LEAVE SPACE ALONE!

It seems like a lot of people are excited about the success of NASA's Artemis II mission. It's understandable in a way. So much of the news today is depressing and horrific. So who can avoid wanting to rejoice in a story of positive cooperation and success? But I ultimately am more unnerved by this development than anything.

Some say that it's a sign of the times that the American public can't center around this success and rejoice over it like we did when we had big successes in the space race in the 1960s. But a lot of that is simply looking at the past through a selective lens. Many protested the Apollo program at the time, citing issues like poverty in the United States and the war in Vietnam as more pressing and seeing attempts to send men into space as extremely indulgent in such a critical period. While it was true then as it is today that the space program paled in comparsion to things like military spending, the symbolism of it made NASA immediately suspect.

In some ways, then, the current missions aren't as different from the Apollo ones in terms of their socio-historical context. As we seem to be entering a new "Cold War" between the US/NATO and Russia/China, it should be no surprise that a new "space race" should accompany it. Space exploration was always, in part, motivated by the same muscle-flexing that leads to war and conflict. Even the most idealistic supporter of human space exploration, Carl Sagan, noted this near the end of Cosmos: the organizational skills and demands of space exploration are very similar to those of waging war. While it would be wonderful if humankind could truly turn swords into ploughshares and repurpose its instincts of war towards genuinly mutual scientific enterprises, it shouldn't surprise us that the direction will often be cynically reversed and that scientific discoveries will be directed towards the infrastructure of war and exploitation.

But the deepest problem of the missions is not that they are a misallocation of funds and resources nor that they have potentially offensive uses. To explain exactly why the missions make me unnerved, it's worth quoting Martin Heidegger in an interview where he talked about first seeing photos of the earth taken from the moon in 1966:

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]--the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char--a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.
Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel, 1966 [1]

I think Heidegger is so valuable here because he expresses a problem that is simple to understand, but often framed in unhelpful terms in the west. One of the all-time greatest American environmentalists, Bill McKibben, described the true tragedy of global heating all the way back in 1989 in a seminal book called The End of Nature. This title sounds extreme, but the name evokes the following idea: Once humans hold sway over the climate, we live in a world where everything is now "manmade." "Nature," as something separate from and larger than us, will retreat when we see everything as conditioned by our own emissions and consumptive habits.

It would be highly presumptuous of me to critique McKibben, who has done more for the environmentalist movement I could hope to achieve in a lifetime. I respect what he has done and continues to do even into his old age to no end. But I do also feel that this position is slightly symptomatic of an Abrahamic conception of "nature." When we look at the societies in this world on the periphery, the tribes who live in closest contact with the natural world, few of them seem to use a word like "nature" to refer to things around them. That is because McKibben's conception of "nature" as a sort of separate realm from humans, independent and higher, is a fiction. Nature has already always been "manmade," because we have always already been woven into the fabric of creation and stewardship. It could not be otherwise.

The real difference here is more subtle and, for that reason, more insidious. What McKibben describes here is the transition from the poetic to the scientific revealing of nature. In Heidegger's terms, this process begins when nature reveals itself to man primarily as "standing-reserve." All of nature presents itself to us as something to be used, in actuality or only in potential. This does not solely apply to the use of materials for economic purposes, like petroleum primarily "appearing" to us as a fuel source or silicon crystals primarily "appearing" to us as ingredients to make semiconductors. Whenever something first and foremost presents itself not as an entity with its own "autonomy" but as something to be measured, manipulated, calculated, and so on. It has passed into the realm of standing-reserve.

There is no one single best way to prevent everything around us from appearing as mere standing-reserve. but one of the most reliable ways is merely to leave parts of nature alone. This doesn't do everything. Take one of the best examples in the modern age: Machapuchare (pictured above). It is a peak in the Annapurna mountain range of Nepal which has to this day never been scaled because it is believed to be a space that is too sacred for humans to touch. Even here, Machapuchare is not totally disconnected from the activity of humans. The amount of snow on its peaks will vary as the climate of Nepal heats up. But it has been allowed to have some degree of autonomy over its own "revealing." This is a wonderful thing. If only more places on earth were treated with the same degree of sacredness.

And this is why I am unnerved by excitement over the Artemis II mission. It is true that the moon is less despoiled than Machapuchare, as 12 men have walked its surface. And it is true that no one on the Artemis II mission despoiled its surface further. But I see the excitement over the mission as one step towards the exploitation of the moon as a piece of standing-reserve. And the monstrousness of this is so extreme that it surprises me how few are afraid of it.

We are already losing the autonomy and natural purity of the night sky. The amount of satellites clogging our night sky is making stargazing less and less possible and is severing us from the most ancient and universal source of wisdom and meaning on earth: the constellations. Why are we so eager to do the same to the object in the night sky which is still most resistant to human attempts to control it? How great will the loss be if we look at the moon and see it as just another object under human control, as an object whose light is being controlled and swayed by the effects of humans on its surface. And the futility of it is perverse: Any attempt to create a livable human base on the moon would be exponentially harder than establishing human bases in even the most inhospitable parts of the earth like Antarctica and the Sahara Desert. I do not want humans to colonize these parts of the earth either, but it would be infinitely preferable if they did. At least the technical dominance would not be constantly in the face of every single person on earth every night.

I look with disgust on lunar programs naming themselves Apollo, Artemis, Kaguya, Chang'e, and the like. They name themselves after the very gods and heroes whose wisdom they seek to erode by potentially leading to the despoilation of the lunar surface through the establishment of lunar bases and eroding the pattern of the rabbit on its surface. It's easy to be pessimistic about the future of a night sky that looks anything like that which our ancestors knew. I particularly feel guilty as I may very soon be using Starlink for my internet if I end up moving to the countryside. I hope for infrastructure that is less satellite-dependent or at least is able to reduce the environmental costs of satellites. But if there is one thing I could never forgive, it would be intruding on the moon.

As I said, many of us are desperate for scientific stories that are positive and stoke our sense of wonder. Too often people suggest a problem without giving people something constructive. So I aim to show people the kind of stories that should be getting accolades and making us happy instead of the Artemis mission. Try to pay more attention to these than any space missions... Part of the power of these agencies is the cultural conditioning we have to respect them and pay attention to them:

LEAVE SPACE ALONE!

FOOTNOTES