I grew up as a space enthusiast before I grew up. Part of the maturation process involved work on a Space Shuttle project, two decades of uninterrupted funding from NASA, reviewing many dozens of NASA proposals for space/rocket investigations, and serving as Principal Investigator for a mission concept study centered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to put a laser transponder on Phobos. Oh, and the most significant chunk of my astrophysics career relied upon the reflectors placed on the lunar regolith by astronaut hands.
No single moment stands out as a crossing of the Rubicon in terms of my migration away from fantasy. But by October 2011 my faith had eroded sufficiently to put out a blog post titled Why Not Space—motivated by responses to the “growth can’t last on a finite planet” drive that initiated this blog. “We’ll just expand into space,” some countered. Note: always beware the word “just,” especially when attached to feats of unprecedented difficulty.
I reprised the theme in Chapter 4 of my textbook (out in 2021), and again a few weeks back. In the last five years, my journey has produced significantly new perspectives (for me) which only serve to make the space delusion more strikingly fascinating and revealing. At this point, it’s hard to identify a phenomenon that so completely captures the religion of the day and its unhinged basis.
Never Lived There
We’ll start with a statement that might make the enthusiasts sputter: humans have never lived in space. But what about Skylab, Mir, and the International Space Station (ISS)? Once you’ve showered in space, aren’t you living in space? Well, there’s a lot more to life than showering.
The space situation as we’ve experienced it is a lot like camping or backpacking, only far more extreme. At least when people go camping they breathe the ambient air and might drink wild water—certainly so if backpacking. Some might even supplement food by fishing or hunting. At times, I’ve boosted my diet substantially by foraging berries. But I don’t for a second delude myself into thinking that I am living in the wilderness. I’m just visiting. What’s that on my back? I might have a valid claim if I went in naked and came out months later in good health (which isn’t how humans really live in the wild—as rugged individuals).
Every atom/molecule critical to a space visitor’s life are of earthly origin. Oxygen, water, food, shelter, fuel, tools—are all carried from Earth. As pointed out in the earlier post, the ISS essentially is connected to the ground by Rube-Goldberg “hoses” (via expensive rocket launches) carrying air, water, food, fuel, and equipment. It’s not really living in space, but the most elaborate and expensive backpacking/scuba trip ever.
The Amundsen-Scott research station at the south pole is somewhat similar to the ISS in several respects. It is continuously occupied, and a few dozen winter-over each year. Like backpacking, air and water are locally abundant—not so on the ISS, Moon, or Mars. But food, energy, and all supplies come from afar. No one lives there permanently—or even for three years—and no child has been born there. It is quite telling that despite being almost infinitely more benign than space environments (including radiation) and being orders-of-magnitude cheaper than space visitation, people still don’t live their lives there.
Talking Nonsense
Our culture tends to reward visionaries and dreamers. This bias affords great cover to people who rhapsodize about space, holding them to a pretty low standard of realism. Cliches, platitudes, and paper-thin arguments pass for wisdom. In some sense, the more outlandish their position, the more revered they are as visionaries! I say settling in space is extraordinarily unrealistic and thus unlikely. They say: balderdash—human innovation is unlimited…and since no one 200 years ago saw the internet coming, anything we dare to imagine now is ipso facto going to happen. By some crazy twist, pessimism is thus always wrong! Can I prove living in space is not practically possible? Can they prove it is? Where, exactly, does the burden of proof lie? It would seem to me that something never before demonstrated despite tremendous—yet so far wholly inadequate—efforts in that direction must assume the burden of proof. The default position should be that it’s crazy-talk, until proven otherwise.
Yet, the case against space is a hard-sell in a culture whose faith in technology and ingenuity approaches religious fervor. People bridle at statements starting out with “We can’t,” or appeals to limits in general—I suspect because such realism threatens illusions of human supremacy. “Don’t you dare challenge our godly omnipotence!” It’s rather fascinating, based as it is on extrapolation of a narrow stretch of time in what is probably the most anomalous (and manifestly temporary) period in Earth’s history.
Just know that people who talk up space colonization are painting alluring pictures of castles resting on clouds. Who wouldn’t want to live there? But painting is the easy/empty part, requiring very little actual accomplishment. There’s no foundation to it: no evidence; no demonstration; no funding at relevant scales; insufficient political will; misguided motivations; and a raft of technical deal-breakers relating to radiation, physiology, extraction, reliability, and self-supporting micro-ecological sustainability. It’s not even close to serious. Why do we even entertain the ravings?
