Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of faith at Wesleyan College, presents a radical analysis of this actual pathology in her 2022 guide Astrotopia: The Harmful Faith of the Company House 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 provided divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves because the spiritual rocket gas propelling people into the following frontier, Rubenstein argues.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2022 (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2024)
“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as a lot a mythological mission 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 obligation, grandeur, and benevolence.”
Rubenstein makes a forceful case that malignant outgrowths of Christian concepts scaffold the goals of house settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded lovers—even when these similar folks may by no means describe themselves as spiritual. If Earth is man’s dominion, house is the following logical step. Earth is only a short-term staging floor for a higher 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 huge civilian populations forged off into the orbital expanse, our dwelling world might be, in his phrases, “zoned residential and lightweight trade,” permitting it to get better from anthropogenic pressures.
Bezos additionally believes that house settlements are important for the betterment of humanity, partly on the grounds that they’ll uncork our inhabitants progress. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled throughout the photo voltaic system, that might assist a collective inhabitants of a trillion folks. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that may be.”
It does sound cool. However it’s a straightforward layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers recreation” strategy would additionally produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes.
And that’s the actual crux of the argument towards pushing laborious torapidly increase human civilization into house: We’ll nonetheless be people once we get there. We received’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—actually, we might exacerbate them.
