Welcome to the video premiere of “Keep Your Grubby Little Hands Off of Mars“
Billionaires like Bezos and Musk don’t just see Mars as an opportunity for exploration and a desire to live out their fantasies about space travel, but as an opportunity for exploitation. The western mentality of settler colonialism hasn’t changed in 500 years. While it’s certainly exciting to wonder if life ever existed on Mars, maybe the cost isn’t worth an answer. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
At the very least, we don’t trust the billionaire class to lead the research. At worst, Mars should be treated as a preserve or a type of US national park. At best, it should be left alone. In fact, humans already trashed the place by leaving dozens of broken down vehicles all over the surface. We can only imagine what it will look like when human colonizers arrive.
Just because “science” may come up with interesting questions to research does not give its practitioners any kind of moral authority to act on every potentially interesting question. We don’t have to look far for the kinds of horrors that “science” has come up with, from nuclear weapons to chemical and biological warfare, from vivisection to Dr. Death and the Nazi scientists. Just because one clever scientist wants to know how many heads one dog’s body can support does not mean that we as a society should condone these kinds of madmen and their experiments. The gap between clever and wise is almost always greater than we think.
Is this to suggest that space exploration is on the level of the Nazi scientists? Well, perhaps not, but using dogs as guinea pigs is a pretty good start. Let’s not forget that is was a bonafide Nazi, Wernher von Braun, that led the US space program in the 50s and 60s, after he was pulled out of Germany by the CIA and Operation Paperclip.
But there are also ethical questions for institutions to consider. The Cree quote at the beginning of this video implies that the earth itself has intrinsic value, a fundamental non-economic value. Indigenous people have understood this to be true for thousands of years. Why would this world view not apply to Mars?
Given the history of colonization of the Americas and its impact on the people and the land, combined with the largely uncritical rhetoric around the colonization of Mars, we can already see what worldview dominates.
On the deeper implications of what settler colonialism in space might mean, we recommend an article by Deondre Smiles called “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space”.
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-space
To quote Smiles at length:
“A brief exploration of what settler colonialism is, and its engagement with ‘space’ here on Earth is necessary to start.
Settler colonialism is commonly understood to be a form of colonialism that is based upon the permanent presence of colonists upon land. This is a distinction from forms of colonialism based upon resource extraction (Wolfe, 2006; Veracini, 2013). What this means is that the settler colony is intimately tied with the space within which it exists—it cannot exist or sustain itself without settler control over land and space. This permanent presence upon land by ‘settlers’ is usually at the expense of the Indigenous, or original people, in a given space or territory. To reiterate: control over space is paramount. As Wolfe states, “Land is life—or at least, land is necessary for life. Thus, contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life” (2006: 387). Without land, the settler state ‘dies’; conversely, deprivation of land from the indigenous population means that in settler logic, indigeneity dies (Povinelli, 2002; Wolfe, 2006.)
The ultimate aims of settler colonialism is therefore the occupation and remaking of space. As Wolfe (2006) describes, the settler state seeks to make use of land and resources in order to continue on; whether that is through homesteading/residence, farming and agriculture, mining, or any number of activities that settler colonial logic deems necessary to its own survival. These activities are tied to a racist and hubristic logic that only settler society itself possesses the ability to make proper use of land and space (Wolfe, 2006). This is mated with a viewpoint of landscapes prior to European arrival as terra nullius, or empty land that was owned by no one, via European/Western conceptions of land ownership and tenure (Wolfe, 1994).”
Finally, the last obvious point to make in our desire to throw a wrench in the thinking of Space billionaires and their white-coat sycophants, we must point out the obvious: that the money spent on sending people and hardware to Mars might actually do more good here on planet Earth. Gil Scott-Heron understood this intuitively as expressed by the classic track “Whitey On the Moon”. What we really need is a moratorium on habitat destruction, pollution, poisoning of the air and water, and the list goes on.
There’s perhaps nothing more revolting than watching the earth get destroyed by the same class of billionaire-playboy-man-children who want to fly off to another planet, and repeat the cycle of exploitation all over again.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Consume, destroy, bail.
Death Blows to Empire
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https://deathblowstoempire.com
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