On October 23, 2020, one day after the last presidential debate and seven months into an epidemiological nightmare that closed schools, crippled local businesses, and killed hundreds of thousands of disproportionately Black, Brown, Indigenous, old, poor, and incarcerated Americans, the G.O.P. tweeted a final distillation of its campaign platform:

Pres. Trump is fighting for YOU! Here are some of his priorities for a 2nd term:
*Establish Permanent Manned Presence on the Moon
*Send the 1^st Manned Mission to Mars

After the Moon and Mars came “Infrastructure” and “WiFi,” and then in a follow-up tweet, the G.O.P. promised a COVID vaccine, medical supplies, and pharmaceuticals. But they clearly wanted the Moon and Mars out front. Why worry about respirators when you could dream about rockets?

Although President Biden parts company with this predecessor on most areas of policy, space is not one of them. Almost immediately after his Press Secretary laughed it off, Biden affirmed his enthusiastic support for Trump’s absurdly conceived and murderously advertised Space Force and also announced his intentions to proceed with the Trump-Pence vision for NASA, perhaps with a slightly longer timeline. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris voiced her full support in a frankly beautiful video call with Victor Glover, the first African American astronaut to live on the International Space Station. So here’s the plan as it stands.

First, we’re going back to the Moon — permanently this time — and then we’re headed to Mars. It’s a mission that NASA calls Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the Moon, who also happened to be the twin sister of Apollo, the god of the Sun. NASA’s tagline, “Moon to Mars,” says it all: they’re building a lunar outpost, which will in turn serve as a launching pad to the Red Planet.

How will they do this? With the joint power of NASA and the so-called “NewSpace” industries: those telecommunications, tourism, space-mining, and aspirationally colonial corporations led by billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These corporations already carry astronauts and cargo for NASA. In the near future, they hope to mine asteroids and the Moon to produce the water, ore, and rare-earth metals necessary to create enough extra-terrestrial fuel and materials to get us to Mars. Investors will fund these endeavors thanks to Obama-era legislation that ensures corporations have the right to sell whatever they manage to plunder from planetary bodies and pass the profits to shareholders.

Why are they doing this? That’s a different question. What could they possibly be thinking, especially as Earth convulses with medical, ecological, military, and ideological disasters that arguably demand our energetic priority?

Well, if you ask Musk, the Moon-to-Mars plan is actually a result of these medical, ecological, military, and ideological disasters. Whether it’s a nuclear weapon, a killer virus, climate change, or an errant asteroid, something is bound to wipe out most of humanity soon, so we’d better start colonizing a back-up planet.

The snake-oil Musk is selling relies on an old-fashioned story of disaster and salvation. And it’s just one part of a powerful mythic resurrection, a techno-transnational remix of European-style colonialism: “resource” extraction; corporate-imperial cooperation; divine mandates; “empty” land; tall, thin structures stretching to the sky; and a remarkably resilient hierarchy of beings.

Unlike the corporate utopianism of Musk, the scientific militarism of Artemis and the Space Force downplays impending disaster and appeals instead to dusty tropes of the pioneering American spirit. As Trump declared in his last State of the Union address, we are going back to the Moon and then to Mars because space is “the next frontier” and it is our duty to “embrace . . . America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”

Manifest Destiny, we might recall, was the idea that God wanted European-descended Americans to occupy the whole North American continent. The doctrine found its fullest legal articulation in the 1862 Homestead Act, which parceled out Western land to non-treasonous citizens for $1.25 an acre. Of course, the U.S. government could only sell this land by taking it from Native Americans, who were murdered and displaced so that white Americans could answer their allegedly God-given calling on the frontier, which they proceeded to overfarm and pave over, strip-mine and strip-mall. In short, the former president’s invocation of Manifest Destiny is deeply troubling to those who object to the violence committed in its name against Indigenous peoples, their land, and the buffalo and other creatures who lived there.

In response to these sorts of arguments, leftish space enthusiasts tend to insist that the comparison of a Martian settlement to Manifest Destiny is strictly rhetorical, intended to stir the hearts of middle-class Americans with Davy Crockett nostalgia. But the projects, they argue, are completely different. After all, there are no people on Mars. Or the Moon. Or those ore-laden asteroids. No people, no trees, no animals — maybe microbes, but who’s going to argue that microbes have rights? So, unlike the earthly frontier, which Europeans mistakenly thought was empty, the final frontier of space is genuinely empty, and therefore ours for the taking.

