So why should we want to go live in space? The seven histories presented here offer only a few answers to that question. It is an incomplete catalog, as any finite list would be.
Nikolai Fedorov and his pupil Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wanted to extend human existence, in time and space, into infinity, optimizing the universe for people at the expense of all subsequent change and difference. On planets, and in orbit, the spaces imagined by the early Russian cosmists would come about as a result of new technologies. But once those capabilities had transformed the Earth and sky, everything would be the same forever after, and this spatial sameness would be imposed by force, if necessary. J.D. Bernal and Alexander Bogdanov advocated in favor of maximizing development and dynamism, and their worlds existed in a state of constant disruption and revolution. But this was no war of all against all. They prioritized mutual aid, the free flow and transfusion of ideas, matter, life, and the ideal of peaceful coexistence with others. These values functioned to mitigate and reduce the harm done by the forces that would otherwise threaten to disassemble and explode any shared space in their future solar systems and beyond.
Wernher von Braun was not a harm reductionist. For him, the ability to go to space, and stay, was inextricable from a necessary period of pain, terror, slavery, and devastating war that he foresaw preceding it. This is the same atomic war that Bernal spent the latter period of his life trying to prevent. After starting his career working for a would-be German empire, von Braun swapped employers, ending it in the service of an American one. Both rested their long-term hopes on his rockets. But he seems never to have thought that he could help them—and help himself—get to Mars, without first passing through Planet Dora. Meanwhile, his friend Arthur C. Clarke used his own work in space science and science fiction to critique planetary imaginations that were—like von Braun’s—based on colonialism and conquest. Clarke’s worlds were too mysterious to be approached with such aggression and directness, and any attempt to use technology violently, to blow up their artifacts with atomic weapons, was just a signal to others—vast, cool, and unsympathetic—who were far outside any human contexts or goals. Direct force did not quite obtain here in this space.
Gerard O’Neill was more subtle. In the 1970s, he was able to project and signal a future image of personal individual liberation in space to influential post–counter culture figures like Timothy Leary and Stewart Brand. Then, in his later books, he foregrounded the benefits of corporate freedom to an audience of private investors and supporters. Distrustful of government and regulation, he didn’t hesitate to highlight the potential political return that a public investment in space manufacturing would have for Congress. O’Neill used and discarded science fiction as a source and a mode when it suited him. He seems to have been more deft at this kind of code-switching than his patrons at NASA, who never quite realized that theirs was a business that trafficked just as much in soft utopias as it did in hard engineering and realism. NASA’s complicated history of aspirational signaling with regard to race and space shows that when it comes to inclusive futures bound up in contemporary politics, there is indeed never a straight answer.
The various players in the NewSpace “space” have absorbed all of these inbound lessons and more, and they can deploy messaging outward in ways that are increasingly skillful. But they still don’t know what they don’t know. NewSpace companies understand how to leverage hope—hope for, on the one hand, the infinite cosmist extension of the status quo, and on the other, for infinite change in an eternal Day One. They can marshal support around idealistic public values—freedom, exploration, and limitless potential—while also appealing to everyone’s private desire and motive for personal profit. And, like von Braun and others, they know how and when to mix in a little apocalyptic fear to mobilize investors, too. But this effort to appeal to so many constituencies at once leaves them spread thin, and gaps and lacunae open up in the NewSpace worldview. As Ursula K. Le Guin shows, a narrow definition of a category like “technology” can leave one exposed.
These stories about space from the recent and near past are also stories about Earth, recorded from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. We might continue to place still more possible stories about the future alongside them. Whether or not the dream of successful permanent life in space is eventually assured, it seems inevitable that people will continue to try and make that future happen. The more worldviews that end up brought along on those attempts, the better off they will be. Both science fiction and space science can often be about explanations, coherence, and plausibility. This scaffolding that supports the sense of wonder can overwhelm it and drag it down. But in space there is also room for others—for planetary imaginations that embrace questions along with answers, differences beside repetitions, and open possibilities next to closed explanations. And some of those other stories might end up offering valuable, useful, and interesting ways of being that technical narratives cannot capture.
