Anti‐capitalists, post‐colonialists, and the controversy about the ‘colonisation of space’

The successful Apollo programme, which achieved the first (and later five more) moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was followed by several lost decades for manned space travel. Despite NASA's accomplishments in unmanned space exploration such as the development of the Webb Space Telescope, progress in manned space exploration ground to a halt for decades. The shuttle programme, which ran from 1981 to 2011, failed to live up to expectations. A new study from Matthew H. Hersch arrives at a sobering conclusion: “By every measure, the shuttle had fallen short of even the modest hopes that had surrounded it. And the shuttle remained flying only because every effort to replace it with a better-winged, reusable craft also failed” (2023, p. 7). Only the emergence of private space companies such as Elon Musk's Space X and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has brought a new dynamic to the space industry. According to a study by the World Economic Forum (2024), the space economy is expected to grow to US$1.8 trillion by 2035. Chad Anderson from the US investment firm Space Capital estimates: “Over a quarter of a trillion dollars has been invested into nearly 2,000 unique space companies over the past decade alone” (2023, p. xx). However, with the emergence of a new, dynamic private space industry, criticism is also growing. Elon Musk argues that mankind essentially has a duty to colonise other planets because sooner or later an asteroid impact could lead to the extinction of our species. Researchers today widely concur that the dinosaurs – along with 75 per cent of other life on Earth – were wiped out by a meteorite strike 66 million years ago. There is plenty of evidence of past asteroid collisions; our planet Earth bears the visible scars of countless impacts in the form of craters that can still be seen today. An asteroid with a diameter of 30–50 metres hit Arizona 50,000 years ago with 150 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Asteroids are often smaller, such as the one that hit the Pacific Ocean on 1 October 1990, although even that had the same explosive power as a Nagasaki bomb. If it had hit a populated area, such as a city, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people would have died. It's not a question of whether another asteroid capable of causing mass extinction will hit the Earth at some point, but when. While science fiction movies such as Armageddon depict scenarios in which asteroids are successfully destroyed or diverted from their paths, the reality of such a feat would be far more complex. For Elon Musk, the human settlement of Mars is a life insurance policy against the extinction of our species and a first step on our journey towards becoming an interplanetary civilisation. The feasibility of colonising Mars remains a topic of debate throughout the scientific community. Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society, and a significant influence on Elon Musk, believes that, given the harsh conditions on Mars, people would initially have to live under protective domes or, even better, underground to shield them from the deadly radiation. Drawing on the findings of several unmanned Mars missions, Zubrin concludes that no planet – and no moon – within our solar system is as suitable for colonisation as Mars. Abundant in resources, Mars boasts a sufficient water supply, albeit not in liquid form, and an even greater supply of essential elements for soil cultivation than Earth (Zubrin, 2021, p. 213). In particular, Zubrin explains, Mars possesses all the necessary elements to produce fuel, a critical component for reducing the cost of returning to Earth. While he concedes that there are challenges associated with travelling to and inhabiting Mars, such as radiation and reduced gravity, he also proposes innovative solutions to address these obstacles. The objective, he suggests, should not merely involve replicating the moon landing by making a brief visit to Mars, planting a flag, and spending the next few decades basking in the pride of that achievement. Such an endeavour, he believes, would be a total waste of time, money, and effort. The true aim, according to Zubrin, should be the colonisation of Mars. He suggests that, while the first Mars missions would probably be state-funded, the long-term goal of establishing a colony on the planet would require private-sector innovation and investment: While a Mars base of even a few hundred people can probably be supported out of pocket by government expenditures, a developing Martian society, one that may come to number in the hundreds of thousands, clearly cannot. To be viable, a real Martian civilization must be either completely autarkic (very unlikely until the far future) or be able to produce some kind of export that allows it to pay for the imports it requires. Around this question will hang the future of Mars, and not just human civilization on Mars but the very nature of the planet itself. If a viable Martian civilization can be established, the population and powers to change the planet will continue to grow. Mars was once a temperate planet, and with enough work, it can be made so again. The advantages to Mars settlers of a terraformed world are so obvious, that put simply, if Mars is colonized, then it will also be terraformed. In short, Martian civilization will be practical because it will have to be, just as nineteenth century American civilization was. This forced pragmatism will give Mars an enormous advantage in competing with the less-stressed and therefore more tradition-bound society remaining behind on Earth. If necessity is the