{"id":625784,"date":"2023-04-05T09:50:02","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T14:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/05\/humanitys-return-to-the-moon-is-a-deeply-religious-mission\/"},"modified":"2023-04-05T09:50:02","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T14:50:02","slug":"humanitys-return-to-the-moon-is-a-deeply-religious-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/05\/humanitys-return-to-the-moon-is-a-deeply-religious-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanity\u2019s return to the moon is a deeply religious mission"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NASA revealed<\/a> on Monday the names of the four astronauts who will travel around the moon as part of the Artemis II program<\/a>. The crew includes two historic firsts: the first woman, Christina Koch, and the first person of color, Victor Glover, to go on a lunar mission. Hailed by NASA spokespeople as \u201cpioneers\u201d and \u201cexplorers,\u201d they were greeted with fanfare befitting \u201chumanity\u2019s crew.\u201d <\/p>\n

But behind the Artemis II program are much more corporate goals. It\u2019s not just that private industry helped build<\/a> the program\u2019s spacecraft. Space mining companies competing for government contracts want to turn the moon into a cosmic gas station. The vision is to mine the lunar surface for rocket fuel that can then propel us all the way to Mars \u2014 and beyond, as humanity takes its self-appointed place in the stars. <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein told me that vision makes her want to throw up. A Wesleyan professor of religion and science in society, she\u2019s the author of the new book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s \u201creligion\u201d doing in that title, and why is a religion professor writing a book about the space program? Rubenstein argues that today\u2019s corporate space race \u2014 helmed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and others who propose to \u201csave\u201d humanity<\/a> from a dying planet \u2014 is actually rehashing old Christian themes that go all the way back to the 15th century, when European Christians colonized the Americas. Remember how Donald Trump described the Artemis mission and eventual settlement of the moon and Mars? He called it \u201cAmerica\u2019s manifest destiny in the stars.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

But as Rubenstein points out, not everyone thinks it\u2019s the moon\u2019s destiny to be strip-mined, or Mars\u2019s destiny to be settled by human colonists. In fact, some believe these celestial bodies should have fundamental rights of their own. <\/p>\n

I talked to Rubenstein about the fear of screwing up space like we\u2019ve screwed up Earth: Is that really a fear of trampling on space\u2019s own intrinsic value, or is it more a fear about human nature? A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.<\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

When you see news about space exploration, like the announcement about who will be going to the moon next year, is your dominant feeling \u2026 excitement? Dread?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s a little bit of dread. Because I worry that all this is getting going before the public really understands what\u2019s happening. <\/p>\n

One thing I\u2019m worried about is that some of the astronauts will be tokenized to make it clear that Artemis is a feminist and anti-racist movement. But if we\u2019re looking to make space exploration a liberationist project, just putting representatives of different identity groups there isn\u2019t going to be enough. I worry that it\u2019ll look like the job is somehow done because there is a woman and a person of color on this mission. <\/p>\n

The mission itself needs to be analyzed from a feminist and anti-racist perspective first. Then you figure out how to do it well, and then you figure out who\u2019s going to be on it. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

There are two words you use to refer to the corporate space race in your book, and the rationale for using those words might not be obvious to readers. You talk about it as \u201creligion\u201d and as \u201ccolonial.\u201d Why?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

What I\u2019m arguing is that the new corporate space race is an extension and intensification of the initial space race of the late \u201950s and into the early \u201970s. And that that space race is an extension and intensification of the colonial project that settled the Americas.<\/p>\n

The journey that Europeans made across the seas to conquer the Americas and then the journey that white-descended Americans made across the North American continent through what\u2019s known as Manifest Destiny gets extended in the mid-20th century as a new frontier is proclaimed to be open, the frontier of outer space. The space race is a new chapter in European-style colonialism \u2014 a vertical extension of that colonial project \u2014 as an effort to get more land and more resources for an imperial nation. <\/p>\n

The colonial project that settled the Americas was underwritten at every major turn by religious language, religious authorities, religious doctrines. Perhaps most profoundly, the reason Spain was able to conquer the New World was that Pope Alexander VI declared that the New World was his to give \u2014 and he gave it to Spain. The conquistadors were underwritten by the head of the Roman Catholic Church; therefore God was endorsing the Spanish conquest of the New World.<\/p>\n

