Hard to conceive

By Oliver Morton

At the beginning of the 1970s, when literary science fiction was as interested in breaking taboos as in breaking the surly bonds of Earth, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story about a rocket loaded with enough freeze-dried sperm to inseminate the Andromeda galaxy. "The Big Space Fuck" was not the subtlest of satires. But its central conceit did at least nod to the idea that sperm—and, presumably, eggs—have some sort of role in securing a human future, even if all the characters in the story do end up being eaten by giant mutant lampreys.

Would that all space visionaries were as up-front about the facts of life. There has recently been a new wave of speculation and hype about the possibility of human habitats beyond the Earth. The Mars One foundation is talking about establishing a colony on Mars in the 2020s; Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the rocket company SpaceX, says he dreams of making a similar voyage himself, though not quite yet; Eric Anderson, chairman of a company that puts paying customers on to the International Space Station and founder of another which aims to mine asteroids, recently told the journalist James Fallows that he expects "irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony" within three to six decades—that is, in a time as close or closer to today as today is to the launch of Sputnik in 1957.