mother of invention, Mars will provide the cradle. Zubrin has faith in the inventiveness of the colonists and believes that they would be able to establish a thriving economy and society on Mars, much like the early European settlers who paved the way for the United States to become the most successful nation in history. And he hopes that this would serve as a catalyst for stagnant and bureaucratic societies back on Earth. The long-term goal of Zubrin, Musk, and other visionaries is ‘terraforming’. The term was coined by science fiction author Jack Williamson in his 1942 novel Collison Orbit and was later embraced by the scientific community. Terraforming involves technologies that could potentially transform inhospitable planets into habitable environments suitable for human colonisation over the course of several centuries. The ongoing debate is not, however, only about whether terraforming is possible, but also whether it is ethically justifiable. Nearly four decades have passed since Jeff Bezos addressed a group of students at Princeton University and speculated on the quickest way to make asteroids usable for humans. During the discussion, one student jumped up, shouting angrily: “How dare you rape the universe!” before storming out of the room. All eyes turned to Bezos, who asked: “Did I hear her right? Did she really just defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?” (quoted in Rubenstein, 2022, p. 120). Alongside Elon Musk, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin are the most prominent names in the field of private space travel today. In her book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (2022), the American religious studies scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein, who is better known for her work on environmental and gender issues, references the above scene involving Bezos and the outraged student. Rubenstein professes her sympathy with the student and empathises with her anger. She raises an issue that resonates with many intellectuals who align themselves with anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and the ‘woke’ ideology – there is a growing opposition to the ambitious plans of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to explore and potentially colonise space, and particularly to Musk's goal of establishing a human presence on Mars. While past American presidents, from George W. Bush to Donald Trump, expressed aspirations of sending humans to Mars, Musk's vision goes beyond mere exploration. He aims to transform humanity into an interplanetary species by settling a million people on Mars as a first step. This audacious goal has sparked fierce resistance. The crux of the opposition lies in concerns about the rights of microbial life on Mars (should such life even exist) and the rights of rocks. Rubenstein critiques what she terms ‘Western antimineralism’, which is “a tendency to value those rocks that have been removed, installed, carved, stacked, and shaped by human hands (and market forces) over those rocks that remain where and as geological (and ancestral) processes made them” (Rubenstein, 2022, p. 123). To most people this probably sounds absurd and can be understood only in the context of an anti-Western, ‘post-colonial’ philosophy. The proposals from Elon Musk and others to ‘colonise’ Mars were bound to provoke backlash from today's modern ‘post-colonialist’ ideologists. Obviously, however, the key distinction between colonising countries on Earth (such as the Americas) and space is that the Earth is populated with humans, whereas Mars, the moon, and asteroids are either devoid of life or at best inhabited by microbes. But the post-colonialists do not accept this argument. Rubenstein approvingly quotes the American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who argued, “if there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes” (quoted in Rubenstein, 2022, p. 138). One argument that is probably more popular than insisting on the rights of microbial life forms is playing off the significant investment in space exploration against efforts to solve other problems. Rubenstein is not only against the colonisation of Mars, but also against the moon landing, for example. Neil Armstrong's Moonwalk, Rubenstein declares, has done very little for poor, black, indigenous, and immigrant people of the United States (2022, p. 157). And she poses the following question: How would the late-sixties lunar landing advance the civil rights of black Americans back on Earth? How would it contribute to resolving the mess Apollo was escaping in Vietnam? How would the moon shot help decolonize India and Africa? What was its stance on the labor movement, the women's movement, reproductive justice, gay rights, food shortages, poverty, dictatorial regimes, refugee resettlement, nuclear proliferation, water rights, and the growing sense that there was something very wrong with the climate? Deondre Smiles, Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada, whose research focuses on “critical indigenous geographies; human-environmental interaction; political ecology; and tribal cultural resource preservation”, argued in an online essay on ‘The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space’ (2020) that the perspective of indigenous peoples is given too little consideration in the discussion about space travel: In one example, when asked about the Moon landings, several Inuit said: ‘We didn't know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time … We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go. These questions have now even found their way into official documents from institutions that advise NASA. 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