It’s surprising that such a collection of rocket builders, scientists, engineers, and experts in supply chains and logistics don’t have a clearer grasp of the tectonics inherent in world-building, or of an expanded definition of technology. Recall how Tom Paine told Reverend Ralph Abernathy, on the day before Apollo 11 was to take off, “If we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.”1 He was drawing a hard line around technological categories. Paine indicates that the part inside the line—in here, with rockets and trajectories and physical forces and buttons—is technology, while that stuff outside the boundary—over there, where political and social forces dominate a different kind of space—is not. Operation Breakthrough showed, though, that all of the hardware in the world will not help address a problem like housing if the economic and social software does not run properly.
Elon Musk made a similar remark, when asked about his attitude toward his major competitor in private launches: “If I could press a button and make Blue Origin disappear, I would not press that button. I think it’s good Jeff is doing what he’s doing.”2 Statements like these are signals from the interior of the technocratic mind; they reflect a dream of an ultimate, uncomplicated wish-fulfillment interface. The problems of the world are reducible here to a single button, and to a single man’s decision about whether to push it or not. On the other side of both of these buttons is a perceived adversary: poverty, stagnation, competition. But the two sides of the go/no-go decision point—to be a hero and send humans to the Moon, or to solve seemingly intractable social problems back on Earth—in fact depend intimately on one another.
In 2019, a student activist, Morgan Paulett, created a Twitter account that as of this writing has over 100,000 followers, with the handle Has Jeff Bezos Decided to End World Hunger? The account bio cites research indicating that feeding the planet’s hungry and vulnerable would cost $11 billion per year, where Bezos’s fortune is around $200 billion. The account posts, at minimum, once a day, announcing the status of Bezos’s philanthropy with regard to this issue. In a 2018 interview with Business Insider, Bezos indicated that that he would not be pushing the button to end poverty and hunger on Earth: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.”3
Musk and Bezos—who are, off and on, neck and neck in the race for the title of the human individual with the highest net worth on the planet—need one another, as scapegoats if not as rivals. In the same mode, Bezos’s decision to try to create a situation where millions of people are living and working in space almost requires the existence of poverty on Earth, as something that his scheme can both address indirectly, and offer an alternative to. Similarly, NASA, during the space race, seemed to need the figure of the Black individual and the Black astronaut. This necessity shows up in the attempts to instrumentalize the existence of the disadvantaged Black person for political gain on both sides of the Cold War, as did Kennedy with Ed Dwight in the United States, and Brezhnev with Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez in the Soviet Union.
In her 2013 book Afrofuturism, scholar and critic Ytasha L. Womack quotes the filmmaker Cauleen Smith: “Blackness is a technology … It’s not real, it’s a thing.”4 This echo of Le Guin’s notion of technology also appears in the work of celebrated novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Baldwin sometimes refers to the existence of the figure of the inferior Black person in American society as a construct, one that can be made and unmade. “What white people have to do,” Baldwin says in footage reproduced in the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary” to construct such a figure in the first place. “If you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that—whether or not it is able to ask that question.”5 Blackness and whiteness, and the hierarchical relationship between them, are just artifacts. They are things, as Smith reminds us, and these human things can be unmade and remade by human work.
Space Is No Place
Womack’s Afrofuturism is a rereading of science fiction from the perspective of the African diaspora. From inside this worldview, immersed in the ongoing legacy of colonialism and slavery, concepts like alien invasion, time travel, and escape to outer space gain new resonance. For people who are descended from the nonwhite survivors of an era in which technologically “advanced” Europeans dominated much of the planet, narratives about utopia and dystopia, futures and pasts, frontiers and the beginnings and ends of worlds can invoke more historical and scientific facts than fiction. Through Womack’s lens, figures like musician and filmmaker Sun Ra, who spent most of his performance career in character as an alien visitor from Saturn, shine again like prophets of a different space age. In his 1974 science fiction / philosophy / jazz concert film Space Is the Place, Sun Ra, in response to a Black teenager’s question “Are you for real?” describes all Black people as a myth, including him:
I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real, if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we are both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth because that is what black people are: myths. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors.6
Sun Ra starts with the idea of Blackness as a construct, as a technology, and then seizes the means of that artifact’s own production, remaking himself into a messenger from outer space who is here to tell the youth that, as the film’s opening song has it, “it’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?”
Sun Ra has a mission in the film: to offer Black Americans the chance to settle on a new planet that he has found. “The music is different here,” he affirms. “The vibrations are different, not like planet Earth. Planet sounded of guns, anger, frustration—there was no one to talk to on planet Earth who could understand.” He wants to set up a colony of Black people on this new planet, without white people, “another place in the universe.” To begin, he declares that time has ended, and he travels back to Chicago in the 1940s in order to start recruiting colonists.
