Chapter 8 Space Exploration is Colonialism !

8.     Space exploration is colonialism!

We should all know by now what colonialism is: hatred, racism, genocide, capitalism, land theft, and ecological destruction. Forever. 

For those of us who are descendants of Europeans, if our grandparents’ grandparents had known this, they could have stood on the docks in Spain, England, and Portugal and torched the ships of the conquistadors and conquerors: The Nina, the Pinta, and the fucking Santa Maria. They could have burned those ships of war, death, and disease to the waterline and then walked to the castles and cathedrals and done the same. But they didn’t know what was to become of the world across the seas. But we do! It is our great challenge to stop these modern murdercraft from killing the universe. 

These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars. The desire to colonize — to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will — is a patriarchal one. Indeed, there is no ethical consideration among these billionaires about whether this should be done; rather, the conversation is when it will be done. Because, in the eyes of these intrepid explorers, this is the only way to save humanity. Rather, the impulse to colonize — to colonize lands, to colonize peoples, and, now that we may soon be technologically capable of doing so, colonizing space — has its origins in gendered power structures. Entitlement to power, control, domination and ownership. The presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer and colonize something new.

Marcia Bianco

Is there anyone alive with an ounce of empathy, a beating heart, who thinks that the conquest of the so-called Americas was a wonderful thing? That Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West was justified ? Only a soulless patriot could justify the death and slaughter of over 100 million people.

We don’t get a second chance to pretend that we are all alone in the universe.

Yet this is exactly what NASA and all these bootlicking capitalists are pursuing while throwing stars in our eyes: nothing less than the destruction of the heavens, so that they can mine asteroids and save some make-believe “humanity.” 

It’s a truism that capitalism never solves its problems but only moves them around. Finally it’s running out of space. The conditions necessary not only for social but biological life are being eroded. It’s running out of minerals; it’s running out of value (the amount of debt on the planet now exceeds the total value of everything on Earth). And all this is accompanied by ghastly mocking nebulae and the idea that the greatest possible course of action for humanity is for us to go about exploring the galaxy, turning void into value, giving capital an infinite field in which to work its sinister magic.

-Sam Kriss 

Decolonize space!