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ABSTRACT
In 2017, the government of Dubai announced plans to create the first human settlement on Mars within one hundred years. This article considers how the ‘Mars 2117’ project and its Earth-bound beta tests represent an increasingly global and vanguard relationship to the materials we call nature, where the goal of politics is about making a new kind of habitat rather than the creation of a polis. Mars 2117 reveals the ways in which the present grounds for authoritarian legitimacy in the UAE are, in effect, on loan, for which the future functions as a form of collateral for its present day governance structure, and is hedged upon the engineered anticipation of a people, a place, and an infrastructure to come. Anticipatory authoritarianism names a form of authority being innovated to skip over political contradictions and environmental limits caused by the feedback between peak oil and irreversible climate change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Saeed is modelled after Saeed Al Gergawi, the current Director of the Mars 2117 programme at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) and Mission Strategist for the Emirates Mars Mission, tasked with launching the UAE Hope probe in 2020.
2 For a detailed description of autocratic openness in relation to Dubai, see Vora’s Impossible Citizens (Citation2013).
3 Mars One Ventures, the for-profit outfit of the Mars One mission that promised to create the first human settlement on Mars, was declared bankrupt by a Swiss court in January 2019. See Cooper (Citation2019).
4 The Blue Moon project is designed to create a permanent settlement on the Moon as a launchpad for Mars. See https://www.blueorigin.com/blue-moon
5 For a comprehensive account of the competing space narratives ranging from geopolitics to transhumanism, see Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies, Oxford (Citation2020).
7 This fantasy structure may also be ‘pre-Islamic’ depending on the project. I have written elsewhere about this temporal folding in the UAE with regard to Legoland Dubai, and the linking of Petra and the Giza pyramids to the Burj Khalifa (Grove, Citationforthcoming).
8 For more on autocratic openness, see Vora.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nicole Sunday Grove
Nicole Sunday Grove is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa. Her work examines the globalization of security and surveillance technologies, and the relationship between space, security and design.