Rethinking the Final Frontier: Cosmo-Logics and an Ethic of Interstellar Flourishing

Abstract

In recent years a range of corporate and governmental entities have made increasingly strident moves toward the establishment of an off-Earth mining industry, often touting an imminent “gold rush in space.” For many proponents these proposals are thoroughly entangled with an even more ambitious set of possibilities for a new age of human history in space that will include the exploration and eventual colonization of extraterrestrial environments. This article takes off-Earth mining as an entry point into this complex terrain, exploring the way in which problematically homogenous notions of humanity and an open and available space are being deployed to do a kind of regulatory ethical work that simultaneously imposes and overcomes any limits to off-Earth expansion. In contrast to such an approach, this article aims to develop an ethics of interstellar flourishing grounded in an attentiveness to the consequential processes of worlding that are already linking up and remaking possibilities for everyone, both on and off-world.

近年来，若干企业与政府精英逐渐朝发展地球外的矿业大幅迈进，并经常吹捧“太空淘金潮”即将到来。对诸多倡议者而言，这些提案完全牵涉崭新的人类太空历史之更具野心的各种可能性，这些可能性将包含探索、最终并殖民地球外的环境。本文利用地球外的採矿作为此一复杂领域的切入点，探讨同质的人类和开放且可及的太空这些具有疑义的概念，如何被运用来进行同时施加并克服任何地球外扩张的限制之规范性伦理工作。与此般方法不同的是，本文企图建立星际繁荣的伦理，并植基于对世界化的必然过程的关注，该过程已连结并重塑世界上或世界之外的每个人的可能性。

En años recientes, una gama de entidades corporativas y gubernamentales han dado pasos cada vez más estridentes hacia el establecimiento de una industria minera fuera de la tierra, a menudo promocionando una inminente “fiebre del oro en el espacio”. Para muchos de los proponentes tales designios están totalmente enredados en un conjunto de posibilidades aun más ambiciosas sobre una nueva edad de la historia humana en el espacio que incluirá la exploración y eventual colonización de entornos ambientales extraterrestres. Este artículo toma la minería extraterrestre como un portal de entrada en tan complejo terreno, explorando la manera con que se están desplegando problemáticamente nociones homogéneas de humanidad y un espacio abierto y disponible, para hacer un tipo de trabajo ético regulador que simultáneamente impone y rebasa cualquier tipo de límites a la expansión por fuera de la tierra. En contraste con tal tipo de enfoque, este artículo apunta a desarrollar una ética del florecimiento interestelar apoyada en una actitud inquisitiva de los procesos consecuentes de terrear [worlding] que ya están enlazando y reformulando posibilidades para todos, tanto dentro como fuer de este mundo.

Key Words:

• environmental humanities
• ethics
• flourishing
• space mining
• worlding

• 环境人文学科
• 伦理
• 繁荣
• 太空採矿
• 世界化

• humanidades ambientales
• ética
• florecimiento
• minería espacial
• terrear

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The preparation of this article was aided by presentations at Curtin University and the University of New South Wales. We are grateful for the helpful comments and feedback received at both venues and for insightful feedback from thee anonymous reviewers. Of course, any remaining errors, in either fact or interpretation, remain ours.

FUNDING

The preparation of this article was enabled by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT130101302).

Notes

1. See Mitchell (2017) for a discussion of the history of both astro-culture and astro-futurism, which consolidated in the 1920s projection of a future characterized by international space flight and the colonization of the moon and other planets.

2. This form of ethical reasoning is especially apparent in the field of bioethics, which broadly consents to the triumphal announcement of an age of biological control limited only by appeals to commonly accepted ethical principles. This dualism between human (technological) freedom and moral and ethical restriction has been the focus of thorough critique, particularly in recent histories of secular thought that have problematized the notion of human freedom as a starting point for an account of human subjectivity (Taylor 2007) and feminist analyses of science and technology that have equally problematized the implicit gendering of the relationship between science and humanities (Franklin 2001; Haraway 2008).

3. In recent years these constellations of “NewSpace” capitalism, and their intersections with broader imaginations of the future(s) of human life both on and off this planet, have provided a rich topic for analysis (see, e.g., Valentine, Olson, and Battaglia 2012).

4. O’Neill’s vision of the high frontier was partly inspired by a desire to decouple humans from the exploitation of terrestrial resources and environments. More recent notions of decoupling are seemingly providing similar forms of discursive sustenance in the context of Anthropocene thinking.

5. It is also important to note that space exploration and settlement have been politically contested on precisely these grounds at least since the first manned space flights, with concern centering on the very earthly implications of state investment in extraterrestrial technological projections. Latour (2004) recorded, for example, that California’s first Space Day, held in August 1977, was attended by iconic cultural figures and space visionaries (Timothy Leary, Gerard O’Neill, Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau, and Robert Crumb) while protestors outside the museum “wav[ed] signs proclaiming ‘Jobs on Earth, Not in Space’” (3).

6. This figure of the human appears in a number of guises in recent environmental thinking; as homo economicus, the naturally greedy “economic man” that characterizes liberal economic and political thought (and some forms of recent popular science); as capital, which is often presented as possessing uniquely expansionist tendencies; as the anthropos as a figure for a collective “age of man” characterized by the “great acceleration” in human resource consumption in the constitution of the modern human.

7. See Sariola and Simpson (2011) and Steffen et al. (2015) for recent discussions of the neocolonial dimensions of bioethics.

8. Passed by House (21 May 2015) and being considered by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

9. Of course, common heritage approaches often raise their own concerns, including a diverse range of equity problems (Hayden 2003).

10. See, for example the work of Hamacher and colleagues (Norris and Hamacher 2014).

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article was enabled by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT130101302).

Notes on contributors

Matthew Kearnes

MATTHEW KEARNES is an Associate Professor and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Environmental Humanities Group, School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].au. His research focuses on the social and political dimensions of technological and environmental change.

Thom van Dooren

THOM VAN DOOREN is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Humanities Group, School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].au. His research focuses on the ethical and political dimensions of conservation and extinction.