Greening the universe
A beautiful vision of space expansion.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
After discussions with early readers and a lot of thinking I’ve revised the first half of my book draft. I revised Chapters 1 to 8 in Google Drive. Now I’ll let the draft rest for a few weeks and wait for some loose ends to snap into place. Then I’ll revise the other chapters and produce a new version of the downloadable draft. Then I plan to publish the book not earlier than September (better better than faster).
Mark your calendar! The Terasem Space Day Colloquium of 2024 will be held on July 7, via Zoom, from 10am ET to 1pm ET. The usual date of July 20 (anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon) has been changed to avoid conflicts with another event. This Terasem Colloquium will explore old and new radically optimistic futurisms including Italian futurism, Russian and modern cosmism, extropy, and e/acc (the new kid on the futurist block).
Speakers: Riccardo Campa, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, Max More, James Pethokoukis.
The Colloquium page will be updated with the Colloquium agenda and the Zoom access coordinates.
Last week I was supposed to participate in a panelist in a presentation / discussion of the book “Reclaiming Space: Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration” (2023), edited by James S.J. Schwartz, Linda Billings, and Erika Nesvold. The presentation / discussion, titled “Alternative Visions of Space Exploration,” has been organized by the Cultural Considerations Working Group of the Moon Village Association (MVA). The video is now online on YouTube.
But after an an email exchange I chose not to participate. In the exchange I tried to express my reactions to the book in a respectful and friendly way. But evidently I failed, and someone took my remarks as a professional insult.
A passage in the book reads: “Space libertarians are, in my opinion, annoying creatures who… are promoting the belief that humanity is destined to propagate throughout the universe.”
Well, I AM a space libertarian, and this IS the belief I’m promoting. I’ll add that to me space expansion is not only our destiny, but also our duty.
Of course the author of the passage (who didn’t participate in the email exchange) has the right to find me annoying, but I have the right to find the passage and its context annoying as well, and I said so.
I have long realized that many of today’s “liberals” (scare quotes intended) are not interested in open discussion and constructive negotiation of good narratives. What they want is total submission. But they will not get it from me.
So, I didn’t participate. Too bad, because I like some of the chapters in the book. In particular, I love one: “Greening the Universe: The Case for Ecocentric Space Expansion” by Andrea Owe.
The editors of “Reclaiming Space” say: “Owe’s chapter is evidence that space expansion, if combined with ecological conscience, may serve admirable as opposed to either ambiguous or morally unsavory goals.”
I see Owe’s chapter as a good starting point for constructive negotiation of good and inclusive narratives for space expansion. Here “inclusive” means not limited to space libertarians, but of course (if precise language and common sense still matter) space libertarians must also be included.
“I see Earth’s ecosphere and its continued story as the primary moral object to protect and promote,” says Owe. “As the only species currently capable of space expansion, as well as contemplating the ethics of planetary and cosmic trajectories, humans have a unique instrumental role in the continuation of this story.”
This deeply resonates with me. From my spaceflight book: “Legendary environmentalist James Lovelock introduced the idea that the Earth can be regarded as a whole living planet [Lovelock 2000], which he refers to as Gaia after the Greek goddess of the Earth. According to Wolfe, our duty to Gaia is to bring her seeds to the stars.”
Yes, the idea that Gaia is a living being with her own strange consciousness deeply resonates with me, and I think Gaia relies upon us to reproduce and travel to the stars. Owe cites Lynn Margulis, the co-developer of the idea of Gaia, who wrote a paper titled “Gaia and the Colonization of Mars” to argue that, by colonizing Mars, we would help Gaia reproduce:
“Cosmic historians, in retrospect, might use establishment of such Martian base camps to date the reproduction of planetary life. Such ‘artificial biospheres’ might be recognizable not merely as a human technology but as an expansion and metamorphosis of Earth's original biosphere… Gaia would have reproduced… Seen from afar, the settling of Mars would be akin to budding, a space-borne planting of a ‘sporulated’ form of biospheric life - Gaia transporting propagules of itself to the surface of a new world.”
In her thesis “Environmental Ethics in Outer Space: A macrostrategic space journey through cosmism, posthumanism and moral enhancement” (2019), referring to the project to become a multiplanetary civilization, Owe says that she is “a proponent of such a project of civilization” and her position “is grounded in naturalism and realism appropriated to the cosmic sphere, and in a general philosophical context, it may be seen as a critical posthumanism succession of Russian cosmism.”
Now this is an alternative vision of space expansion that I like!
In “Garden the Solar System, Green the Galaxy: A Visual Manifesto,” the one and only Howard Bloom says similar things. I’ve been reading a draft of Howard’s forthcoming book, where he argues that “nature has given us a job: to garden the solar system and to green the galaxy. To bring space to life by bringing life to space. And to lift life, sentience, and soul beyond the skies.”
Both space libertarians like me and other who wouldn’t call themselves space libertarians can get behind this vision. I’m a space maximalist to whom space expansion is so important to justify all means, so I welcome capitalism, Western patterns of thinking and all that, if these things get us to the planets and the stars, but others may and do differ, and that’s perfectly OK.