Rethinking Transhumanist Politics 2— Political Neutrality is Death
(This is the second in a series of four related essays; you can read the first one here.)
Space exploration is easily the most symbolic, strongest political cause that transhumanism can take up, because a stance in favor is one of the few things that brings all transhumanists together: space flight requires massive resources and strong tech development with, on the other side of the equation, the promise of even more resources and development; indeed, mastery of the universe. Space exploration is, or should be, the main transhumanist rallying cry.
The assumption that space exploration is a given, unstoppable part of tech development that will continue to evolve and improve until humans are masters of the Solar System and beyond, is laughably wrong. Yes, Elon Musk is building a massive Spaceship, and I wish him all the best in his endeavor. But what if he fails? He’s only human, and leads a company that must keep investors happy while servicing hard-to-please clients on which it completely depends… like NASA.
If SpaceX were to fail, for whatever reason, there just isn’t any alternative out there, and there has been no single plan for even modest manned exploration that has gone beyond the blueprint stage for decades — the likes of Blue Origin are well behind SpaceX in terms of tech, and even more in terms of ambition. The Asteroid Mining Craze? Wake up: that went away a long time ago. Unless Musk’s Spaceship provides a low-cost, reusable transportation method, there will be no asteroid mining in our lifetimes.
One should also discount NASA’s on-and-off plans to build a Lunar outpost, last re-launched under the current U.S. administration following, again, decades of discussions. That can go down the drain with a flick of President Biden’s pen, and very likely will, unless his handlers feel that China or Russia can build a Lunar outpost soon.
The U.S. Senate just drastically cut funding for the program so that nobody thinks it will be make its “ambitious” target of returning humans to the Moon by 2024, that is, during Biden’s administration. Did you know that NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine was perhaps the staunchest supporter of human spaceflight within the agency? He’s out. Because of his opposition to same-sex marriage.
This decade in particular is critical. Right now, there still is some measure of popular, wide-eyed support for launching astronauts on a wild ride, or at least limited outright opposition; in ten years, that may be gone, perhaps for generations. The writing is on the wall.
Take a recent, much-reviewed book that is making an impact with its arguments against space exploration. Yes, it’s 2020 and the most popular book on space exploration… is strongly against.
“Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity,” written by Daniel Deudney and published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, makes the straightforward argument that space exploration is mad, bad and dangerous, and should be stopped at all costs.
There are reviews of the book in Turing Church and Centauri Dreams for those interested in the details of Deudney’s points, but in summary Deudney rests his argument on the much-abused principle of precaution: same as some climate change experts call for stringent measures to reduce the chances of catastrophic, low-probability events to zero or near-zero, Deudney calls on space exploration to be stopped because it’s a double-edged sword, that can harm mankind as much as it can aid it.
Deudney isn’t 100% anti-space. He supports Earth-centered space activities focused on nuclear security and environmental protection. He likes his cellphone, so communication and weather satellites are cool. In general, he believes that any space activity that doesn’t lead to the protection of Earth should be banned. Banned, yes, proscribed, forbidden.
Oxford University Press, remember.
In the finest tradition of propaganda and politics, Deudney coins an expression to describe us supporters of space exploration as pathological enemies of the people: “space expansionists.” That’s who we are, from now on.
I find it fascinating that Deudney really concedes all the main points of what we might describe as the “transhumanist consensus.” As I discussed in part 1 of this essay series, transhumanists are a varied bunch and lot of them are more focused on, say, mind uploading, genetic and cybernetic technologies than they are on putting boots on the Martian ground.
But, generally speaking, all transhumanists agree that all of these developments go hand in hand: again, better technology for mind-computer communication and for physical body enhancements — perhaps including genetics — will help space exploration; and space exploration and its releated technology is a great driver for massive leaps in the fields of computer science, genetics and cybernetics.
It all comes together in a virtuous cycle, and Deudney totally understand this, and agrees. He just sees it as horribly dangerous. Please note that he explicitly singles out genetic and cybernetic technologies as the riskiest of any human technologies, including mind-uploading-related advancements as a part of cybernetics (which is fine by me).
Deudney adds that space exploration may provide god-like destructive powers to those in charge of moving asteroids or space freighters. Think of those mad scientists in orbit who may finally take their revenge on the cheerleaders who didn’t want to go to the Prom with them, by hurling space rocks on Earth and destroying all human civilization. That will teach them! Deudney thinks we can’t run that risk in the Tinder era.
Jokes aside, we must understand the roots of Deudney’s objections, in order to refute them. Space exploration does indeed implies risks for human life on Earth. Small, of course, even infinitesimal, but real. There may be not entirely sane people who will be capable and willing to leave the Earth to work with massive asteroids and spaceships. These risks as real: if we say they amount to zero, we’re lying. This is a debate that must be had.