There are two primary antagonists working to thwart Sun Ra’s mission on Earth. The first is the Overseer, a Black man who collaborates with white culture to keep other Black people in a place that might leave their lives and potential underdeveloped. The figure of the Overseer collapses the blissful planetary imagination of the overlook effect into the terror of surveillance overflight and random death from above: “If he sees something he wants, he gets it.” But Sun Ra is also pursued by agents of NASA, who are secretly recording his pitch sessions, overhearing his cosmist slogans, which do a better job of signaling than the space agency could ever hope to: “Everything you desire from this planet, and never have received, will be yours in outer space.”
Sun Ra’s critique of Earth is a critique of the purposes to which utopianism is put. Earth generates desire, because that is how it is presented by those with power, like the Overseer, who then exploit that desire. Again and again in the film, those who follow the Overseer have their desires presented to them, only to be withheld at the last minute. The sixteenth-century humanist Thomas More famously coined the word “utopia” as a portmanteau of the Greek for “good place,” and “no place.” Earth, in Sun Ra’s planetary imagination, has already been made over as a utopia for white people. But space, with its blackness and depths and vibrations in the void, can be a utopia for those who find Earth to be a kind of hell, if they are willing to go to no place. “Space is not only high, it’s low,” he says. “Space is a bottomless pit.”
Utopia and dystopia are not stable categories; they turn into one another and depend on each other. One group’s ideal world is another’s nightmare. The utopia of the New World in the Americas depended on the hells of genocide, slavery, and the Middle Passage, itself a voyage over a bottomless pit that claimed many. Similarly, the mystery of why the utopian imaginations of some would-be asteroid miners would include those who must work to survive—and others who might be leaving Earth to flee for their lives—is unlocked when we see that that the one depends on the other. The figure of the desperate, vulnerable refugee is necessary and realistic in this worldview. If existing economic structures that maximize return on investment are extended into space, capitalism will need someone with desires and needs to exploit. Utopia, when it is instrumentalized to perpetuate naturalized hierarchies, often comes wrapped in the righteous flag of realism. Those already in power construct their ideal world by promoting more of the same, and calling it human nature. And in this good place, thanks to lobbying efforts in 2015, the asteroid miners won’t have to go before The Hague.
In December 2019, President Trump signed the United States Space Force Act, establishing the Space Force as a new branch of the American military. This was the fulfillment of a longstanding goal in certain sectors of space science and military strategy. In February 1958, eight months before NACA became NASA, President Eisenhower had established ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The primary purpose of ARPA—later with “Defense” appended to it to become DARPA—was to maintain research and development projects in space science for the Defense Department in the post-Sputnik era of the Cold War. The tension between military and civilian applications of space was present right in the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year, which saw the launch of the Soviet Sputnik and American Explorer 1 satellites. Would the descendants of these craft be used for science, or for war?
The Space Race was, of course, inextricable from the Cold War, and space-based military capabilities were handled by the US Air Force during much of that period, backed up by research from DARPA. The United States Space Force traces its lineage to these realpolitik legacies, but it also has deeper roots in science fiction. The first use of that name to describe the military branch responsible for the defense of interests in outer space might be in J.W. Campbell’s story “Mightiest Machine,” in the 1935 collection Astounding Stories. And the second might be in Wernher von Braun’s The Mars Project, where the “Space Force of the U.S.A.” is “coequal with the Air Force, Army and Navy.”7 This is the branch of the military responsible for winning World War III against Communist Eastern nations.
In 1960, Arthur C. Clarke speculated, in an article for Playboy, about a future in which an American Space Force might develop a weapon capable of blacking out the sun, and use it to threaten enemies abroad.8 Trump’s Space Force is, like many of the imaginaries we see catalogued here, an old future, warmed back up like a classic science fiction franchise given a gritty reboot. The language in publications and press releases from the US Space Force, though, is almost beyond parody and fiction: outer space is a new “theater” for conflict here, and America needs the Space Force in order to maintain “dominance,” “superiority,” and even “supremacy” within it.9
If property rights are the basis for a capitalist economy, then the right to possess and exploit material in space, as upheld by Obama’s SPACE Act of 2015 (which affirmed property) and Trump’s executive order of 2020 (which disavowed common heritage), is the foundation of a space economy. A Space Force is an obvious next step, with the capability to defend those rights on behalf of American interests. The supporters of the Space Force see threats to those interests in emerging state actors like China, and in other established ones like the old Russian rivals.