As founder of the utopian Mars Society Bob Zubrin puts it, “On Mars, we have a chance to create something new with clean hands. We’re not going to Mars to steal other people’s property; we’re going to Mars to create — not just property but a society.” Or as astrobiologist David Grinspoon argues, “On Mars and beyond, we may have the opportunity to explore lands that are truly unoccupied, giving outlet to our need to explore without trampling on others.” All we’d be trampling on is dust, dirt, dead “earth,” or, in the words of whoever writes the official Mars Curiosity Rover’s Twitter feed, “a pile of rocks.” So, Grinspoon concludes, “Is Mars ours for the taking? . . . [I]f by ‘we,’ we mean ‘life,’ then yes, Mars belongs to us because this universe belongs to life. I mean, without us, what’s the point?”

So the race to extract space resources and colonize other planets is on. China ended 2020 by collecting moon rocks and depositing them on Earth; NASA plans to send its first Artemis mission to the Moon in 2021 and to have a permanent outpost there by 2024 (when the UAE and Israel hope to arrive, as well); China’s space probe reached Mars just before NASA’s Perseverance, with the UAE and Virgin Galactic close behind; China is beginning construction of its own space station; Jeff Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon so he can spend more time moving heavy industry and most of the human population off the Earth (which he’ll rehearse this year through some civilian flights); Richard Branson has resumed ticket sales for his own tourist flights aboard Virgin Galactic; Axiom Space is selling $55 million-dollar passes for a 10-day civilian trip on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station; some pop-up space outfit is suddenly promising a Ferris wheel-shaped space hotel by 2027; and Elon Musk wants to take a million human beings to the Red Planet’s hellscape surface beginning in 2030. Meanwhile, the military-communications industry has filled low Earth orbit with so much garbage (“we live in a corona of trash,” says the New Yorker) that some fear we won’t be able to launch anything in a few decades’ time. The pioneers had better move quickly.

Thus we find ourselves in an escalating transnational, corporate, cosmogonic clamor. A frenetic competition — not just to make money, but to make worlds. To create, like that old God of the Fathers, out of the infinite nothing of space. But where did we get the idea that there’s nothing in space, and that it’s therefore unworthy of ethical treatment? Where did we get the idea that the water on the Moon is lying in wait for humans to come take it, or that the rocks on Mars are “just” rocks?

“Isn’t it just the case?” you may ask. “Rocks can’t think, eat, or move; they have no will or desires; it’s objectively the case that rocks are just rocks.” But what I’d like to suggest is that it’s only subjectively the case that rocks are “just rocks.” It’s not pure science, pure empiricism, or pure anything at all; the ideas that rocks are just rocks and space is just space are true within the framework and legacy of Western monotheism.

Okay, what the hell am I talking about?

As it narrates the origins of the universe, Genesis 1 tells us three times that humans are made in the image of God. Consequently, we learn, humans are in charge of everything else:

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (1:28)

Genesis 2 and 3 sketch this cosmic hierarchy in more detail, with Adam in charge of Eve, both of them in charge of animals, and all of those beings eating the plants to which they’re superior. This sketch becomes the basis of what the medieval period called “The Great Chain of Being,” a comprehensive ordering of creation stretching from God and the angels down through man, beasts, plants, fire and, you’ve got it, rocks.

Now modern science has no use for God or angels, but it has fastidiously retained the rest of that order. Think of the five biological kingdoms as textbooks tend to diagram them: bacteria rank below fungus and vegetation, which rank below animals. Of the animals, humanity, often just called Man, is consistently said to be the most complex, the most advanced, most important, and most deserving of protection. And, of course, this scientific Man is not only primarily male, but primarily white. From phrenology to pharmaceutical testing and non-consensual surgeries, dark-skinned humans are consistently subjected to biomedical violences that serve the interests of a wealthy subset of light-skinned Man. The whole universe serves the interests of a wealthy subset of light-skinned Man, from BIPOC essential workers to women of color tumbling out of employment to factory-farmed animals to clear-cut forests to flash-frozen probiotics to rocks, which don’t even make it into the biological diagrams. (“Of course they’re not in the diagrams,” say the biologists, “rocks aren’t alive. Rocks are just rocks.”)

But what about cultures that don’t stem from Western monotheisms? Many of them teach that humans are not created by a transcendent God who stamps his image on them and gives them dominion over the Earth. Rather, other human communities are created by other sorts of beings — snakes and turtles and coyotes and women who dive to Earth from the sky. Under the sway of totally different creation stories, and totally different orders of creation, many non-Western and Indigenous cultures teach that (some) rocks are alive, or sacred, or both, and that they are therefore worthy of human respect and caretaking.

Take the example of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope on Hawai’i’s Mauna Kea. The University of Hawai‘i and NASA have been trying for years to construct it, despite the vigorous objections of Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians), who insist that the mountain is sacred and ought not to suffer any more damage at the hands of Western science. What do I mean by “more damage”? Well, it turns out there are other telescopes on this mountain — thirteen of them — each of which was said to be temporary at the time of its construction and each of which has stayed around, bringing traffic and environmental degradation to the mountain.

