Don't let them leave !

Don’t let them leave!

for Laika

From the list of demands against the so-called city of Olympia, WA:

Number 13. Cessation of all space exploration  

and 

Number 2. Blow up the sun!

 A ten point countdown as to why we oppose human conquest in space

Our hatred of manned space travel has nothing to do with our love of science fiction! Even with all the problems with the genre, there is much to love and cherish. So much so, that we confuse and transpose this love onto modern-day space exploration, which is not, and will never be, as free and utterly wild as our dreams.

If you watch NASA films and look through their documents, what you see is not space opera--not Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin--but a sterile lab bleached of all our dreams and wonder. You see hardware and machines, and men building structures for business. A  future architecture of our entanglement in domination. We’ve been fooled by their propaganda. 

The hero is always some North American, flaunting some pure, good guy hero mysticism, in a gleaming white suit. With flags and expensive, gold-plated spaceships. Either in ruins or in perfect order. 

NASA has the best propagandists in the world, even better than the police’s. And the point of this PR mission is to make space appear peaceful, serene, and sterile. But we know that the space industry is none of these things. 

NASA is populated with the soft-spoken, intelligent professor, a white man. This is the number one cause for alarm. That should concern everyone. Space is for white people only. Say it again, and watch the footage, the newscasts, the documentaries. Space is for white people and their property, weapons and robots. 

That is why rich, white billionaires are interested in space exploration. They don’t want us to see what lies behind space exploration.To look closer, without television lenses or cellphones. We need a countdown, for drama, for thrills. Like an execution. 

Countdown

10.  Space colonization and space travel are unethical 

 9.   The sun, moon, and planets are not our junkyards

 8.    Space exploration is colonialism

 7.    You will be left behind

 6.    Weapons development and militarism

 5.    Tourism: everybody hates a tourist

 4.    Nationalism: space exploration is statist 

 3.    Space exploitation is not vegan

 2.    Contamination! 

 1.    Space is only for white men

 0.    Wernher von Braun

 Supplement 

1. Space is only for white men.

1.  Space is only for white men. Space exploration is founded upon racism, white supremacy, and sexism.

"What do I look like, living in Watts, in the projects, sitting in a living room that really doesn't have too much of anything, looking at the launching of a missile to orbit a man around space, and … I'll hear a police siren and … I'll go outside and I'll see him going down the street and I'll look away because it's no big thing, this happens every day, and then I can look down a little further and see kids playing around trash cans, because that's all they have … The reality of being poor is in you. And a space race has to be the last thing on your mind. You're too concerned … and the word is 'hustling' … you're too concerned with just trying to make enough to live.”

Professor Johnnie Scott 

"You know," said the professor, "there are no black astronauts."

"Of course not."

"Any Jewish astronauts?"

"I doubt it."

The black man grunted. They would not need to mention Mexicans or Puerto Ricans …

"Look," said the black professor," do they have any awareness of how the money they spent could have been used?”

Professor Johnnie Scott 

African-Americans didn't watch the launches. You had civil rights leaders who were actively protesting during the "ticker tape parades" for returning astronauts – they disrupted parades in Manhattan, for instance, to try to draw attention to poor housing conditions.

Neil M Maher

With a quick Internet search, it’s apparent that there are numerous space-related conventions and gatherings across the U.S. and Europe planned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lunar landings. Here, then, are the names of these events and a survey of speakers and committee chairs: 

The 35th Space Symposium -Colorado Springs, CO

Speaker roster:  156 speakers 

21 are people of color  

That's 13.4% 

The Space Forum  -Luxembourg

2019 speakers comprise 18 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 man of color 

Previous speakers show 68 white men, 11 white women, and 4 people of color

SpaceCom - Houston, TX

Lists its advisory committee as 27 white men, 4 white women, 3 men of color, and 2 women of color

Space Tech - Long Beach, CA

Speakers for 2019 include 34 white men, 5 white women, 3 men of color, 2 women of color, and 1 African-American woman

International Space Development Conference - Arlington, VA

The National Space Society list features 13 white men and 3 white women

Starmus V - Zurich, Switzerland

“The fifth edition of Starmus is back to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the man’s First Step on the Moon.

