A key challenge lies in this: the need to overcome the terrestrial mindsets we carry.
For the current paradigms of space habitation are deeply influenced by the Modernist mindset, rooted in a framework prioritising functionality and human preservation nonetheless ill-suited to the volatility of outer space. Hence, the need to shift away from designing to the superficial dichotomy of ‘earthness’ versus ‘spaceness’; as O’Neill’s and Sherwood’s designs demonstrated, both were fundamentally static, non-evolving systems, enclosures that strip their inhabitants of agency. These designs mirror the logic of Earth-based zoos described by Braverman, designed to manage and preserve life rather than enable its evolution. Rejecting environmental context limits the potential of both the architecture and its occupants.
Modernist influence extends beyond functionalism; it grants its believers the illusion of mastery over nature. Hence the desire for an ideal, selectively curated space-nature as static, functional amenities, contrasting with the reality demonstrated in Biosphere II’s failure — that any attempts to ‘manage’ a biospheric orbital city, even one containing a reduced biosphere, is marked for failure, for life is fundamentally uncontainable and unpredictable.
To complete this modern architecture requires robustness, thus the creation of an architecture insulating its inhabitants from the space-environment through the tight coupling of engineered systems, an approach which also assumes a ‘biologically pure’ human inhabitant, one incapable of surviving direct exposures to the space-environment. By attempting to engineer the ‘trouble’ of the space-environment condition, carefully curating every species and tightly coupling every metabolic loop, it produces over-optimised cities with no optionality required to survive Extremistan events. Thus a robust system is not necessarily antifragile, and the efficiency-driven optimisation necessary to recreate Earth in fact creates a recipe for critical failure in face of Extremistans.
Thus, the IPA.
It does not endeavour to recreate Earth-like conditions, realising that attempts to design only for the ‘biologically pure’ humans creates an enclosure which enforces stasis upon its inhabitants in the name of protection. Understanding that initial generations of space-faring humans might not be able to adapt immediately to the space-environment, it facilitates their evolution, but not by enclosing them and acting only as a protective shell. Instead, it fosters kinship among its inhabitants, allowing them to create sympoetic relationships with each other and with the IPA itself as they make the step towards a cyborg future.
It rejects the false illusion of mastery over nature by recognising and dissolving the false divide between nature and culture. Knowing that life is self-organising and that attempting to manage it thus results in catastrophic failure, the IPA approach treats space-nature as one to be seeded rather than simulated. IPA thus acts as the scaffold for a space-native bio-technospheric ecology, adopting an Earth-like evolutionary strategy instead of allocating its inhabitants by function. IPA itself participates in this ecology as an organism capable of growth and evolution alongside its inhabitants, a shift enabled by technologies like the mycelium-based myco-architectures also capable of providing radiation shielding, further dissolving the distinctions between nature and structure, evolving into a self-organising, self-sustaining, cell.
It realises that current practices of designing for robustness are in fact an act of rejecting the space-environmental context. This limits the evolutionary potential of both the architecture and its occupants, while creating enclosures inherently fragile to the stressors. It is also aware that to achieve antifragility both physically and socially, the IPA’s social structures must be considered instead of ignored. Consequently, as it adopts the evolutionary strategy at a network level of multiple, self-organisational and self-sustaining, space-native cells, it posits that each are independently capable of survival, seeded to house a population at a scale where they are capable of maintaining stable social relationships, their communities kept under its members’ cognitive limit. In this model, where space-based ecologies are facilitated rather than dictated, populations and their habitations evolve in tandem to create niches within a larger space-native ecological network. It is thus antifragile through its provision of optionality. This creates an IPA that thrives under the volatility of the cosmos, instead of breaking under it.
The ultimate goal of designing a place among the stars should not be to create a ‘home away from home’, but instead to forge a new home for life in the space environment.
In this future, stars are no longer viewed through the window. They are woven instead into the very fabric of a new, interplanetary existence.