The case towards people in area

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of faith at Wesleyan University, presents a radical analysis of this precise pathology in her 2022 e book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, which got here out in paperback final 12 months. It all begins, appropriately sufficient, with the e book of Genesis, the place God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Over the years, this biblical mind worm has supplied divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves because the spiritual rocket gas propelling people into the subsequent frontier, Rubenstein argues.

“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as much a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” she writes. “It’s a mythology, in fact, that holds all these other efforts together, giving them an aura of duty, grandeur, and benevolence.”

Rubenstein makes a forceful case that malignant outgrowths of Christian concepts scaffold the desires of area settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded fanatics—even when these similar folks would possibly by no means describe themselves as spiritual. If Earth is man’s dominion, area is the subsequent logical step. Earth is only a short-term staging floor for a higher future; we’ll discover our deliverance within the heavens.   

“Fuck Earth,” Elon Musk said in 2014. “Who cares about Earth? If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonize the whole solar system.”

Jeff Bezos, for one, claims to care about Earth; that’s amongst his finest arguments for why people ought to transfer past it. If heavy industries and huge civilian populations forged off into the orbital expanse, our house world may be, in his phrases, “zoned residential and light industry,” permitting it to get well from anthropogenic pressures.

Bezos additionally believes that area settlements are important for the betterment of humanity, partly on the grounds that they are going to uncork our inhabitants progress. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled throughout the photo voltaic system, that would help a collective inhabitants of a trillion folks. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that would be.”

It does sound cool. But it’s a simple layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers game” strategy would additionally produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes. 

And that’s the actual crux of the argument towards pushing onerous torapidly broaden human civilization into area: We will nonetheless be people after we get there. We received’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—in actual fact, we could exacerbate them.