Space Ain't the Place
Guys with big rockets and deep pockets seek the ultimate in capital flight
(With the launch of Amazon sultan Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket last week, along with SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s stated goal of sending human to Mars by 2026, I thought it timely to resurrect and rewrite an article originally in the August 2019 issue of Common Ground, adding some new art.)
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“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." - Father of Rocketry Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky
”It’s understandable if a newborn craps in its cradle. A little less so if a toddler craps in its crib.” - Urban critic Ffoeg Noslo
“Earth First! We’ll wreck the other planets later.” - legendary bumper sticker
The respected Icelandic urban critic Ffoeg Noslo is no Pollyanna. He insists the invention of agriculture was something of a disaster for human beings, by setting us off into a spiral of technical solutions that only begat more problems. “Sedentary living introduced a host of new ailments and conundrums, including the messy matter of waste disposal in urban environments,” Ffoeg (pronounced Fudge) observes in his magisterial 2016 study, Where Do We Stick Our Shit? An Unnatural History of Civilization, Waste, and Entropy.
For centuries, there was enough of an “outside” to get rid of waste products without ecological backlash rearing its ugly head, even though pre-20th century cities in the western world were defined as much by filth as wealth. With the industrial revolution came the miracle of urban sanitation (the arts and sciences of moving your shit away from you), which lowered mortality rates and energized population growth.
We got so good at moving unwanted stuff away from us - aided and abetted by cheap fossil fuels - we eventually scaled it up to nation-state levels, says Noslo: “The First World has largely created order, in the form of dense civic infrastructure, highly subsidized agribusiness, and all the bric-a-brac of hypercapitalism, by exporting disorder to the Third World. Literally. Everything from electronic waste to poison-pill debt arrangements were sent their way, under the pretext of philanthropic beneficence, while undercutting their natural capital through resource extraction. For centuries it’s been the same old hypocritical crap, from the Dutch East India Company to The International Monetary Fund.”
Okay, confession time. I’m a kidder: there’s no “Ffoeg Noslo” and no such books. But it’s the kind of thing I can imagine authoring, about how in the effort to manage our shit we rationalize or disguise shitty behaviour toward our own kind and other planetary citizens, from honeybees to orangoutangs.
Therein lies a story. One chilly San Franciscan night in 1966, writer Stewart Brand traipsed to the rooftop of his North Beach apartment building and dropped a small dose of acid. Wrapped in a blanket and under the influence, it seemed to Brand that the streets of the city weren’t running parallel, but curving inward. It occurred to him that we tend to think of the Earth as flat, and infinite in extent, and regard its resources as endlessly renewable as a result. “The relationship to infinity is to use it up,” he told author Michael Pollan, “but a round earth was a finite spaceship you had to manage carefully.”
Coming down from his high, Brand wondered how to convey its core truth effectively this others, and petitioned NASA to take Earth’s portrait from space. It’s unknown if it’s the direct result of his campaign, but two year later, on Christmas Day of 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts orbiting the moon trained a camera on Earth. It granted us one of the first complete images of our home, a blue and white bauble floating in blackness.
Christened “Spaceship Earth,” the shot became the iconic image of the first Earth Day in April, 1970, and visual shorthand for the co-dependency of the planet’s living beings. A ball of rock and water where there is no “outside,” with planetary resources recycled on a thin shell of life only a few miles thick. Home to one alpha predator species with it’s perennial problem: not just where do I stick my shit, but where do I put my stuff?
It’s a long way from Brand’s sixties-era ‘aha’ moment to the fever dreams of today’s billionaire investors, who believe shareholder salvation awaits above. Guys with deep pocket and big rockets hallucinate interplanetary space as the new Jamestown, with pilgrim astronauts staking a claim for Hairless Primates in Orbit.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is eyeing the moon for colonization, and projects a time when a trillion humans, presumably all Amazon Plus members, live throughout the solar system in orbiting pods. For his part, SpaceX founder Elon Musk is eyeing Mars for colonization.
You may recall the 2015 film “The Martian,” in which Matt Damon’s abandoned astronaut farmer desperately claws at the Red planet’s rocky surface, trying to get it to cough up potatoes. I won’t get into all the non-Hollywood problems with interplanetary habitation, but I will cite one real-world parable: the attempt three decades ago to recreate Earth’s living conditions in a self-sustaining, enclosed environment in a three-hectare sealed environment in the Arizona desert. This brave and brilliant experiment, called “Biosphere 2,” encompassed a miniature rain forest, a mangrove swamp, and coral reef. But by the early nineties it had ran afoul not just of unpleasant ecological surprises (cockroaches, for one), but of interpersonal politics between the eight crew members. And this was an experiment on Earth.