What do I mean by “sacred”? As anthropologist and Kanaka activist Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explains, Mauna Kea is at once a temple, or house of worship; an ancestor; and a living relative of the Kanaka Maoli. The mountain is the place Hawaiians go to pay reverence to their origins and their family members, including the mountain itself, who is said to be the firstborn child of the Earth Mother and Sky Father and sibling to the creator of the stars, people, and vegetation. In the words of Noenoe Silva, “we are part of a family that includes the sun, stars, ocean, and everything else in the world.”

Much like anyone else, the Kanaka Maoli are taught to care for their family members, and Mauna Kea is their family member. It’s not just a rock or a super-high place with a clear enough sky to see back in time through hundred-foot telescopes. It’s a living being, a temple, and the umbilical cord between the heavens and the Earth. When faced with objections to the construction of another telescope on Mauna Kea, the scientists tell the press that they’re facing backward, primitive people who don’t understand that a rock is just a rock, and who need to enter the 21^st century. The defenders, on the other hand, say they’re already living in the future and have no desire to subject their land to continued abuse at the hands of the people who’ve paved over, mined, and fracked so much of the globe in the name of modernity. And for the crime of protecting their land from such desecration, Kanaka elders have been carted away by the dozens in police vans.

We might also consider the Bawaka people of Australia’s Northern Territory, who are beginning to raise concerns about the industrial nations’ astronautic behavior. For these Aboriginal astronomers, what Westerners call “outer space” is Sky Country, where the ancestors live, and which is subject to the same respect and care as their land. Every person who dies is sent through ritual song on a journey from Earth to sky along the River of Stars, where they will continue to live and influence the affairs of their people. The Bawaka people are worried that escalating efforts to mine asteroids, conquer the Moon, and colonize Mars will not only pile even more garbage into the skies, but will also disrupt the passage of souls and the habitation of the ancestors. Space, in other words, is neither “outer” nor empty, but part of the everyday lifeworld of the community.

I haven’t yet heard of any official responses to this Bawaka concern. But when a small, tireless group of justice-seeking astronomers submitted a white paper arguing for an anticolonial exploration of space, they incurred the rage and disdain of Zubrin, the-well-funded Mars advocate, who accuses the authors of backwardness, irrationality, “wokeism,” and even “ancient pantheistic mysticism and postmodern social thought.” As for NASA and Bezos and Musk, they don’t even seem to be paying attention. But what if they did? What if the boards of directors at NASA and Blue Origin and SpaceX actually included native Hawaiians, Aboriginal Australians, the water-defending Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council — not for the purpose of taking multicultural Instagram shots before storming off to mine the universe, but in order to rethink our relation to it?

Are the heavens really empty? Are they really uninhabited? Do planetary bodies have any right to exist for their own sake, or are they just there for human consumption, recreation, and profit? What if the astronautical industry were simply to consider the teaching that there are people in the Milky Way, or histories in Martian rocks, or life in lunar water; how would it treat exploration differently? How would people whose communities have been decimated by settler colonialism go about settling or colonizing other planets? Or would they caution their fellow earthlings to stay the hell at home?

In the process of such a conversation, the good people of the space industry might realize they have their own reasons to proceed with respect and care. After all, whether they want to stay or go, no one wants Earth to be imprisoned in a corona of trash. Presumably, no one wants to be space-bombed by some renegade nation or corporation. And even the most adamant secularist would admit that the rocks on Mars hold histories we’re just beginning to understand. So it would behoove us not to destroy this extraterrestrial archaeological site by strip-mining, contaminating, or “nuking it.” (You know, says Musk, to warm it up.)

I’ll admit it: I’m not sure there is a way to explore “space” without exploiting it. But if we want to try to find one, we need first to acknowledge that the basic assumptions of astronomy, physics, militarism, and capitalism are just as mythologically produced as the accounts of Mauna Kea and the River of Stars. These Western-mythic assumptions include the inanimacy of minerals, the possibility of objectivity, the importance of dominance, the promise of profit, and the expansionist “destiny” of a chosen subsection of humankind. From this shared recognition, spacefarers could begin to ask not which myths are “true,” but which might ground thoughtful and sustainable ways of relating to the Earth we’re part of and the universe we’re trying to join. In other words, we don’t need to determine whether mountains are actually people, whether water is actually alive, or whether souls are actually residents of the stars. All we need to do is to ask how we’d act toward them if they were.

 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author, most recently, of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination, with Thomas Carlson and Mark C. Taylor (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She teaches religion and science studies at Wesleyan University, has received support from Wesleyan’s College of the Environment, and is grateful for the early editorial help of Winfield Goodwin, Kēhaulani Kauanui, Ephraim Rubenstein, and Kenan Rubenstein.