At the same time, we must understand where this unease comes from. It doesn’t come from Deudney himself. He didn’t invent it. He’s just a spokesman who has been given a pretty big loudspeaker.
Even during the heroic era of space-flight in the 1950s and 1960s, there were objections to the massive expenses incurred in the race to the Moon. In the Soviet Union, many other government priorities had to be put in the back-burner while the relatively backward country devoted a large percentage of its resources to put Gagarin, Tereshkova and Laika on orbit.
In the U.S., opposition was as muted as it was in the more repressive Soviet Union, but it did exist. Some liberals complained about the expenses, especially when the country embarked on the Great Society programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration, but they were kept on the margins. Black opposition was harder to silence, since it coincided with the rise of Black Power and the push for civil rights for African-Americans.
Few remember now, but most black leaders were intensely critical of the U.S. space program. As man was about to land on the moon, the black magazine Jet was condemning the space program for using money which could be better spent on welfare programs for blacks. [“Blacks Scarce as Men on Moon at Launch, by Simeon Booker,” Jet, July 31, 1969] The more mainstream Ebony magazine published an editorial comparing white men going to the moon to Columbus’s voyage to the New World, which led “to one of the most infamous and long lasting rapes of all history” [“Giant Leap for Mankind?”, Ebony, October 1969].
One month before, Ebony had reported that blacks opposed what they thought was a misallocation of taxpayer dollars better suited for ameliorating poverty in black communities and Africa: “From Harlem to Watts, the first moon landing in July of last year was viewed cynically as one small step for ‘The Man,’ and probably a giant leap in the wrong direction for mankind. Large segments of the rest of the population, except perhaps at the time of the first landing, were merely bored.” [“How Blacks View Mankind’s ‘Giant Step’: Space scientists, laymen see space program from different perspective,” by Steven Morris, Ebony, September 1970, p. 33]
On July 16, 1969, Ralph Abernathy — the heir to Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement — rode a mule cart, with three mules, along with 150 other poor black people to protest NASA’s launch to the moon. [“Protesters, VIPS Flood Cape Area,” by William Greider, Washington Post, July 17, 1969].
It’s easy to dismiss this. But, in the end, financial considerations are the main (but not sole) reason why space exploration slowed down to an effective halt over the next decades. The protest did succeed. NASA budgets have been cut down ever since; in 2019, it was at less than 0.5% of the U.S. Federal Budget, its lowest level since 1959, down from almost 5% in the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, international aid and government handouts have ballooned.
This is, of course, incredibly important for two reasons. First, the trends that we see in American politics and NASA budgets have been mirrored elsewhere, with similar money troubles from pretty much every other space agency in the world, save for the Chinese space agency which — although no reliable numbers are available — is probably still expanding its budget.
Second, NASA is hugely relevant for human, not just American, space exploration as a whole. Only NASA took humans to the Moon, only NASA has anything close to a decent record of Mars exploration (a huge Russian/Soviet failure); and NASA is a key source of financing for the U.S. private space sector, the world’s most relevant by far, which is booming but still needs plenty of government subsidies, and will for the foreseeable future.
In a world in which social, racial and environment concerns dominate, and this increasingly is our world, there’s no way in hell that coming American administrations will keep even the current, reduced level of budgetary support for NASA.
The fact that NASA is a giant money pit from which Boeing and other contractors with increasingly damaged reputations are extracting resources with which they build McMansions, and politicians extract jobs to be re-elected in their states, doesn’t really help to make NASA’s funding future any more secure. NASA is a very soft, very exposed target for anyone who is looking to cut spending someplace, and increase it someplace else.
Also, we’re not even taking into the account the hugely demoralizing effect of political correctness on a workforce that is already subjected to massive indoctrination and racial preferences that, by design, result in lowered hiring standards and, obviously, lowered work standards.
I’m Hispanic myself so if you’re thinking that’s very harsh on Hispanics (a larger percentage of the American population than Blacks, and a rising one, unlike Blacks), all I can is that’s just the way it is. Facts of life. Check the SAT numbers out and spare me the lectures.
So, there are two ways this can play out. Either the idea of space exploration and budgets for space exploration are defended, or they will be gutted like a Trump supporter surrounded by antifa activists.
Did you ever wonder why it’s the nature of political systems across the world to produce two opposing voting blocs? Because concentration of power is the only way to survive. If there’s an anti-exploration bloc, and it’s pretty evident that it’s only growing, there must be a pro-space exploration bloc to square off against it. Or the battle will be lost for our generation.
(To be continued)
Cover picture from NASA.