These are the same fears about state power that von Braun, in 1948, imagined such a space force might face down. But in all likelihood, the US Space Force will also act in ways that transcend the state. If there is the necessity for proprietary “safety zones” on the Moon, to protect others from the harmful effects of transportation and mining, then some kind of regulatory agency will be necessary to administer them. In the void left behind after the rejection of the commons, the Space Force may be poised to step into that role. If the would-be Moon and asteroid miners want to extend the status quo, it’s not hard to imagine that the Space Force exists in part to defend that status quo. Dominance is the dominant paradigm, and unless it is undermined, it will remain so.
As this history shows, aspirations about a permanent human presence in space have long been intertwined with fears about dominance and annihilation. The L5 Society, the inheritors of O’Neill’s legacy, even cultivated ties with the Reagan administration during the 1980s, when his Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” seemed to offer a way out from under Senator Proxmire’s targeted destruction of civilian space initiatives.10 Military supremacy is an implied—but crucial—component of expansive, colonial, and extractive planetary imaginations, and the language used to describe and promote life in space often perpetuates these ways of thinking.11 Like von Braun’s midcentury pitches to the military and to the public, which capitalized on fears of nuclear holocaust in order to build support for his agenda, these strategic alliances beg the very same question of space settlement enthusiasts. Once again: What kind of world are you willing to make, or at least tolerate, in order to get the kind of world that you want?
The desire for infinite expansion and exploration is often presented as a given in the stories this book discusses. While these impulses clearly exist in some human cultures and people, they are by no means universal. According to Alice Gorman, an archaeologist who studies sites and histories of human inhabitation on Earth as well as in space, narratives that frame attributes like “curiosity” and “the urge to explore” as universally a part of “human nature” have been used to de-humanize indigenous people, and to construct their land as “terra nullius,” and therefore as fair game for colonization and exploitation.12 Principles and practices in land development recognize the concept of “highest and best use” for a given piece of territory. If the people who currently occupy it are not curious about how to use it in other ways or about what might exist somewhere else, this worldview imagines, then it is okay for those who are inquisitive and expansive to turn it to their own ends.
The capability to move to a new territory, exploit it until it is depleted, and then move on to others is not necessarily correlated with long-term, species-level survival. In a 2019 article for Acta Astronautica, Martin Elvis, a Harvard astro-physicist, and Tony Milligan, an ethicist at King’s College London, build an argument about space resources based on the principles of exponential growth and induced demand. These forces, they show—given even a modest 3.5 percent growth rate in the space economy—imply that existing amounts of mineral resources in the Solar System would be exhausted within a relatively short timeframe, slightly less than 500 years.13 The line goes up and to the right, and it does so very quickly.
If this is the case, they speculate, then maybe it is prudent to set some kind of trip wire, an alert triggered at an inflection point beyond which there is no return. Humans have a hard time intuitively grasping the effects or scale of exponential functions, as we’ve seen over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this in mind, the authors recommend setting this alarm to go off when only one-eighth of available resources have been used, which would occur in time to allow for the space economy to be retooled toward some kind of steady-state existence. Given the wildly rapid doubling that occurs in such functions, this inflection point might be reached after only 400 years. If the utopia of indefinite expansion into the cosmos is achieved, but no one puts the brakes on at that point, there may be less than a century left after that before a Club of Rome–style total collapse devastates the entire Solar System.
If the second-best time to limit the exploitation of space resources is 400 years in the future, then maybe the best time to do it is now. The paper’s authors warn against the dangers presented by “vested and competing interests” if humanity keeps marching blindly toward the crisis point. Indeed, this kind of conflict between actors invested in space resources is exactly the situation that asteroid mining paradigms already anticipate, and that the US Space Force is now mobilizing to defend. Earth, as we’ve seen, is already in space. Constant growth is not a sustainable strategy, inherently and by design. If the application of intentional limits to growth—or at least growth to limits—is sensible 400 years from now in space, then it is sensible now on Earth.