Starmus V features top scientists, legendary astronauts and cutting-edge art, discussion panels, round tables, debates, amazing performances and concerts, and much more.” 

Starmus V lists a speaker roster of 42 white men, 12 white women, 2 men  of color, and 2 women of color.

Looking at these conventions, it would appear that Space Inc. doesn’t include any African-American men as invitees or guest speakers. Almost as if space was reserved for white people.  Almost as if human space travel was going to replicate institutional racism, white supremacy, and in-your-face tokenism into the stars and galaxies.

Space is only for white people! Specifically, white men, and even more, so white male billionaires. 

This fact carries all the hallmarks of white supremacy, racism,  sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and speciesism. A patriarchal system crushing all of us under capitalism, police, and military dogma.  Old white men sitting around deciding future courses for their money, investments, brands, and heirs. 

Space colonization is an extension of Manifest Destiny, the so-called opening of the West and the accompanying “Indian problem,”  which became the blueprint for Nazi death camps and ethnic cleansing. This same thought pattern will lead to dreams of invading Mars. The first step toward the conquest of outer space was when these men surrendered to the US at the end of WWII. These scientists/engineers were Nazis. They wore SS uniforms! These men used slave labor and children’s labor in the construction of the V2 rockets. 

The Victory and Vengeance rockets were constructed in concentration camps, built by German communists, French resistance fighters, Polish Home Army POWs, Russian POWs and Czechs, who would be tortured and executed, but would still manage to sabotage these spaceships. Russian POWs would urinate on delicate electronics. The French resistance prisoners would replace working parts with known defective parts and leave screws loose during assembly. Hundreds were hung for this sabotage.

These spaceships were constructed by a self-proclaimed “master race” of white men who wanted to own the future of humanity. 

Men today of destiny and fortune--4 billionaires: Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk--hold the same dream of owning the stars.  

The same dream the Nazis had: to commodify the planets, moons, and asteroids, and become historical figures known for something more than their collective wealth. A wealth stolen from exploited workers and resources extracted from indigenous peoples’ land.

Their goal is the conquest of outer space, and thus, the conquest of the very future of humanity.

Don’t let them leave!

The Expanse- questioned

Having a disagreement with an old friend about the course of human history and the course of manned space travel, with its historical failings and its future of privatised corporate ownership and military/ police state guardians. It is very hard to divorce the speculative dreams of our youth and our fantasy of what space could be, opposed to what history has always shown us what exactly the expanse, would actually look like. And if the espanse just shows us, the same old tired, cowboys and monsters and corruption, of police states and prisons and murder mysteries, why would we hold these visons cherieshed to our hearts. Couldn’t, shouldn’t our dreams of space opera envision something more profound, more interesting than the exploitation of the expanse? 

Is space opera just the same reality that we must live through every day, located in a spaceship, a space station, backdropped worlds, rather than, a car commuting to cities, across towns over highways, patrolled by cops. Ruled by politicians. Fueled by greed and stupidity ?

So the Expanse is just our reality, floated off world- and you can tell this is fact because

In the worlds of the expanse, there is no great Artificial Intelligence, computation is virtually the same as ours, now. 

There is also no contact with alien life, we don’t enact first contact drama, we don’t get to wrestle with the exploitation of other beings' homeworlds. Or interact with aliens at all. Humans, we, find all of the other planets dead and ready for mining and harvest, no other life, no roadblocks to our colonists. 

I know ! I hear you screaming about the Protomolecule.

What about the entire plot of the first season and books? 

Well the Protomolecule is nothing but a plot device which takes us into the road movie medium. But yeah, in space. We get to tour the universe, with lovelble rebels and defenders of all that is good and noble of mankind.

Fuck.