This language gets taken up in different ways later. You find a claim to land and resources and a justification for destroying indigenous communities, all authorized by biblical claims. North America is understood very early on to be what early preachers will call God\u2019s New Israel. Just as God gave the Land of Canaan to the Israelites on the proviso that they make it a holy land, God was now giving Europeans a new Canaan. The idea is: Go in there, cleanse it of all unholiness and devotion to any other gods, and establish a new kingdom dedicated to the glory of God. <\/p>\n

By the way, there are 20 towns in the US that are named<\/a> New Canaan. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

So if America is understanding itself to be God\u2019s new Israel, it\u2019s like saying Americans are God\u2019s new chosen people. How do those religious themes underwrite the modern corporate space race? <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

When Mike Pence spoke to space-industry professionals [in 2018], he quoted Psalm 139<\/a> and said that \u201ceven if we go up to the heavens, even there His hand will guide us.\u201d Then in 2020, Trump used the language of Manifest Destiny in his last State of the Union address when he was declaring his priorities for a second term. This was in the [beginning] of the pandemic, people were dying, and his first priority was going to the moon \u2014 to embrace \u201cAmerica\u2019s manifest destiny in the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was a call-out to the old idea of Manifest Destiny, that God wants light-skinned people of European heritage to inhabit not only the Eastern seaboard but the entire continent. Now the idea that Trump set forth was, it\u2019s not just the continent that God wants America to have, it\u2019s the entire universe.<\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

And just to be clear, lest people think this is just a Trump thing, this is very much something that the Biden administration has decided to continue, right?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

Absolutely. There\u2019s absolutely no difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to space. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

Some people object to using the word \u201ccolonialism\u201d in this context. We think of colonialism as a hugely harmful thing mostly because European colonizers were coming to inhabited lands and destroying indigenous peoples. But if the moon or Mars or space beyond our solar system is uninhabited<\/em>, how does \u201ccolonialism\u201d apply?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

The answer that seems compelling to you totally depends on your frame of reference. Perhaps the most difficult for secular, white Westerners to take on would be this. If you talk to indigenous people \u2014 I\u2019m thinking particularly of Inuit cosmology, of Ojibwe cosmology, of Bawaka cosmology from Australia \u2014 they will tell you that outer space isn\u2019t empty at all, that it actually is inhabited, that there are indigenous people there: their ancestors. <\/p>\n

For the Bawaka People, when people die, they\u2019re actually carried up into the Milky Way alongside the stars. So they\u2019re really concerned that if we mine there, we\u2019re actually doing damage to the habitation of the ancestors. And planetary bodies are often said to be sacred or to be divinities themselves. So, from different perspectives, it\u2019s not just a foregone conclusion that there is nothing out there. <\/p>\n

If that doesn\u2019t do it for you, colonialism was also fairly destructive for the nations who were doing the colonizing! At the moment we do not have a robust international legal structure in space. If you\u2019re able to set up, say, a mine there, you\u2019re going to have to defend your mine. So the US Space Force is going to be stationed around the mine to make sure nobody else goes there. And suddenly you\u2019ve got the same clamoring for land and resources that tore the nations apart in the late 19th century, and we had two world wars resulting from that. It seems like a bad idea to set ourselves up for that in space.<\/p>\n

Also, the pursuit of wealth and explosion of profit tends to make those who are already wealthy much wealthier. We know that widening the gap between exceedingly rich people and exceedingly poor people is not good for most of the population. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

What about ways that an extractive approach to space could potentially do damage to land? <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

This approach means we\u2019re going to get even more rocket launches than we currently have \u2014 Elon Musk sends 60 satellites up at a time \u2014 and more launch pads being created and those are usually created in spaces like wetlands. Boca Chica, Texas, for example, has been absolutely destroyed by the operations of SpaceX in that area. Ecologically it\u2019s a disaster. And low-Earth orbit is already so crowded<\/a> that it\u2019s very hard to see the stars, even for astronomers.<\/p>\n

The next thing to point out is that the colonial project has been destructive not only of communities, but of land itself. So then the question becomes whether the land of the moon or Mars has any value in itself, which is to say beyond its value to us. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