A counterargument, brought by growth proponents like Bezos and O’Neill, would suggest that to limit growth is never a viable strategy. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz’s first principle says that “what happens in space happens on Earth.” But the unavoidable math of induced demand and exponential growth shows that unless change happens alongside growth, the expansion of human life as it is will only lead to more and more suffering. The corollary would be “What happens on Earth happens in space.”14
The dominant paradigm for space settlement depends on the exportation of Earthly planetary imaginations to new worlds. Why not redefine that dominant Earthly worldview before bringing it elsewhere? When extraction, expansion, and colonialism needs singular force—a Space Force—to back up growth, then the potential for destruction grows alongside everything else. As J.D. Bernal and other opponents of nuclear force knew, a capability gained is one step away from a capability used. And the capabilities that will need to be developed for permanent life in space are as dangerous as they are powerful. Forget, for a moment, all of the unknowns inherent in space settlement, on which writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the Strugatsky brothers dwelled. Even if those of us interested in space only account for the knowns, we find that any work to expand into it forever will create capabilities that will potentially kill billions.
Staying with the Mess
So if we humans must dwell anywhere, maybe we should dwell on these unknowns, on the gaps and lacunae that our optimism elides. This kind of thinking is messy, but if the clarity offered by those who would build a utopia based on exponential growth and naturalized assumptions about human nature is inherently deadly, then messy thinking might be on the side of life.
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling, onetime cyberpunk and editor of the genre’s key anthology Mirrorshades, built a Solar System–wide future history, called the Shaper/Mechanist universe, in the 1980s based on a version of O’Neill’s paradigm that was messy and always on the verge of a breakdown. There are O’Neill cylinders here, almost completely consumed by out-of-control fungal rot, or taken over by strange crime syndicates who put on plays. Asteroid mining is accomplished not by mechanical drills and brute force, but by subtle genetic manipulation that produces caustic acids and plastics that skillfully erode and crush the rock into useful base components, sometimes then used to produce powerful sculptural artwork.
In the introduction to a 1995 omnibus collection of stories set in this timeline, Schismatrix Plus, Sterling writes about the methodology for world-building that informed his project: “When I began to work on the Shaper/Mechanist pieces, I had learned how to stop reading so much science fiction. By that time, I was already brimful. Instead, I learned how to absorb the kind of material that science fiction professionals themselves like to read.” First among the material Sterling lists is Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, which Sterling calls “a stellar masterpiece of cosmic speculation.”15 Sterling is, like his fellow cyberpunk author William Gibson in Neuromancer, using older models to critique and deconstruct the O’Neill paradigm and the clean, shiny Usborne future.
The second book that Sterling cites is Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing the Universe, which prioritizes the messy bottom-up methodology of life over the cold top-down calculus of defense and exploitation. Experimental architect and researcher Rachel Armstrong has also created a body of space settlement work based on Dyson’s worldview. Unlike the O’Neill paradigm that would undertake the hopeless task of trying to exclude “pests” from future space habitats, Armstrong advocates for inviting them in right from the start. “This is not a clinically clean, sanitized vision that sterilizes its spacecraft of opportunistic microbial passengers,” she writes. “It is dirtier, contaminated, and full of surprises.”16 Armstrong, in her 2017 collection Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship, sketches a future in which the mud, mess, bacteria, mold, and soil are not afterthoughts, but the primary heroic subjects of space exploration and settlement.
Maybe the clearest and most complete paradigm for existence in space—one that embraces slime, living in cans, and the revolutionary potential of all the awkward unknown novelty that will come along with this new mode—is expressed in a podcast launched in 2017. The Intergalactic Railroad is a place where the otherwise-anonymous hosts—Mike and Max—and a rotating cast of guests, talk about their aspirations for an unapologetically Marxist space program. Their vision has roots in the cosmism of Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky, and especially Bogdanov, and branches in a future where everyone has the capability to “live forever and go anywhere.” In a manifesto-like episode titled “The Biocosmopolitan Deathmarch Review,” they lay out their position directly:
First, we will not make these journeys alone, we must bring our biosphere with us. Second, the worlds we explore are as precious as the Earth, and our primary goal should be to learn to commune with them rather than destroy them. If we fail this second goal, we will have lost the wisdom and knowledge these places contain, replacing it with some replication of our old lives, rendered a little cheaper and less meaningful by colonial denial.
