Despite what Amazon’s PR department almost desperately tried to make us believe, neither Jeff Bezos nor even William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, really reached the final frontier. The Kármán Line is, rather, the lowest common denominator of space, a definition based on the ratio of air lift versus Keppler force for the legal purpose of delineating the heavens during the escalating megalomania of the Cold War. Shatner and Bezos went to a place that we could call SpacePrime™, which simulates whatever people imagine space is like without the enormous costs of actually leaving Earth – and without the much less popular and most likely catastrophic risks of leaving the ionosphere. The black skies of unscattered sunlight, a feeling of weightlessness produced by rapid parabolic descent, and a visibly curved horizon – but no cosmic radiation firing protons at nearly the speed of light from the hearts of dying suns, no gamma ray bursts of unimaginable magnitude being hurled from the shattering crusts of neutron stars, no unpredictable solar eruptions sending billions of tons of plasma crawling through the baffling emptiness of interplanetary space. SpacePrime™ is to space what the World Showcase at Epcot is to travelling Europe: a controlled, marketable and idealized simulation.
Now, this shouldn’t be a problem if we ignored the blatant inequality, the almost comical levels of labour exploitation or the sheer neoliberal hubris at play here – or should it? If we don’t care about the environmental damage caused, surely we could just congratulate someone who went from cornering the book market to blasting billions through rocket engines?
Emphatically and absolutely not! Because this pissing contest over fake space travel is not just the brain child of a class of financially limitless but physically restricted parasites. It betrays an attitude that is common to most of us – rich white men have just perfected it. Some would call it privilege. Privilege does not budge when it notices a space that is off-limits, even if, as in this case, it is not so much off-limits as rather just so entirely and actively hostile to any form of organic life that it almost seems to show agency on behalf of the universe in trying to kill us. Rich White men cannot accept that doors are closed to them – or simply do not exist. They must burst through them with ill-deserved confidence, without knowing anything about the space beyond, backed up only by their egos and the imagined mastery of technology which has been developed for them by smarter people. In the 1940s, the Frankfurt school first described this disposition as the symptom of an atrophied Enlightenment – a form of one-dimensional, technocratic positivism that flattens all human life into the satisfaction of primary needs. In the disenchantment of the world by the aimless blade of science, they saw the incomplete separation from nature, like a child, raging against its mother, violently tearing at the chord. Nature became an object of domination, a force not to reckon with, but to control. But Jeff Bezos’ daytrip to the line where, for the purposes of international law, astronautics begin does not control anything about nature at all.
To us, like to those billionaire rocketeers, technology can do anything – most importantly, it will solve our problems without us having to do anything about them at all. After all, it is others who make the machinery which we resign our survival to but which we do not understand.
If we ever actually bothered to listen to the people who make (actual!) space flight possible, we would quickly learn that the solution to our problems cannot possibly lie beyond earth, except perhaps symbolically. Humankind now needs a common purpose to unite behind, and perhaps a grand space mission could be that purpose. A radar base on the Moon’s dark side springs to mind – what an opportunity for private billions to finally become useful!
But that would require letting go of some dangerous illusions. Civilization cannot be saved by moving to Mars, not now and not in the foreseeable future. Not within the current geological eon, even! This is not because of a lack of entrepreneurial spirit; it is simply physically impossible to make Mars similar to earth in any meaningful way. No amount of money or brazen disregard for workers’ rights can change that. Even if we wrested the fabrics of an atmosphere from its lifeless soil, Mars, at one tenth the mass of earth, could not hold it; if we somehow solved that “problem”, too, its moons would drag on the air we created and simply whisk it away. By a few orders of magnitude, it would be easier to build millions of Mars habitats on an eventually poisoned and increasingly Mars-like earth than to actually try to live there.
Unfortunately, this is true for many of the technological “salvations” we seem to be betting our future on. But what can we expect from the remnants of the Enlightenment spirit left by 40 years of the neoliberal collapsing of human life into a grotesque simulation of itself? Don’t get me wrong: space (!) flight is incredibly important, but this is so primarily for fundamental research purposes. If we ever hope to do anything, we must understand the universe. But truly understanding the universe means not just treating it as a technological challenge or an arena of entrepreneurial opportunities, but as an incredibly complex system that we cannot possibly dominate in any sense of the word, and which shows us our absolute (!) limitations every day. True progress is made by scientists who know about the complexities of the world, not by billionaires who seriously believe that they can zoom around space and mine asteroids for unlimited uranium for their network of small modular reactors, and then shoot the nuclear waste into the sun for an easy cleanup – just because they installed an Alexa speaker on technology from the 1940s to make it “smart”.
Engaging with reality on its own terms means to shatter the illusion that humans are in any way shape or form masters of the universe. We are very good at living in one specific speck of it, within an arrangement of cosmic circumstance that is so incredibly fortunate and improbable that it could almost make you believe in a benevolent creator. There is one thought that unites all people who went to actual space: from a place so hostile that it seems unimaginable from the paradigm of a hospitable planet, they instinctively turned back to Earth, choosing to look not at any of the miracles around them that no human had ever seen, but at the small speck that holds everything any of them had ever known. Like them, maybe we need space only to realize what an incredible but fragile paradise we live in.