adhesion, ways to work out interpersonal conflicts, and incredibly strong abilities to tolerate the individual idiosyncrasies of those who share their air. This also means there will be hierarchies, even as there may be democratic systems within them. While it may be important for the family to vote on non-life-critical decisions, in the name of safety and survival, there will have to be authority, chosen by vote or seniority or whatever method fits the crew or family. When major life and safety issues are faced, such leaders, like the heads of families since the dawn of human sentience, will have to have full and absolute authority.

In this, as in so many ways, by going out there into the cosmos, humanity will be traveling a full circle back to our primitive roots in the jungles and savannahs. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the family and its tribe are built around shared responsibility and knowledge that, unless all perform their tasks and roles, all will die. This will be true in space.

The mores and rules of space culture will also demand a core set of life-protecting and necessary commandments. Sharing a sealed habitat, the rupture or penetration of which results in the possible death of all, will in itself enforce and create a new set of social contracts. Examples might include actions and activities that can put others at immediate risk, such as opening the living volume to vacuum or the use of fire, which can be instant death.

More subtle yet just as deadly consequences can arise from bad sanitation or personal habits or misuse of shared resources. We will, of course, have to be responsible to one another. The concept of interdependence will also take on a completely different meaning, as we will be dependent on each other at all times in ways we never before imagined. From these very practical concerns, I believe a new and closer social order will arise.

I believe the frontier culture of space will enhance and revitalize the concept of family, even as it has seemed to fade in the societies that are launching this new era. Be it genetic or created by association, every human life, family, unit, and community will be so utterly vulnerable that the interdependence of one with another will create the need for social interactions based on openness rather than exclusion. The loneliness of each unit, alone in the barren wilderness, the need for all knowledge and wisdom to be shared and passed down, the actual resource of love itself, which is an energy form far greater than that derived from their power sources, will bond all to each other.

We have seen, and still see, many of these aspects in cultures that live in extreme environments here on Earth. Be it the Inuit taking in a stranger from the cold or the rules of conduct protecting a guest in a Bedouin tent on the sands of the Sahara, when people are faced with and surrounded by the possibility of death, they draw together and generosity becomes the rule.

If ever there was a time when we could use such an example, it is now. The opportunity to begin this evolution, or perhaps, re-invention, is just ahead of us. From the tunnel dwellers of the Moon and Mars to the citizens of cities in the skies of Free Space, the High Frontier offers the promise of our reinvention and rediscovery of many of the best aspects of our human roots.

Again, as we go up, we will move one step closer to becoming our higher selves, and as we do, perhaps we will grow closer to each other.