The protomolecule is used up and exploited to show us the greed and horror of corporations, and business people. Then cast aside and sent away. 

When it is brought back again, it merely leads us to more lifeless universes, to be manifest destined to shit. To be land grabbed, back stabbed and again the protomolecule is shown to be irrelevant. 

Why can’t humans envision a universe that isn’t a ghost town. 

The expanse is nothing but a character driven drama, that could be a western, or a mystery, or about a bar, or coffee shop, in the frontier, filled with all the sexism and racism one could crave. With all the stereotypical characters. The hero, white, the sidekick, specialists, gunslinger, white, the love interest, exotic, belter, POC, the genius engineer, XO. the loveable spaceship, weapons platform. Foul mouthed politicians, two dimensional dirtbags and bad guys. 

Oooo, but they live in asteroids. 

Fuck you. 

This show, these books are the perfectly encapsulated reason not to go to space. 

Why we as a species should never expand, 

Or be 

The expanse.

number 2. Contamination !

2.    Contamination !

Manned space exploration has embraced the notion of studying the stars, moons, and planets with a ravenous desire to kill the subject, to catch, embalm, and dissect everything. To hunt and catalog without any reflection on the damages. 

Look at the way the moon has been treated by National Space Administrations. After the Apollo programs headed back to earth, the orbital craft was sent to the surface of the moon for what were called “intentional crashes.” The idea was to study the seismic data from the destruction. Fifty-four  space vehicles totaling almost 200,000 kilograms have been crashed on the moon.This shouldn’t pose a contamination problem for the earth’s moon, because it is assumed to be lifeless.

But Mars, on the other hand, has a much more disgraceful history. The 1976 Viking landers 1 and 2 may have detected life on the surface, but the results are disputed and not widely accepted. Today, over fifteen man-made spacecraft, probes, and testing platforms have been crashed onto the surface of an entire world.  Fifteen spacecraft carrying Earth-born microorganisms. This means that we are destroying our own ability to study life on Mars, which also means we could be following the path of Victorian germ warfare. But unlike the Victorians, NASA knows these facts and has decided to ignore or set aside their own guidelines. 

There are over 15 manmade objects on Mars with a mass of over 10,000 kilograms of toxins and contaminants. A gift from mankind. 

Additionally, it is impossible to completely sterilize spacecraft leaving Earth. When humans travel in those spacecraft, contamination is almost certain. Beyond contamination, ethical questions must also be considered about human intervention and research of potential alien life.

McKay

As we speak, humans plan on sending thermally tipped nuclear-powered torpedoes to Europa, one of the moons of Saturn. These torpedoes will penetrate the ice shell of pristine alien oceans to search for life and kill it, either directly or incidentally.

Robotic spacecraft to Mars are required to be sterilized, to have at most 300,000 spores on the exterior of the craft—and more thoroughly sterilized if they contact "special regions" containing water, as otherwise there is a risk of contaminating not only the life-detection experiments but possibly the planet itself.

We do not know enough about what life is, what life could be on other worlds, to even consider these genocidal risks.  History has shown us that the introduction of germs/bacteria/viruses proved deadly to the indigenous populations of the Americas.  Or the reverse: in the classic book War of the Worlds,  Orson Welles describes how humans are saved because Martians don’t have immunity to our diseases. 

It is impossible to sterilize human missions to this level, as humans are host to typically a hundred trillion microorganisms of thousands of species of the human microbiome, and these cannot be removed while preserving the life of the human. Containment seems the only option, but it is a major challenge in the event of a hard landing (i.e. crash).[29] There have been several planetary workshops on this issue, but with no final guidelines for a way forward yet.[30] Human explorers would also be vulnerable to back contamination to Earth if they become carriers of microorganisms.[31]

This is not the path to discovery, but the path to colonization, genocide, and ecocide. A human path to freeing land of pesky indigenous life-forms, regardless of whether we acknowledge them or their right to existence.  

This is the study of what you are destroying by studying it