But such lunatics (and Marsatics?) get a cultural pass, while the more appropriate reaction would be good-humored teasing for those who are not too far gone, and ridicule/ostracism for those who aren’t taking the hints.
The Fatal Flaw
What do I believe to be at the core of the belief (faith) in a space destiny? I’m going to lay out a multi-layer account.
Mental Models
First, humans have brains. Brains are adapted to represent some version of reality faithfully enough to confer adaptive advantage. Mental model representations need not (and cannot) be perfect or complete, as long as they have some purchase on real phenomenology—even if indirect. For example, one can believe that forest spirits will protect and guide you if shown respect and reverence, but bring you to harm if shunned. Such a model may be wrong in a scientific sense, but nonetheless result in attentive behaviors that indeed reduce the chances of committing regrettable mistakes. All that our mental models have to do is offer value/advantage of some sort, on average, in some limited context.
But thinking is a poor facsimile of reality. To think is to necessarily leave most of the universe out of the process, and therefore either ignore or misrepresent it. Writing expands the working canvas beyond raw cognitive capacity, but not sufficiently. Maybe the line ought to be: I think, therefore I fib. Or more accurately: Brains think, therefore they lie (dispatching the mentally-modeled illusion of “self” enshrined in first-person language).
Separateness
Mental models necessarily simplify messy reality into clean and tidy representations that can be “grasped” and manipulated. Our brains assert categories, divisions, and artificial “boxes” that are more crisp in our heads than in the underlying reality. In doing so, many contextual relationships are ignored and severed in the mental space. The door is left wide open to erroneous conclusions and bad decisions.
The raft of simplifications imbue a tendency for us to differentiate animate vs. inanimate; subject vs. object; mind vs. body; particle vs. wave; distinct species with hard lines between them—while the reality is a mushy continuum expressing great overlap and constant interdependence. Among the most damaging mental models commonly held in our culture is that the human species is separate from the rest of the universe—certainly from Earth and its ecology. Moreover, individuals feel separate from the sun, rocks, rivers, plants, fungi, insects, mammals, other humans, and even their own bodies! Those sensations of separateness all stem from limitations (faults) in mental models: doing what brains do, even if wrong. In truth, our experiences do not manifest without all the elements listed above (and many more) behaving as an integrated and interactive whole. Nothing an individual does could be accomplished without all those elements being in place and locked in relationship.
Granted, a human being can temporarily detach from some of these linkages and still live. But none of our food is synthetic: living matter, and thus the sun, is always the source—even for Twinkies! The air we breathe is processed by living organisms. The rocks hold that air—via gravity—for us to breathe. We cannot and do not exist separate from all the rest, even if our lazy mental models are readily able to pretend otherwise out of sheer, colossal ignorance. Castles on the clouds are all-too-easy to conceive—especially for kids—which is a warning sign.
Supremacy
Once our brains have asserted logical separation—however artificial and ultimately wrong—the next obvious task is one of ranking. It is little surprise that our culture places humans at the top of the scale on Earth. Some allow angels and God (or gods) a rung above, but in these cases we importantly straddle the (artificially-construed) divide, possessing both earthly and godly qualities: yes, we must begrudgingly admit that we still need to eat, poop, and die in a most un-godlike manner, but we also have thoughts, which are imagined (wrongly) to be divine-adjacent and divorced from matter. Basically, separation begets human supremacy, and it’s all in our heads.
I and many others have dedicated plenty of writing to the agricultural origins of this sense of separation and supremacy, so I’ll not repeat those sentiments here. Suffice it to say that cultures who do not express separateness and supremacy tend to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers, whose animistic humility deeply embeds them within a Community of Life as participating partners rather than as masters/overlords. A profound sense of kinship remains intact when refraining from smashing the world into separate shards. Without the shards, ranking exercises cease to make any sense.
Belonging
As Daniel Quinn put it so well, the fallacy of modernity is believing that Earth belongs to us (and that we are meant to rule it)—whereas other (Leaver) cultures have humans belonging to Earth. Separation and hierarchy are ubiquitous and obvious in the modern view.
