Ending Irrational Objectification Of Space Means Ending Rapacious Exploitation On Earth

Monday, 28 April 2025, 8:09 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

I’m old enough to remember the naïve thrills of the first American spaceflights of Mercury and Gemini. I was in high school when Neil Armstrong planted that ridiculous American flag on the moon. Now, between SpaceX and Blue Origin, spacefaring has become a churlish and childish tourism and tech fantasy.

A recent example of delusional technophilia is entitled, “How space exploration can improve life on Earth.” Ignoring evidence and common sense, the author absurdly proclaims: “We will not be able to combat global heating, biodiversity loss, pollution and so many other environmental challenges without space-faring. Going to space is in fact taking care of problems on Earth first.”

He doesn’t stop with that illogical claim. “Tracking the consequences of government policies, distributions of wealth, and dozens of other more directly socio-economic phenomena have strong spatial dimensions that make space-based remote sensing indispensable.”

Conclusion? “Opposing space-faring unwittingly inhibits all this crucial activity.” In a classic bit of Trumpist reversal and projection, we’re told that those who have “a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology” would halt human progress.

This self-declared geologist makes no distinction between the previous five mass extinctions resulting from meteor strikes or super-volcanoes, and the Sixth Extinction at the hands of a supposedly intelligent species. “Extinction is a destructive force, but it also increases biodiversity; humans need to acknowledge that awkward truth if we want to survive,” he has written with astounding obtuseness.

Stringing together a series of non-sequiturs, the writer doubles down: “Anti-space ideology amounts to a critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.”

The Western mindset is dying hard. The problem with space exploration is not ideological but existential. Exploiting the near-Earth environment is the highest expression of man’s manipulation of nature. Nations and corporations have littered orbital space with space junk of planned obsolescence. And you won’t be able to look at the moon in ten years without thinking of all the competitive mining operations on its surface.

Driving the new capitalistic/militaristic space race is a persistent, pernicious way of thinking. Though the polycrisis is the culmination of man’s rapacious consciousness, even many progressives continue to believe it can be remedied externally, by more technology.

Space exploration has its place. However, only if enough people begin looking inwardly, rather than outwardly for the remedy to what is essentially a planetary, collective crisis of consciousness.

Why won’t “improving our ability to get to space improve our ability to perform Earth systems monitoring – and thus to deal with climate change and other environmental crises?”

First, because there is no connection between “Earth systems monitoring from space,” and effectively addressing and redressing “climate change and other environmental crises.” Indeed, there’s an inverse relationship: the more we’ve been able to monitor the Earth from space, the more the climate crisis has intensified.

Second, the fragmentary approach, which is implicit in the phrase “climate change and other environmental crises,” lies at the root of the problem.

Viewing the crisis in man’s relationship to nature in terms of many “environmental crises” directly contributes to a paralysis of analysis. In short, the Earth burns while the experts monitor it.

Cui bono? Siloed scientists, absent-minded academics, colluding capitalists and militaristic madmen.

Third, the shibboleth that science will save us is simply untrue, no matter how many Landsat and other space-based monitoring satellites we send into orbit.

One has only to reflect on the “scientifically conducted” thermonuclear detonations over the Bikini Atoll, which remains radioactively uninhabitable for its former people to this day, to realize that science can be used for good or ill.

Fourth, the failure of imagination, or more accurately of insight that underlies the technophile mindset is egregious in light of the real and present danger to our already overheated atmosphere and oceans. The prospect of thousands more touristic, capitalistic and militaristic rocket launches, much less the energy AI energy sucks to support them, should give everyone pause.

The crux of the matter is that the climate, pollution and Sixth Extinction crisis has its source in man’s obsessively externalizing, extractive consciousness.

Indeed, the ecological crisis is the ultimate manifestation of the crisis of human consciousness.

Without radically changing the separative, fragmenting and extractive mentality, things will only get worse. Must techno-fools and their spacefaring children render the Earth a barren echo of its former beauty and diversity before they realize this?

It’s a question of basic direction: Do we continue with the Western mindset of pathological externalization and extraction, or can we restore the inwardness of the East within us as global citizens while proceeding with scientific and technological progress?

Voracious individualism and consumerism overwhelmed the last gasp of a countervailing inwardness of ancient India a half-century ago. Despite its arrested development materially, ancient India provides an alternative to the obsessive materialism and externalization of the West.

This is not a call to graft Buddhist traditions and practices onto moribund Western societies. That’s been tried over the last 40 years and it has failed to alter the course of America, much less the now globalized capitalistic system.

So what is a true breakthrough? Clearly it begins within us as undivided human beings, not in any scientific much less technological or political breakthrough.

Such breakthroughs are completely secondary to the inner breakthrough in human consciousness that must occur if humanity is to survive and flower on this wondrous Earth.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail