Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of faith at Wesleyan College, presents a radical analysis of this precise pathology in her 2022 guide 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 guide of Genesis, the place God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Through the years, this biblical mind worm has supplied divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves because the spiritual rocket gas 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, the truth is, 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 goals of area settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded fans—even when these identical individuals may by no means describe themselves as spiritual. 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 mentioned 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 huge civilian populations solid off into the orbital expanse, our dwelling world may be, in his phrases, “zoned residential and light-weight business,” 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’ll uncork our inhabitants development. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled throughout the photo voltaic system, that might assist a collective inhabitants of a trillion individuals. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that will be.”
It does sound cool. But it surely’s a simple layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers sport” strategy would additionally produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes.
And that’s the actual crux of the argument towards pushing onerous torapidly increase human civilization into area: We’ll nonetheless be people once we get there. We received’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—the truth is, we could exacerbate them.