You write about a group of Australian scholars who argue that it\u2019s not okay to damage the surface of the moon or pollute it, that the moon \u201cpossesses fundamental rights.\u201d They\u2019ve even issued a Declaration of the Rights of the Moon<\/a>. This echoes the \u201crights of nature\u201d movement<\/a>, which has successfully won legal personhood rights for lakes and forests. Do you think it makes sense to apply that sort of thinking to an extraterrestrial body?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s such a hard question. On the one hand, I can understand that people might think there are severe limitations to applying human-derived rights language to natural formations. We might be concerned that modeling the rights of nature on the rights of humans only allows us to value something insofar as it seems human-ish. But my sense is that we\u2019re working within a complicated and insufficient legal framework and that any strategy that works is worth trying.<\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

You cite the philosopher Holmes Rolston III who argues that natural entities have their own value<\/a> independent of anything humans might want from them. That doesn\u2019t mean we should never eat a carrot or dig up a weed, but it does mean we should spend time considering what we take from the world and how. Rolston offers criteria for how to know when we shouldn\u2019t destroy something. For example, we should respect \u201cplaces of historical value,\u201d \u201cextremes in natural projects,\u201d \u201cplaces of aesthetic value,\u201d and \u201cplaces of transformative value.\u201d <\/p>\n

But are these really about a place\u2019s intrinsic moral worth? To me this sounds more like people grasping for language to talk about instrumental worth \u2014 what certain places do for us.<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

I think it\u2019s very hard to measure the value of something in itself. We\u2019re always going to slip into the language of human perspective; we\u2019re always going sneak in our own aesthetic criteria. This project has really demolished anything like academic purism in me. I think we\u2019re going to have to give up on purity, inviolable categories or absolute measurements. <\/p>\n

But even if there were just some kind of attention to the landscape itself and to what\u2019s important to us (taken broadly) about that landscape … even if we were just to approach the bodies of outer space in the ways that we approach national parks, where you carry out anything you bring in … we would be doing a lot better. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

I like this idea of human judgments as a floor or a minimum. Even if we just are thinking about how to protect a place vis-\u00e0-vis what is of instrumental worth to us humans, that\u2019s already going to be some improvement. <\/p>\n

I think a lot of people are painfully aware of how humanity has screwed up the Earth. And so maybe there\u2019s this fear about screwing up space. But is that really more of a fear about human nature, as opposed to really being about space\u2019s own intrinsic value? <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s so much a panic with respect to human nature as it is a panic with respect to capitalist nature. It\u2019s not all of humanity that wants to conquer the stars; it\u2019s a destructive subsection of humanity that claims to be speaking on behalf of all of humanity and telling us that either all of humanity is going to become extinct forever or we need to nuke Mars [to terraform it, per Musk\u2019s ideas<\/a>]. It\u2019s a false zero-sum game. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

Right, everyone from Musk to Bezos to Branson says the corporate space race will be for the benefit of humanity. This goes back to Eisenhower, who said<\/a> the US must develop a national space program \u201cfor the benefit of all mankind.\u201d I\u2019ve seen this in the AI race too \u2014 OpenAI, for example, says<\/a> its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence \u201cbenefits all of humanity.\u201d <\/p>\n

In your book you take issue with this language of saving all humanity from going extinct, and you write, \u201cThe operative fallacy here is known as longtermism.\u201d Longtermism is a controversial spinoff of a social movement called effective altruism<\/a>, but you say it\u2019s actually a high-tech version of what Malcolm X called \u201cpie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter.\u201d He blamed America\u2019s racist social system on the Christian teaching that those who suffer on Earth will be rewarded in the afterlife, which he said dissuaded Black Americans from overthrowing their oppressors. How does that map onto your worry about longtermism? <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

In the book I try to expose the clearly religious heritage of colonialism and the remnants of the kind of thinking we find in Pence and Trump when they say that God wants us to conquer the cosmos. But that\u2019s not the most interesting place that religion is showing up at this point. The most interesting place is much more subtle: It\u2019s in the proclamations that \u201cthe world is coming to an end.\u201d They\u2019re offering us a classic messianic logic of impending disaster on the one hand and eternal salvation on the other. <\/p>\n

So the locus of religious operation has changed from the Church to these private messiahs. The private messiahs aren\u2019t speaking in the name of any recognized religion \u2014 the logic claims to be totally secular. But it actually looks a lot like the Christian logic that says suffering on Earth is justified because there\u2019s going to be redemption in another world. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

So is your worry that the longtermist doctrine prioritizes the existence of our species in the far future, so it risks propping up the current destructive systems and keeping us docile about them?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

