Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of faith at Wesleyan College, presents a radical analysis of this actual pathology in her 2022 e book Astrotopia: The Harmful Faith of the Company Area Race, which got here out in paperback final yr. All of it begins, appropriately sufficient, with the e book of Genesis, the place God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Through the years, this biblical mind worm has provided divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves because the non secular rocket gasoline propelling people into the subsequent frontier, Rubenstein argues.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2022 (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2024)
“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as a lot a mythological challenge as it’s a political, financial, or scientific one,” she writes. “It’s a mythology, actually, that holds all these different efforts collectively, giving them an aura of responsibility, 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 fans—even when these similar folks would possibly by no means describe themselves as non secular. If Earth is man’s dominion, area is the subsequent logical step. Earth is only a short-term staging floor for a better future; we are going to discover our deliverance within the heavens.
“Fuck Earth,” Elon Musk stated in 2014. “Who cares about Earth? If we will set up a Mars colony, we will nearly definitely colonize the entire photo voltaic 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 enormous civilian populations solid off into the orbital expanse, our residence world will be, in his phrases, “zoned residential and lightweight trade,” permitting it to get well from anthropogenic pressures.
Bezos additionally believes that area settlements are important for the betterment of humanity, partially on the grounds that they may uncork our inhabitants development. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled throughout the photo voltaic system, that might help a collective inhabitants of a trillion folks. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that might be.”
It does sound cool. But it surely’s a simple layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers recreation” method would additionally produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes.
And that’s the actual crux of the argument in opposition to pushing exhausting torapidly increase human civilization into area: We’ll nonetheless be people after we get there. We received’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—actually, we might exacerbate them.
