The case against humans in space

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, presents a thorough diagnosis of this exact pathology in her 2022 book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, which came out in paperback last year. It all begins, appropriately enough, with the book of Genesis, where God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Over the years, this biblical brain worm has offered divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves as the religious rocket fuel propelling humans into the next frontier, Rubenstein argues.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2022  (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2024)

“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as much a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” she writes. “It’s a mythology, in fact, that holds all these other efforts together, giving them an aura of duty, grandeur, and benevolence.”

Rubenstein makes a forceful case that malignant outgrowths of Christian ideas scaffold the dreams of space settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded enthusiasts—even if these same people might never describe themselves as religious. If Earth is man’s dominion, space is the next logical step. Earth is just a temporary staging ground for a greater destiny; we will find our deliverance in the heavens.   

“Fuck Earth,” Elon Musk said in 2014. “Who cares about Earth? If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonize the whole solar system.”

Jeff Bezos, for one, claims to care about Earth; that’s among his best arguments for why humans should move beyond it. If heavy industries and large civilian populations cast off into the orbital expanse, our home world can be, in his words, “zoned residential and light industry,” allowing it to recover from anthropogenic pressures.

Bezos also believes that space settlements are essential for the betterment of humanity, in part on the grounds that they will uncork our population growth. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled across the solar system, that could support a collective population of a trillion people. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that would be.”

It does sound cool. But it’s an easy layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers game” approach would also produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes. 

And that is the real crux of the argument against pushing hard torapidly expand human civilization into space: We will still be humans when we get there. We won’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—in fact, we may exacerbate them.