How to read the evidence. Each evidence entry gives the exact citation, what the source shows in our words, and a link. Read the original and cut your own card before you run this case; do not read our summaries as evidence in a round.
Framework
Value: justice, giving each person what they are owed.
Criterion: prioritizing determinate obligations to existing persons. Three warrants. First, obligations run to identifiable people who can be wronged; a person who may exist in three centuries cannot be wronged today by a choice that also determines whether they exist at all. Second, moral imperatives must be action-guiding; a duty that competes with every present duty and always wins because its imagined stakes are infinite is not a guide but a trump, and a framework built on it licenses any sacrifice. Third, justice requires fairness in distribution: resources committed to speculative future benefit are taken from people with concrete present claims.
Duties run to identifiable persons
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, Part Four.
Sets out the non-identity problem: choices that determine which future people exist cannot straightforwardly wrong those people. The negative uses it to argue that obligations to merely possible future persons are weaker than obligations to the living.
Contention one: the resolution mistakes an aspiration for an imperative
An imperative is not merely a good idea. It is an obligation that binds regardless of preference, and violating it wrongs someone. Colonization may be admirable, ambitious, even wise. But no one is wronged if humanity chooses to remain on Earth, whereas identifiable people are wronged every day by unmet present obligations: preventable disease, hunger, and exposure to climate risk on the one planet that supports human life. The affirmative must show a binding duty, not a hopeful project.
Space expansion carries serious risks of its own
Deudney, D. (2020). Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. Oxford University Press. global.oup.com
A sustained critique arguing that space expansion increases rather than reduces catastrophic risk, through militarization, planetary-scale weapons, and political fragmentation. The strongest single source for the negative.
Contention two: colonization as currently imagined reproduces historical harms
The word colonization is not an accident. The proposed model, private and national actors claiming territory and resources, replicates the legal and political structure that produced historical dispossession. International law, in the Outer Space Treaty, prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies precisely because the drafters understood that frontier claims produce conflict. A moral imperative cannot rest on a model that the existing legal order was designed to prevent, and that scholars of space governance identify as a driver of militarization and inequality.
International law forbids national appropriation
United Nations (1967). Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Article II. unoosa.org
States that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use, occupation, or any other means.
Frontier claims produce conflict
Milligan, T. (2015). Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation. McFarland.
Examines the ethical problems of property and resource claims beyond Earth and argues that the exploitation model imports the failures of terrestrial frontier politics.
Impact: conflict between space powers and the transfer of resources from the many to the few, harms that are near-term and probable under the affirmative's own timeline.
NR strategy
- Win the framework on action-guidance. Ask in cross-examination whether any present spending could outweigh a nonzero reduction in extinction risk under the affirmative criterion. If the answer is no, the criterion cannot guide action, and the judge should prefer yours.
- Collapse to contention one. The cleanest negative ballot is: aspiration is not obligation. Spend two minutes there.
- Use contention two as the turn. If the judge buys the affirmative framework, argue that great-power conflict over space territory is itself an existential risk, so the affirmative's own criterion cuts against colonization as proposed.
- Weigh probability against magnitude. The affirmative's impact is enormous and remote; yours is smaller and certain. Explain why justice attends to the certain wrong.
Pair this with the affirmative case for a practice round, and use the weighing drill on the magnitude-versus-probability clash.
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