Now imagine trying to get a “Biosphere 3” going on the surface of Mars. A small group of astronauts, on a seven-month flight to a planet they can likely never return from, may be less likely to die from a shortage of potatoes than from their own company.
But let’s imagine such first-wave colonization of Mars is successful, and the descendants of subsequent arrivals are able to survive - even thrive - on a planet terraformed into a chilly semblance of Earth. Within a few dozen generations the Martians would start straining what resources the planet has to offer. And the pernicious Malthusian problem humans now have on Earth would return to bite the Martians’ asses.
By the way, let’s not forget that the greatest discoveries about our solar system weren’t made by manned space missions but by spindly unmanned craft, at a bare fraction of the costs (I’m lookin’ at you, Voyager 1 and 2). The new mania about manned flight isn’t about exploration or knowledge. It’s about the ultimate in capital flight: exporting order upward and outward, leaving disorder behind.
Back to our stoned friend Stewart Brand. In fall of 1968, he debuted the Whole Earth Catalogue, a hippy-era bible of DIY technology and sustainable systems. It’s first issue featured one of the first color images of Earth, a digital image mosaic taken in 1967 ATS-3 satellite. Brand’s altered-state ideas about a limited globe are now a 3rd grade given, and Earth’s portrait is its cheery, science class avatar. Yet the mythic American trope, of motoring off and leaving your crappy past in the rear view mirror, dies hard. In it’s new inflection, arrested adolescents with too much money are preparing to hit the interplanetary road Kerouac-style, ejecting booster rockets like beer cans.
You can imagine the near-future marketing angle: “Hey, wealthy humans! Spare yourselves an ugly fate on an overheated, resource-strapped planet by throwing yourself into orbit, before the planet’s population peaks at 11 billion!”
Some fringe commentators believe there’s nothing new here. They claim the trillions of US dollars reportedly missing in federal accounts have been earmarked for the covert colonization of space. They have given it the name, “breakaway civilization.” While I doubt we already have pickleball courts on the Red Planet, it’s a certainty that there are two factors now at work in plundering space. The first factor is old-school geopolitical hegemony. In the near-term future, control of low-orbit space is as critical as control of sea lanes for global domination. And there are only two serious players in this at the moment: the US and China. The second factor is profit, with proposed space tourism by non-state actors like Bezos and Musk, which may function as something of a spearpoint for the first factor.
In any case, space tourism promises to ride on a historical peak in class and income disparity, between Earthbound proles and the wealthy weightless. (That’s pretty much the premise of another Matt Damon film, “Elysium,” by the way.) And it that regard, both factors in post-NASA penetration of space - state and nonstate - are driven by the same capitalist ethos that has created a new Gilded Age and wreaked havoc on global biodiversity.
And true to form as a species, we’re already trashing space. By 2013, NASA was tracking more than 500,000 pieces of junk orbiting the Earth. “They all travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft,” notes the agency. Even untracked paint flecks travelling at such speeds can do significant damage. Increased activity in space, from launching satellites to manned missions, only adds more debris and more danger. NASA’s reconstruction of highlighted debris around Earth resembles a hive surrounded by angry bees. The space agency is very concerned about space pollution, and astronauts having to dodge fast-moving debris like Neo in “The Matrix.”
The ultimate if unlikely irony would be if we construct a planetary cage for ourselves with this garbage, making future space colonies a moot point. (And of course, space junk gone wild was the main plot device in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film, “Gravity”.)
The operative term here is ‘Spaceship Earth.’ How do you top a 13000 km-wide spherical craft on a fixed solar orbit in the “Goldilocks Zone,” with a biosphere regulated by trillions of organisms, and shielded from cosmic rays by an internally-generated geomagnetic field? Short answer: you can’t.
We are sure to trash other less-agreeable worlds like they’re Motley Crüe hotel rooms, if we persist in doing a Nikki Sixx to this one. As Ffoeg Noslo never wrote, “If we aim to populate nearby planets while allowing trophic collapse on Earth, then we have to ask what our spaceships actually represent to the cosmos. Are they seeds of sustainable life or vectors of chronic infection? For there are no places left to stick our shit, and space ain’t the place.”