Imagine a painful past asteroids on an advanced spacecraft, calculate the speed boost you will get by gliding over a large planet, navigate the dangers of space radiation, and develop sensible technologies and can speculate to propel rockets and sift valuable resources. It’s not just NASA scientists who study such things; With the latest board games, everyone can.
Board games have evolved quite a bit since Settlers of Catan appeared a quarter of a century ago. Space-themed games in particular have been on the rise in recent years, and while some of the new generation games resemble classics, like Risk or Monopoly in Space, many The game is completely different. A candidate for the most complex game is definitely High borderreleased its fourth version in 2020 and will include many more expansions, or “modules”. It encourages people to play the role of space agencies like NASA or Roscosmos (or companies like SpaceX) while designing fast and agile or loaded rockets to take crews to distant worlds, where one needs to get water for fuel and mine minerals to make more rocket parts. .
Other board games include Leaving the earthabout space agencies competing in the original space race, SpaceCorp: 2025-2300 SCNabout companies exploring the inner and outer solar system, then establishing interstellar colonies, and Project Gaiawhere factions of different species compete to make neighboring planets to their liking.
In Terraforming Marsplayers act as corporations — some environmentally conscious and some not — racing to bring the world back to life. They work towards creating greenhouse gases to warm the planet, they improve the conditions for plants to grow, they raise the oxygen levels in the air, they make surface waters flow again, and They even built cities for settlers. If one day humans try to make Mars a human-friendly place, where walking outside without a spacesuit won’t mean certain death, then the technologies they use could similar to what is envisioned in this game.
These impressive enhancement games, most of which have been released in the last five years, really bring the future of space exploration to the coffee table. But in doing so, they ignore controversial ethical questions.
Now is the real world Exploring space beyond our atmosphere has finally taken place, one can imagine how all of this might play out in real life. Long-term vision of space agency and space billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos all involve astronauts visiting, if not settling and building, other worlds. Humans will probably return to the moon within 5 years or so, thanks to NASA Artemis Program and to China Mission and companies like Blue Origin, Moon Express and Astrobotic. Using those lunar outposts as conduits for stations en route to deep space, they will set foot on Mars within the next two decades. The extraction of water and building materials will also appear in our lives, while travel to the asteroids and moons of Jupiter and Saturn could take decades more, as they complicated by the great distance from our home world and by the non-solar need to stay away from the sun.
Some space games today involve technical and logistical complications, and they evoke very real tensions between international competitors and international cooperation in space. But they did not engage with broader questions, even if the experts were start arguing: To be topography a good idea? Whose decision is it and who is responsible for the risks involved? On Earth, ideas about changing our climate and atmosphere to combat climate change, are called Geotechnicalare still controversial (although they may one day become necessary). But terrain shaping is even more complicated, and there’s a big chance it might not work. And as the game Gaia Project shows, terrain means different things to different species, and it’s not simultaneously livable for aliens with different needs. Most planets cannot turn into ice worlds and houses at the same time.
People have also begun to discuss the dangers of space mining and the challenges of doing it sustainably and without blurring the surface of other worlds. But who decides that they can only take the space resources to themselves? And since those resources don’t replenish themselves, how sustainable can it be?
