Why we Earthlings should think twice about colonising Mars!
I’ve been working a lot on my Masters dissertation recently. Looking at proposals for human settlements on Mars and what their treatment of food relations tells us about the socio-political logic to space exploration. During my research one name in particular keeps popping up as an extremely zealous advocate for Mars settlement. Robert Zubrin. In the article Why We Earthllngs Should Colonize Mars! Zubrin doesn’t just argue that we can colonise Mars, but that we must — and now for god’s sake! Because if we’re not colonising Mars then we’re effectively giving in to the resource limitations of Earth thereby trampling our human freedoms and paving a quick path to oppression and genocide. My initial reaction to reading his work was honestly shock, that so liberal a brush stroke could be used to paint virtually anyone who feels we need to reduce our consumption as a genocidal lunatic, was honestly surprising.
Then I felt anger, there was clearly a passing familiarity with Weber’s theory of rationality and a hint at Arendt’s banality of evil, but if they are sources for Zubrin they have been woefully misunderstood and misused. In fact Weber’s argument was that it was the development of capitalism and the state simultaneously in relation to the ‘Protestant Ethic’ that generated the modern bureaucracies Zubrin is so worried about. To try and divorce the consumptive core of capitalism from the bureaucratic structures that make it possible and provide the psychological safety that enables individual consumption is honestly wild. Arendt’s argument was that it was the bureaucratic structures of Nazi Germany that created the conditions for such evil to occur, an ideology on it’s own could not muster the administrative power needed to operationalise death on that scale. Many of the most prolific and evil Nazi killers weren’t even particularly ideological — they were doing their office jobs — which happened to be facilitating genocide.
The argument that a concern for consumption equals a preclusion to authoritarianism is quite frankly absurd. That by colonising space and extracting more and more resources we can consume our way out of inequality, poverty and conflict is alluring but ultimately a misunderstanding of the cause of these issues. Time and time again we see famines caused by political decisions, power cuts due to corruption, poverty because of racist zoning laws. Zubrin is in effect putting the cart before the horse, more resources will simply feed existing structures of inequality, the rich get richer. Instead we need to work on building global political structures that put social measures before economic ones and support sustainable and responsible consumption that improves lives and reduces inequality.
I could go on for ages about Zubrin’s other questionable assertions, like the idea that America has become rich on its “inventiveness and…ability to bring together people and ideas from everywhere” rather than a ruthless multi-decade geopolitical struggle to assert it’s own interests off the back of a devastating conflict. Or that America doesn’t benefit from “keeping the rest of the world under-developed”. Or that the historical and prevailing impetus for war is first and foremost limited land and resources. But I have other pieces covering those areas that I think get the point across better (I’ll work on posting those). It’s not all a disagreement though, I love space and sci-fi, I’d love to see humans visiting Mars and although I’m not on-board with large-scale permanent settlements I am excited at the prospect of permanent scientific bases on another planet. We do need people actively and vociferously advocating for space exploration. Zubrin also makes very quick work of myths around population limits and the potential dangers of such thinking (although misses several valid points and overblows some of the dangers).
At the end of reading Zubrin’s passionate exhortation of why we must colonise Mars I mostly felt sad, his argument that we lack imagination is right, we lack imagination to move beyond our obsessive consumption. The fact that nature and all the wonders of the universe stretch out before us and our concern is how much resource we can extract from it is worrying. We’ve barely scraped the surface of everything there is to know about Mars or the asteroids of the asteroid belt and we’re already wondering how much money we can make by ripping them apart and rocketing their pieces around the solar system. And finally, we’re letting our anthropocentric arrogance drive our exploration ambitions. Last term I read Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth Povinelli, Povinelli asks what if Western metaphysics opened up to other thought systems like those of Indigenous Australians, would our understanding of relations of power change to incorporate the aspects of our universe we see as ‘non-life’? For me this writing begged the question ‘who do we think we are?’, we don’t know everything so why do we assume that there is no consequence to our consumption of outer space? Why is Martian soil only valuable for what it can give to us? We’re not the only things in this universe, we need to stop acting like it.
To finish up this thinly veiled piece of procrastination writing it does cement for me the purpose behind my dissertation. There’s a gap when it comes to our ambitions for space and it’s name is political sociology. It’s not a completely empty gap, there are much smarter people than I already working on it and leading the way forward, but more needs to be done to close it. We’ve been technologically developing our way out of world-ending catastrophe for two hundred years and yet inequality is rampant, we comfort ourselves thinking that at some point we’ll develop the technology to fix all our problems. But this isn’t Star Trek and my next cup of tea isn’t materialising out of space dust in a replicator. The only way we’ll deliver on the scientific promises of the future is if we seriously work on the socio-political problems we face today.
References:
- Why We Earthlings Should Colonize Mars! — Robert Zubrin
- Geontologies — A Requiem to Late Liberalism — Elizabeth Povinelli
P.S. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the Borg while reading Zubrin’s article. I found them by far the scariest of the Star Trek villains, not only because they seem significantly overpowered but also because they remind me most of humans — what do you think?
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