Let’s examine the piece of our cultural mythology that says humans belong in space: that it is our destiny to claim the universe. It seems obvious that a hunter-gatherer viewpoint would not contend that humans belong in space. It’s not our context: space lacks stories tying us to the “land” for generations upon generations; space lacks a Web of Life to support us or for us to reciprocate within. These are pillars of Leaver cultures.
The human-supremacist angle is brought into acute relief by asking whether any species besides humans belong in space (i.e., independent of humans). Do caterpillars belong? Newts? Eels? Chickadees? Zebras? If any of these strike you as ridiculous, then good! Now ask: why is it any less ridiculous to say humans belong in space? And here’s the hard part: try making the case without resorting to human supremacy. I’d contend that it can’t be done. Space ambitions, therefore, are a nearly perfect expression of human-supremacist views. Go, Human Reich! I even have an idea for a logo.
Humans belong to Earth. That’s our context. At best, futile efforts toward space habitation would attempt to carry some representative collection of Earth’s ecology to support us, since scratching food out of the dirt on Moon or Mars ain’t gonna work. We have zero other options. What we would almost certainly find if foolish enough to try is that cleaving some subset of beings from their earthly context would result in decline and death. We’re not as smart as billions of years of co-evolution in a fully-interactive ecological context, and our mental models won’t capture a complete enough set of interrelationships to result in a viable whole (see Biosphere 2 post).
Powerful Religion
It seems that a key reason I’m attracted to the space question is that it’s a place of convergence where many failure modes stand out in stark contrast. Space fantasy exposes our capacity for delusion in seizing highly decontextualized mental models. The faithful are passionate in their baseless fervor. Living in space is the ultimate expression of humans being separate from our Earthly context—almost as if an important and perpetually-elusive proof of that false tenet. The belief that humans belong in space simultaneously appeals to the sense of separation and shouts human supremacy.
But it’s working backwards—like building a pyramid starting from the top (on the ocean). Rather than evaluate whether a foundation and viable path exists, it is assumed that because humans are superior, we must end up in space, so the rest becomes pesky detail that will unquestionably be worked out. Practical naysayers who poke holes clearly don’t have the mental fortitude to start with a levitating top brick.
The allure of space is wrapped up in ignorance over evolution (moving from sea to land to air, and next space), sloppy extrapolation of technological trends that in reality are heavily contextualized to a one-time fossil fuel bonanza, and a grossly misplaced analog to earthly exploration and colonization of benign and proximate continental frontiers. Also contributing is a sense of destiny, of supremacy, of ascendancy, and of total mastery.
That’s a lot of contributing factors. But it’s a great window onto our culture, where the same flaws apply to our relationship with the Community of Life on Earth. Seeing ourselves as separate and superior has had devastating impact, on track to carry out a sixth mass extinction (a clever way to assure the evaporation of space fantasies).
Many proponents of space colonization would recoil at the suggestion that their quest shares much in common with religious faith. But faith never feels like faith to a true believer: it requires no effort and tends not to be carefully examined. One has to at least temporarily step outside the faith to evaluate it, and defense mechanisms often prevent such heretical excursions.
Within a cult, beliefs make complete sense and go unquestioned, while to the outside they seem insane. The problem in this case is that few of the voices to which we are exposed sit outside the cult of modernity. Once shot of faith in a space future for humans, the beliefs seem just as delusional and misguided as cult beliefs. I lament that it’s so hard to see past the smokescreen for most in our culture, who are already sold on the separate/supreme tenets of the religion and reticent to question these pillars of modern life. One might even feel sorry for them.
Paucity of Heretics
A measure of how ubiquitous faith in a space future is comes from looking for vocal critics. It’s comparatively easy to find rhapsodical appeals from prominent people. Crawling through these quotes is a tour de force in mythological delusion. Almost all assume without any reflection that modernity is permanent and ever-expanding (based, presumably, on lazy extrapolation of a contextually short phenomenon). A few outliers spot the peril and recoil at the palpable prospect of modernity’s failure on Earth, but grab for the space solution in what strikes me as a fit of panicked desperation to keep (abusive) modernity alive at all costs and against reason.