There is an essential tension here, but it is not a contradiction. We must go, but we must respect the new worlds when we arrive. If that seems like too much to ask of humanity, then humanity must attempt to better itself. The universe is large and alive, and we are a part of the biocosm: the living world.17
This clear and radical acceptance of—even desire for—difference and difficulty is a refreshing contribution to dialogues about living in space. Writing about another Marxist post-cosmist space enthusiast, J. Posadas, researcher A.M. Gittlitz calls this tendency “xenophilia.” In a 2020 monograph, Gittlitz tells the story of Posadas, a Trotskyist political party leader from Argentina who advocated in favor of a nuclear first strike from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.18 The resulting war, Posadas hoped, would accelerate the worldwide revolutionary turn to Marxism, and maybe even draw the attention of advanced extraterrestrials, who would no doubt be communists themselves.
Posadas’s interest in aliens and space travel was highlighted after his death by two of his followers, Dante Minazzoli and Paul Schulz, who further developed this extraterrestrial hypothesis in their own writing and activism.19 Schulz, in particular, also became attracted to the work of Swedish UFO contactee and hoaxer Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier, and he bridged Posadas’s concept of communist aliens with Meier’s extended universe of ascended alien races. Meier himself is also a bridge figure: one of his fake photographs that purported to show a hyperspace portal to another world was actually an image taken from a NASA television broadcast, showing one of the paintings that Rick Guidice had made for Gerard O’Neill’s 1975 Ames Summer Study. Another of Meier’s photos, of a flying saucer that his ex-wife said he had made from a trash can lid, appears in the TV show The X-Files, as a poster on paranormal investigator Fox Mulder’s office wall, with the optimistic slogan from which Gittlitz’s book takes its title: “I Want to Believe.”20
Another slogan is the rallying cry of a different politically radical group interested in space exploration: “Don’t Let Them Leave.” This was the motto and manifesto of a conference held in Seattle in 2019, The Salish Sea Anti-space Symposium, “a first of its kind event to say NO TO SPACE EXPLOITATION!”21 The organizers of the SSASS hoped that this event, held in the home city of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon and Blue Origin, would be an opportunity to critique and oppose not just the capitalist efforts of the private NewSpace companies, but the idea of space travel and space settlement altogether. In this anti-escapist worldview, the drawbacks that come along with the capability of extending human life to outer space outweigh the benefits. The creation of a future line of flight away from Earth, its adherents fear, will not only reproduce existing hierarchies but create the potential for even more exploitation and destruction on a new and more dangerous scale.
Part of the utopian appeal of NASA’s overall project is that it seems like something anyone could potentially take part in. This is why stories of the agency’s Black astronauts are important: they both complicate and foreground the signals that NASA sends to the public about meritocracy and access to the future. When spaceflight is privatized, and a ticket to space—and by extension to a human future of expanded possibility—can be bought with, as Bezos puts it, his “Amazon winnings,” it’s harder to remain optimistic about that future. It can be depressing to see transcendence get commodified. The existence of NewSpace capabilities, and the way that some companies and actors in that arena have repurposed radical concepts of revolution, infinite potential, and novel ways of life, is another example of the uses to which utopian thinking can be put.
One reaction to this situation might be to fall back on a naturalized false realism: the wealthy and elite get to do things that ordinary people don’t, one might say; that’s just the way life is. But this is another case where realism is cover for someone else’s utopia. The anti-escapist mindset anticipates a future where the utopian capability that the elite have gained, the chance to leave Earth, might help accelerate the encroachment of dystopian conditions here. Similarly, anti-escapism and NewSpace need one another. The existence of NewSpace and the Space Force gives the anti-escapists something to point to, a foundation in the construction of a limited, closed, zero-sum world, where every dollar spent on space travel has been directly diverted from efforts that fight poverty or climate change. The button has not been pushed. Opposition to space travel, private or otherwise, is easily characterized as advocacy for the steady-state stagnation that Bezos and O’Neill are so afraid of, and it allows private spaceflight proponents to present their own worldview as dynamic and future forward, when it can be more accurately characterized as an indefinite perpetuation of existing modes.
But the world is more full, more complicated and messy than all that, and so are other worlds. The power of space settlement schemes that start with the mess, with the radical and even the senseless, is that they deny and mock cold cynical realism and naturalism right from the start. These schemes reject the codependent binary of utopia/dystopia, where the one is for me, and the other is for thee. There are more things in heaven and on Earth, after all. They use utopianism for what it is good at, not to provide cover for realism but to critique it, to undermine it, to change it by demanding the abundant and the impossible. In these biocosmist worlds, everyone will be able to, as the protagonists of The Intergalactic Railroad have it, “live forever and go anywhere”—even Jeff Bezos.
