In his paper on The Space Review, Al Globus rebuts Dark Skies, a book calling for the end of space settlement. The full text is at The Space Review.

In the book Dark Skies Daniel Deudney examines space settlement in detail and comes to the conclusion that it is so likely to exterminate humanity or have other serious consequences that it should not be undertaken at all, or at least not for several centuries, giving time to improve homo sapiens’ habits. Deudney comes to his surprising conclusion by applying geopolitics, a part of political science that studies “the practice of states controlling and competing for territory,” among other things, to space settlement, which Deudney describes as “habitat expansionism.” Deudney uses a version of geopolitical theory to generate 12 propositions and then applies them to predict the future, coming to the conclusion that space settlement is an existential threat to humanity and should be viewed in the same category as nuclear war. Dark Skies is a difficult read but it is also a detailed and extensive critique of space settlement that deserves a thoughtful response.