While criticism is much less pervasive, most is characterized as cautioning against how we’re going about space ambitions (ethics, political priorities, anti-colonial sentiments, inequality, contamination risk), but not doubting that we ultimately will move to the stars. Try finding people who paint it as silly and not feasible on technological, ecological, or other practical/contextual grounds: willing to say it ain’t gonna happen.
In my search for recognized experts bashing space fantasy, I came across a podcast chat between Michael Shermer (famously skeptical) and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I figured at least one of them would be dismissive of space fantasy, but both assume it will happen. At one point, Tyson even speculated that once liberated to space, wars may be a thing of the past because space offers unlimited resources. OMG the scale of delusion is staggering! It’s all going to be an easy utopia, apparently. Doesn’t that say it all? Maybe because the hardships are unimaginably tough, we simply don’t bother taxing our brains with those aspects.
When I say “Try finding people” above, I’m serious: I want your help! I only found a tiny handful. Please use the comment section to point out instances from “credible” people strongly critical of the very idea of a space future. I’ll bet for every prominent voice who might come out hard against the viability of a space future, nine more will echo the cultural religion/delusion that space is our destiny. In such a lopsided environment, what are the masses to believe, and at what cost to Life on Earth?
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“So, the idea of Elon Musk to have a million people settle on Mars is a dangerous delusion. Living on Mars is no better than living on the South Pole or the tip of Mount Everest.” — Lord Martin Rees
“Leaving 2C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.” — Kelly and Zack Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
“We could get hit with an asteroid, detonate every nuclear weapon, or see the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable than Mars.” — Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (interesting book by the way, if you're interested in the psychopathic delusions of tech billionaires).
“All life on Earth evolved to live in Earth conditions.… If humans can’t figure out how to adapt to, or arrest, changing conditions on Earth—then I can’t see how humans could figure out how to adapt to a totally alien environment.” — Linda Billings, research professor at George Washington University
“We are not capable of enacting a successful colonization of another planet. The fact that we have destroyed our home planet is prima facie evidence of this assertion. It is sheer hubris to even consider the question of whether we should ‘go or not go’ as if we are deciding which movie to see this weekend because we really are not in a position to make that choice…. What objective person would hire humanity to colonize a virgin planet, given its abysmal past performance in caring for the Earth’s ecosystem (overpopulation, climate change, mass extinctions)?” — Lori Marino, founder and executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy
I'd argue none of these people are particularly prominent and are still vastly outweighed by actually prominent people spewing balderdash.
What a treasure trove! Thanks so much for digging these up! I have met Martin Rees, and have always admired him as an unusually broad and open-minded astronomer. In fact, I'll be catching up with one of his former students in an hour, who is a similarly agile thinker (on the same page). I had also come across Billings (some e-mail exchange) and the Weinersmith book. It will be fascinating if the circle stays pretty tight.
We have become fatally optimistic. Maybe always have been. We are intelligent/divine? Not so much. We like a feel good story. Especially if it makes us feel superior/special. Anthropocentrism/fantism run amok I would say. Our imaginations are exaggerating our limited ability to perform alchemy/magic.
I'm looking forward to the human reich logo!
Me too!
I immediately scrolled ahead to find it (and was disappointed)
Uh oh. My apologies for dangling a nothing (parallels to space settlement?). I only had in mind a certain polarizing emblem that was prevalent in Germany circa 1940. The Human Reich is even more destructive in many regards.
Does Kelly & Zach Weinersmith with their book "A City on Mars" count?
I have their book sitting at the library, ready to pick up. So, I can't be certain. I watched a podcast interview with them, and it seems like they make a lot of very strong points about how idiotic our near-term ambitions are, but it sounded like they believe we'll get there eventually. I'm not sure how eco-aware they are, as yet. I'm guessing they don't make the case that modernity will fold up shop well before we invade space.
It's a great book – you'll like it! They make a lot of the same points you do.
Neil Armstrong at commencement address at Ohio State University in June 1971:
“My enthusiasm for the future of space travel, I think you’ll grant is understandable. To stand on the surface of the Moon and look at the Earth high overhead leaves an impression not easily forgotten. Although our blue planet is very beautiful, it is very remote and apparently very small. You might suspect in such a situation, the observer might dismiss the Earth as relatively unimportant. “However, exactly the opposite conclusion has been reached by each of the individuals who has had the opportunity to share that view. We have all been struck by the similarity to an oasis or island. More importantly, it is the only island that we know is a suitable home for man"
Good one. It does remind me of William Shatner's reaction to his few sub-orbital minutes in space:
"It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet—the blue, the beige and the white. And I realized one was death and the other was life."