Absolutely. Longtermism gives us a recommended sacrifice of the poor, homeless, and hungry of the Earth, because they\u2019re not the future. It\u2019s actually worse than the Christian promise. The Christian promise is that you yourself may suffer for 80 years but you will be rewarded in the afterlife. Here, there\u2019s no reward for the particular people who are suffering. They\u2019re just going to be thrown by the wayside and die in conditions of poverty and misery. But the human species itself will triumph. <\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

The human species will see the Promised Land but the individuals of today will languish in the desert. <\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel<\/h4>\n

Last question for you: If space exploration can be done in a way that doesn\u2019t screw over people or animals or our planet or other planets, are you all for it?<\/p>\n

Mary-Jane Rubenstein<\/h4>\n

I\u2019m absolutely for it! And there are so many teachers who know how to do this better. They may not be astronomers and they\u2019re probably not corporate leaders. But there are people who know how to live sustainably. If we can find a way to listen to their example, then great! But that would involve locating those people and probably trying this out on Earth first. <\/p>\n

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But their quest to colonize outer space is.”,”homepage_title”:”Humanity\u2019s return to the moon is a deeply religious mission”,”homepage_description”:”Space barons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk don\u2019t seem religious. But their quest to colonize outer space is.”,”show_homepage_description”:false,”title_display”:”Humanity\u2019s return to the moon is a deeply religious mission”,”pull_quote”:null,”voxcreative”:false,”show_entry_time”:true,”show_dates”:true,”paywalled_content”:false,”paywalled_content_box_logo_url”:””,”paywalled_content_page_logo_url”:””,”paywalled_content_main_url”:””,”article_footer_body”:”Since Vox launched in 2014, our audience has supported our mission in so many meaningful ways. More than 80,000 people have responded to requests to help with our reporting. Countless teachers have told us about how they\u2019re using our work in their classroom. 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More than 80,000 people have responded to requests to help with our reporting. Countless teachers have told us about how they\u2019re using our work in their classroom. And in the three years since we launched the Vox Contributions program, tens of thousands of people have chipped in to help keep our unique work free. We\u2019re committed to keeping our work free for all who need it, because we believe that high-quality explanatory journalism is a public good. We can\u2019t rely on ads alone to do that. <a href=\"http:\/\/vox.com\/pages\/support-now?itm_campaign=anniversary-week1-week2&itm_medium=site&itm_source=article-footer\">Will you help us keep Vox free for the next nine years by making a gift today?<br \/>\n<\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p><label tabindex=\"0\" role=\"radio\" aria-checked=\"true\"><\/p>\n<p>\n <span>$95<\/span><span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/label><\/p>\n<p> <label tabindex=\"0\" role=\"radio\" aria-checked=\"true\"><\/p>\n<p>\n <span>$120<\/span><span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/label><\/p>\n<p> <label tabindex=\"0\" role=\"radio\" aria-checked=\"true\"><\/p>\n<p>\n <span>$250<\/span><span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/label><\/p>\n<p> <label tabindex=\"0\" role=\"radio\" aria-checked=\"true\"><\/p>\n<p>\n <span>$350<\/span><span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/label><\/p>\n<p> <label tabindex=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p> <span>Other<\/span><br \/>\n <\/label>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/vox.memberful.com\/checkout?plan=\" id=\"contribute--submit\"><\/p>\n<p>\n Yes, I’ll give $120<span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n Yes, I’ll give $120<span>\/year<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\n <span><br \/>\n We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and<br \/>\n <\/span><br \/>\n <span><br \/>\n Google Pay. You can also contribute via<br \/>\n <\/span>\n <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/donate\/?hosted_button_id=VSP4PYJX98SHL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><br \/>\n <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/22734206\/paypal_logo.png\"><br \/>\n <\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/future-perfect\/2023\/4\/3\/23667361\/moon-artemis-nasa-elon-musk-jeff-bezos-space-colonization-exploration\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><br \/>\n Raleigh Pepper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA revealed on Monday the names of the four astronauts who will travel around the moon as part of the Artemis II program. The crew includes two historic firsts: the first woman, Christina Koch, and the first person of color, Victor Glover, to go on a lunar mission. Hailed by NASA spokespeople as \u201cpioneers\u201d and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":625785,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34779,22409,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-625784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-humanitys","8":"category-return","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}