The Parts We Have
Despite the aspirations of the newest branch of the American armed forces, space is not a theater where one singular force can dominate or prevail. There are, rather, a proliferation of multiple forces and vectors out there, and they are all worth tracking. Anthropologist and artist Michael P. Oman-Reagan writes about human life and the human imagination in space. In a 2017 essay for the magazine Sapiens, “The Key to Survival in Space,” Oman-Reagan inventories some of the capabilities that will help support that survival, arguing that “we already have the tools we need, it’s time to use them.” The constant existential threats that the environment in space presents, Oman-Reagan says, will require that certain values and ways of life be prioritized. These include respect and care for the habitable environment; the maintenance and cultivation of diverse outlooks, viewpoints, and backgrounds; investment in science, but also in arts and culture; and commitment to mutual aid—even and especially for the kinds of refugees Chris Lewicki anticipates in space.22
Oman-Reagan’s inventory is a list of things that have not traditionally been perceived as technological, but, as Ursula K. Le Guin argues, they should. These political and social technologies, adapted as they are to create the interface between humans and their environments, should also be exported to space. But they are ideals that are too often left unhonored here in the first place. What should happen on Earth, should happen in space. The corollary of that formulation would be to say that what should not happen on Earth also should not happen in space.
The concept of “planetary protection” in space science comprises a set of practices that seek to ensure that worlds don’t contaminate one another as they are explored. Certain protocols are observed as spacecraft bound to Mars, for example, are assembled, and when human scientists eventually succeed at bringing samples from that planet back to Earth, certain other protocols will obtain in order to ensure that in the not-impossible event that Mars has biology, it won’t be able to harm life here. In 2020, an interdisciplinary group of authors wrote a white paper arguing that the principles and goals of planetary protection could and should be expanded and applied, not just to threats of biological contamination, but to prevent or mitigate the impact that harmful ethical or ideological transmission might precipitate in space. Specifically, the coauthors (Lucianne Walkowicz is one) argue that among the things that shouldn’t happen in space or on Earth are the perpetuation of colonialism, extraction, exploitation, or capitalism that disregards the value of life and difference, in the past and in the potential future.23
These are two brilliant applications of Le Guin’s notion of technology to issues that are central to the future possibilities of human life in space. And they illustrate how bound up our planetary imaginations are: Earth and space are not separate and opposed to one another, and when humans imagine, or enact, the occupation of one, they are also remaking the other. These inventories, of what is needed and of what should be rejected, are necessary for life on Earth just as much as they are for life in space.
The default mode, if these inventories are not attended to and applied, is for space exploration and space settlement to end up captured by the forces that are already poised to define and shape them. A singular militaristic/capitalistic paradigm has a head start here; indeed, it was launched along with the first V-2. But other technologies are not far behind. The Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Agreement, with their enshrined values of rescue and return, harm reduction, and common heritage, are in one sense, as absurd as the biocosmist demands for eternal life, or the Golden Ball’s promise of happiness for everyone in an endless Roadside Picnic. But in another sense, the expression and signaling of these priorities performs the function that utopianism should when it rejects realism outright.
The necessary part of the critical practice here is to reject attempts, like in the SPACE Act of 2015 and Trump’s executive order of 2020, to open up the frameworks of the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Agreement and allow capital and exploitation to escape Earth. The people can go, these documents say—let them leave, as long as we hold them, and ourselves, accountable to our common human values—but harmful worldviews shouldn’t go to other worlds. Once their expression is established in space, the transmission of these signals can go both ways, up and down. To take the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Agreement seriously is to acknowledge that these values must obtain everywhere. These artifacts and the practices they express exist in order to give humans the ability to critique the status quo—to ask, if these practices can and should exist in space, why don’t they exist on Earth?
These technological capabilities—existing, invented, and desired—are the parts of new worlds. They are the tools with which “we”—the people who are interested in going to space—can construct a new “we” that encompasses all of humanity. The selection of those components matters, but so does the manner of their assembly, and the legibility of the resulting construction. In building, architecture organizes parts and wholes, channeling and resolving the forces in play in order to create habitable space. These organizational structures and resolutions, and the sometimes-abstract ideas behind them, are often delightfully visible in the material result. In world-building and tectonics, expression, aspiration, and imagination—planetary and otherwise—matter as much as, if not more than, the built reality.