Nice post. I ponder the factors that upregulate voices that preach conquest of space, industry, manifest destiny, the infinite potential of technology and innovation, the continuance of modernity, despite the mounting evidence that is pointing contrary to such convictions. Belief in human supremacy certainly appears to be a common denominator, though I notice the seeping ooze of toxic positivity being disconcertingly pervasive as well. Perhaps this is a branch of human supremacy, integrating brain-worship and filtering only to emotions and mental frameworks that make people 'feel good'. – Don't bother the dominant culture with those pesky 'pessimistic' views that are aligned with reality.
Modernity favors it's own acolytes, those who reinforce the beliefs of the cult. They can be found on every TV channel, every radio station, are algorithmically favored on the internet, they're comprised of business leaders, successful politicians, academics, they're everywhere! To be rewarded with success in the modern system, one must participate in the omnicidal batshit crazy dumpster-fire cluster#&%* that we call modern life. No wonder people who reach the highest rungs and have the biggest microphones in this system are narcissistic delusional moron psychopaths, or characterize similar attributes, I.E. wankers. – There's your modernity window!
There aren't many qualified scientists willing to challenge the space habitation trajectory that's for sure. Less so, modernity. Plenty of philosophers do, and I'd expect that most anarchists do too. Certainly those of a anarcho-primitive (the correct anarchism!) bent. Darren Allen nicely critiques modernity for example.
From memory, you've been on The Great Simplification podcast with Nate Hagen's? I'm wondering what his view would be? Obviously, if there is to be a great simplification, then there could be no Mars future. Or it seems obvious, to me. However, I wonder if he'd hold that view, or believe that there is a future where we've clung to a modicum of the good stuff to fuel a number of "critical projects" passed across from modernity? There seems to be a few who seem to hang onto the faith, even when they can see the writing on its walls (I'm in no way being critical of Nate here).
Well, there aren’t many famous scientists to begin with. Tyson is one of the more famous ones, and isn’t really the most intelligent guy out there, though I assume he’s probably good at his astronomy job. Would the other really famous ones — Carl Sagan, Dawkins, Richard Attenborough, etc. — be more similar to you or to people like Elon Musk? I don’t know, but I’m guessing they would be more like you.
The most famous movie about space, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think takes a position closer to yours….even if it leaves the door open for some weird stuff involving aliens being theoretically possible. But even the weird alien stuff in the movie is shown as just that — weird, not natural or desirable.
There’s also a hypothetical question that maybe is a bit harder to answer: presumably, there are solar systems out there where two planets are (unlike Mars) habitable. If the inhabitants of one of the planets becomes aware that they are under threat from something like an asteroid, is it ethically acceptable for them to attempt to move to the second planet?
Sagan's 'Demon Haunted World' resonated with me, 'Pale Blue Dot' less so.
The first video resonates, the second less so:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i4ITTUyuvjQ
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3sQzav6E6XQ
I appreciate that Sagan seemed to advocate that we take care of issues on Earth first before expecting success in space, but he appeared to believe in the continuation of technological modernity. If one is cognizant of limits and aware that modernity itself is a dead-end, space colonization ideas become doubly dubious.
I love it: "But thinking is a poor facsimile of reality." I will steal this one …
It's remarkable how few critiques of space colonization appear in the literature. I tried Google Books, WorldCat, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Stanford U. Libraries, Claude, DeepSeek, and Perplexity. Not much to add:
Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science. By Robert L. Park · 2008. Page 208, Running the Numbers. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Superstition/1XocNrUN_K4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=running%20the%20numbers
Fantasy and Social Movements by James Omrod. Part III A Case Study of the Pro-Space Movement and Fantasy. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fantasy_and_Social_Movements/VGWoBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration By Savannah Mandel · 2024. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ground_Control/AJrwEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
The case against humans in space. Three books push back on a rising tide of optimism about space settlements. Becky Ferreira. MIT Technology Review August 22, 2025. Paywall.
