Toward a Science of Flourishing off the Earth

The Inner Planets Foundation is the public name of Inner Planets Terraforming Foundation Corporation, an Idaho nonprofit corporation organized and operated exclusively for charitable, scientific, and educational purposes within the meaning of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

The Foundation develops technologies and methodologies whose results are made openly available to educate the public, students, scientists, and policymakers on planetary science and planetary habitability.

Nearly all current settlement research addresses the first needs of the first days: oxygen, water, food, propulsion, habitats. That research is essential, and the funding for it accounts for nearly all of the world's current investment in extraterrestrial settlement — the Foundation's own census of settlement funding, Who Funds the Settlement of Space?, found it concentrated almost entirely in hardware, biology, and destination science. The settlement envisioned by current research manufactures little beyond life-critical materiel, is run by a chain of command, as an expedition is, and counts as a success if its crew survives long enough to return home.

The Foundation is concerned with the phase after the first needs of the first days have been assured. Survival is more certain; return is neither necessary nor necessarily desired; and a harder question arises — how a settlement flourishes rather than merely survives. Securing survival is not the same as becoming a society. Long-term viability begins when the settlement no longer has to be run like an expedition — when a single line of authority, whose orders must be followed because any mistake could be fatal, can safely give way to decisions the settlers make among themselves.

That moment poses two questions, and they are the Foundation's two research programs. The material question: what can a settlement make, from local resources, beyond the survival floor — the soap, clothing, utensils, and everyday conveniences that turn an outpost into a place people would choose to stay? The social question: how does a small community, founded under a chain of command, grow the institutions and governance of a durable society? These two questions form the motivation and subject matter of the Foundation's work, and define the Foundation's motto: ex omnibus opes — everything a resource.

The Foundation offers considered forethought regarding the evolution of chemical technologies in extraterrestrial settlements. Intelligent exploitation of in situ raw material resources is the means by which the material question must be solved. The Foundation offers considered forethought regarding the evolution of governance, economic, and other cooperative structures in closed extraterrestrial settlements. Intelligent exploitation of human adaptability is the means by which the social question must be solved.