 |
| Photo by William Anders / NASA |
"It was the death that I saw in space and the life force that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white, and I realized one was death and the other was life."
- William Shatner
The Moral Vacuum
This article is a revised and tidied up view on my thoughts on spaceflight that was initially posted on the Tree of Souls discussion forum. The original post and ensuring discussion be be found here.
It is often said that my generation, that sociologically challenged cohort of older millennials, missed out on the so-called golden age of space exploration. By the time Gaia drop-kicked us out of the womb and into a world of unaffordable housing and underpaying jobs, the moon landings had been and gone. Space was watching people float around in a metal box in low orbit, eating packets of dehydrated slop and sponge bathing.
However, for several years now, we've been living though a rehashing of that Cold War fever dream of anthropocentric separatism and human exceptionalism - that humans are somehow separate from this world - a vainglorious belief in a sort self-deification or supernaturalism. A new "space race", except by billionaires instead of empires. Elon Musk, and many of his fans and Tescreal[1] fellow-travellers have been making much of the need for humans to
establish colonies in space, and that humans must become a multi-planetary species.
To be clear, I do not see spaceflight per se as harmful, either to human cultures to the interests of life as a whole.
The use of space technologies has brought things of great value, including insights, understanding and tools that can serve to benefit all life on Earth.
Advances like satellite navigation, the Cospas-Sarsat search and rescue system, weather
observation, and environmental monitoring/study are of undoubted benefit, and can genuinely be said to be truly for the good of all and be rightly
regarded as achievements we can and should be proud of as a
species.
Children of Earth
However, the idea of space colonisation, that is to say a
humans living permanently in space (be it on another world, or in a
floating metal box like the ISS) is clear cultural, societal, ethical and spiritual failure that has encouraged the aforementioned sense of separation of ourselves and our species from the environment we belong to, are entirely dependent on, and have evolved to live completely within, and to deny that bond to our home and our parent ecosystem forever condemns the survivors and their decedents of these colonisation attempts - should there be any survivors - to an eternity
of misery, eeking out an existence on processed air and survival rations
in a closed, airtight metal box surrounded by an alien environment
hostile to life itself, hoping and praying that the next supply drop will make it.This is a twisted, isolated, insular perspective of who and what we are as humans - not arrogant ghosts floating above the world, but a part of Her fabric, the leukocytes in Her blood, the cells of Her skin and fur - meaningless and dead on our own, but full of life, purpose, meaning and value as part of the environment we belong to.
Honouring Our Obligations
From this view of humans as spectres disconnected from the rest of life comes the assumption that Earth is doomed. Two aspects of this should trouble us, and both come down to the issue of responsibility and obligation to other than human life - neither being concepts that are fashionable in the Tescreal mindset. As creatures of Earth, we can’t avoid our responsibility in working to heal the harm caused. We caused this destruction and it is on us to fix it. This is our obligation to all life on Earth, down to and including ourselves. As an additional point in this theme, until we learn to see the harm we have done, to accept responsibility for that, and strike to play a part in alongside all life in making it right, take responsibility for our actions here, on the world we belong to, how can we expect to do any better on an alien world that is no relation of ours?
Nearer My Spacebucks To Thee
Thidly, while national space agencies have traditionally focused on
scientific and academic study of space, these are private ventures are led
by explicitly for-profit companies that seek private gain. While
contracting has long been a part of space exploration, and is part and
parcel of any self-respecting industrialised, consumer-capitalist dystopia, the
desire of private, for-profit corporates to specifically get into space colonisation
is profoundly disturbing. This opens up a slew of questions over the
rights and wellbeing of the colony inhabitants, especially given the
vast resources and costs needed to keep even a single individual alive, let alone mentally and physically healthy. What of the world the colony is on? Despite the dubious
viability of such ventures, if they are even possible (more below on
that), the only remotely feasible source of profit would be strip
mining this brave new world for resources that are rare and unknown on Earth but have
potentially valuable uses in industry (such as Tritium) – an activity
that even on Earth, where oversight is somewhat possible, doesn’t have
an enviable reputation of respecting either it’s workers or the world in
general. Putting gilded age robber-baron company towns in space doesn’t magically make their horrific flaws disappear. On the contrary, it concentrates and encourages them, and removes any realistic potential for independent oversight. When Elon Musk said he wants to be the “Imperator of Mars”, it is
quite possibly the only honest thing he’s ever said. In light of all this, we can perhaps breathe a sigh of relief and thank our lucky stars that Mars and Luna are already dead, sterile balls of rock.
Furthermore, the scarcely imaginable natural, technical, financial and mental resources being
wasted by this quixotic quest are draining expertise, focus, finance and
real resources away from where they are needed. Much as this is a
private, for-profit venture by Musk, Bezos and co., they are, in best
capitalist style, doing it with giant wads of public bailouts, grants,
contracts and concessions. These resources as desperately needed on
Earth to tackle the problems of our own making, rather than expanding
the scope of our destruction to new worlds.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
Finally, all this might well be for naught. One of the big issues,
especially with Musk, but with many other grifters of the techbro
variety, is grossly overestimating the technology humans (let alone they themselves) posses, and the
scale of the issues of space colonisation. Humans don’t handle
exponential mathematics well, and space colonisation is full of such
issues. Mars is, of course, not “the next step” after Luna. The sheer
difference in distance involved is hard to grasp and frequently ignored .
The difference between shipping half a dozen highly trained,
professional, disciplined astronauts to low earth orbit for a six month
stint in a science outpost is a tad different to sending one million
fare-paying civilians to Mars for the rest of their lives (along with
all the belongings fare-paying passengers expect to take). This exponential difference is trivialised. The threat of radiation is trivialised.
Same with microgravity. Same with shelter, food, mental health,
reproductive health… and so on. And if Earth is "doomed" because of our
mistakes, then these "multi-planetary species" humans will only outlast
their parent world by a few months. Once the last supply ship is gone
and it's cargo finished, the "multi-planetary species" will too be
finished. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
My feelings are that the governments and space agencies of the world
should come together to give a clear message that space colonisation is
neither possible or practical with current or near-mature technology,
nor is it a desirable project. It should be made clear that no private
colonisation effort will have any legality or legitimacy, and will not be tolerated. We should work
toward a system similar to the Antarctic Treaty System to be applied to
all celestial bodies – limiting human activity to scientific/academic
research and conservation only, as well as setting up clear standards
for non-contamination of these worlds, and of absolute protection for
any life identified.
[1] TESCREAL is a philosophy common among billionaire technologists and their techbro acolytes, referring to a right-libertarian, technosolutionist, hyper-individualist combination of transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, so-called "effective altruism" and longtermism.