Thanks for the diligent effort! The paucity is indeed a striking phenomenon.
Gemini identified the three books that Becky Ferreira reviewed:
Becky Ferreira's article in MIT Technology Review, titled "The case against humans in space," reviews three books that are critical of the push for space settlement.
The three books are:
Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race by Mary-Jane Rubenstein
The Space Age: The End of History? by Jedediah Purdy
Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Limitations of Human Space Settlement by Deirdre Black, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press
Gemini: These books collectively argue against the prevailing optimism surrounding space colonization by highlighting doubts about practical feasibility, the exorbitant costs, the harsh environment's impact on the human body, and the underlying ideologies and mythologies driving the commercial space race.
Oops–looks like Gemini hallucinated.
"The Space Age: The End of History?" is not a book by Jedediah Purdy, but rather a question posed in an interview that likely alludes to his work, particularly his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene.
Oy Vey – another hallucination–Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Limitations of Human Space Settlement by Deirdre Black.
So sorry! PS: I am a retired librarian. I feel sorry for students today. What a mess.
I have the Rubenstein book on hold at the library. I suspect that most critical resources one might find do not take the stance that it simply won't happen for a raft of technical and practical reasons, but that our approach is all wrong—propagating damaging social tendencies and ethical practices.
The Library Dean at SUNY Stony Brook came to my rescue: https://alumcommunity.mit.edu/news/1308709. Reviews the three books.
A useful review. As suspected, two of the three books deeply critical of space still assume it to be in our future: "Mandel and Rubenstein both argue that any worthy human future in space must adopt a decolonizing approach that emphasizes caretaking and stewardship of this planet and its inhabitants before we set off for others. They draw inspiration from science fiction, popular culture, and Indigenous knowledge, among other sources, to sketch out these alternative visions of an off-Earth future."
As I mentioned, I didn't get the sense that the Weinersmith book outright calls it all bunk fantasy, although they are clearly more firmly in the same camp as me in pointing out how absurdly sucky space life would be.
Hi Tom, I'd like to comment you how surprising was for me to discover that, while discussing the Fermi paradox, the interviewed Ana Campos, an astrophysicist, told us that the paradox could be explained by the idea that intelligent civilizations tend toward self-destruction, something her mentor postulated. She struggled to understand this when I suggested that there might be another explanation: that we simply haven't got the capacity to go into space and that technology might not be sustainable in the long term. She flatly refused to accept that possibility.
Right: we allow that our magnificence is so grand that we have the technological capacity to end civilization, but have much greater trouble imagining that we are incapable of maintaining high-technology at all. We can more easily imagine being "too good" at technology than not good enough to make it work in the long run.
Both are valid solutions to the Fermi paradox. Humans being
"so good" at technology is arguable what makes modernity so dangerous.
It seems to me this is the obvious answer to the Fermi paradox – the reason we've never been visited by aliens is that no matter how advanced a civilisation is, the biophysical constraints imposed on evolved lifeforms travelling through empty interstellar space for hundreds of thousands of years are simply impossible to overcome. I also used to be a "space enthusiast", but after reading what you had to say about it, my illusions fell apart very quickly. I've built this topic into my high-school space science course, so I'm actively trying to get young people to also wake up from this unrealistic dream 🙂 Thanks for all your great work.
That's awesome! I am curious to know if you can identify the straw that broke the camel's back: what new info or perspective caused your illusions to fall apart? Or was it a slower process of taking it all in?
It has always amazed me, and many others of my 60's generation (born in '49) how incomprehensible it seemed for so many people who couldn't even enjoy the dirt, plants and critters of earth could even think that they would be interested in space travel. Especially when it is so obvious that many people can't even camp out on a California beach without complete set-ups and umbilical cords to nearby grocery stores or restaurants. How many people can do without toilet paper? It is an absurd and delusional joke that so much attention is given to human space travel, and that includes passenger jets. Why keep bouncing around inside expensive toys when a lush garden jungle lies down below with many hidden and comfortable places to lean back, smell the forest or meadows and listen to the birds. With less technology there would be even more spaces like that. Cars and trains, boats and planes, tech, tech, tech. Bicycles should be the upper limit. I remember years ago seeing skinny Indian pedal rickshaw drivers doing a great job, electrifying something like that makes sense, not more. Some high speed electric trains could connect the rickshaw hubs all over the world. Crossing oceans would be a slow boat ride, probably not as fun as some adventurous rickshaw rides. Maybe there would be an educational component accompanying the boat rides. Anyway taking people like Musk and Bezos and their rocket toys very seriously is a true sign of modern well-candy-coated insanity. As 100% American as the POTUS. PS, i do get a kick out of Hollywood fantasies, Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, and the old classics as well. 50's TV scifi was great fun for the imagination, you had to fill in a lot of the blanks, more interesting that way.
@tmurphy
I didn't go looking for examples, other comments do a great job at that; more for my reading list too. But I suspect one of the reason for said insanity window is that when the sci-fi genre was born, we weren't so vitally aware of our critical resource limitations and unfolding mass extinction. Instead, the idea was to make the leap from the Mechanical Turk to truly intelligent robots and the truly universal computer, and to plant a footstep on the distant Moon. Hence Karel Capek's idea of what a robot should and shouldn't do, the Turing test and Stanislaw Lem's trilogy. Each dared to dream big, each a giant intellectual achievement in its own right.
Nowadays, a completely different picture. What started as sci-fi in space and for space, we might as well rename as *fi-sci* : fictional science! More a social commentary of what needs to be done better on Earth, not a realistic account of what is scientifically possible and morally reasonable. I suspect that since those mentioned were serious moral thinkers too, they might be the one spearheading this movement today. Alas, you can't ask them…
Otherwise, looking for socially "prominent" people in this respect may be as futile as it is earnest. For when prominent means being well adjusted to the lunatic asylum that is modernity on steroids with its requisite blinders, the prominence that such achievement brings is hardly an achievement at all.
I am quite content with cherishing the comment community of this excellent blog; no need to look for strength in numbers, whether counting words, sets or ranks. If anything, I look in this for the humility and modesty of the kind of still water that runs deepest.
Most (including me) go through the 'education' system, which is there to propagate the existing hierarchy – i.e. modernity, with all its attendant human supremacy, destruction, waste etc. We're taught about 'the third world', and about 'developing' and 'developed' countries, from the perspective that 'developed' = 'better'.
The time is coming though, when 'first-world problems' will cease to mean trivial ones.
Technolgical progress is taken as a given (things are probably even worse in schools now, with ubiquitous computers, 'AI' etc).
Throughout our lives we're exposed to propaganda from tv 'news' and Hollywood films in which humans have adventures in space, meet (and usually kill) aliens etc. No movie was ever made in which space exploration was thoroughly debunked and ridiculed.
As Alex said above, to be rewarded in modernity one must 'join in'. Therefore most scientists (indeed most people) are part of the cult, so it's not surprising that few have spoken out against the religion of Progress, of which space 'conquest' is the holy grail.
It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I can see I was lied to for my entire life. People have to educate *themselves* in order to see it – which is why the vast majority don't bother.
I highly recommend reading "The Invisible Pyramid" (1970) by Loren Eiseley, wherein the naturalist analyzes the rocket century.
The book ends with a reflection around the doomed Apollo 13 mission.
…when the wounded Apollo 13 swerved homeward, her desperate crew intent, if nothing else availed, upon leaving their ashes on the winds of earth. A love of earth, almost forgotten in man's roving mind, had momentarily reassured it's mastery, a love for the green meadows we have so long taken for granted and desecrated to our cost. Man was born and took shape among earth's leafy shadows. The most poignant thing the astronauts had revealed in their extremity was the nostalgic call still faintly ringing on the winds from the sunflower forest.
The degrowth movement rejects the notion of space colonisation, although this rejection is implicit rather than explicit, as in your piece today.
Nice summary of the academic literature here:
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-025941
And a more recent paper here about a putative post-growth economy, which would be entirely Earth-bound and would not expand over time:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext
Thanks, Tom, for another insightful piece. And thanks to the many respondents who added more to that theme.
I must say that the Apollo program was really exciting to me (I'm an engineer, born in 1942) but I never saw it as the first step to the stars. Of course I was cheering for the brave astronauts, but the famous "earthrise" photo was, and still is, my emotional high point.
There may be some as-yet-undiscovered principle of physics that will let us economically escape the gravity well we're in, but like you I don't place my bets on it.