Dear editors,
Indeed, there is nothing left to conserve! The nothingness of our outer space is one of the most sublime and consequential elements of our existence, and deserves genuine effort towards its conservation. It is not, as our least charismatic billionaires have put it, a void waiting to be filled with industry and advertisements. In fact, our cosmic nothing just beyond the atmosphere is a beautiful perfection which took thirteen billion years to arrange itself and needs no human input. When we gaze at a starry sky, unpolluted by the trivial man-made artifacts and lights which float through its volume like parasitic debris, our overweening pretensions are, for a moment, adequately humbled. The accelerating campaign to clog our low and medium orbits with satellite constellations, to plant our flags on Mars, to treat the grand cosmos as a frontier economy waiting to be exploited, represents not one giant leap for mankind but a failure of imagination so profound as to genuinely endanger our survival as a species.
The most dangerous argument for a bold and rapid spatial expansion is that Mars, or some other orbital habitat, could possibly function as a lifeboat for civilization’s accelerating collapse back on Earth. This argument is as destructive as it is seductive. If human extinction is assumed to be inevitable, then the only prudent response is to prepare a litany of backup plans to continue our progeny even in the face of a planet-wide apocalypse, such as, for example, climate catastrophe or nuclear holocaust. But this system of grand-scale doomsday preparation relies on a fatal and ultimately untenable presumption: that Earth is either losable, or already lost. By building an escape hatch, we ratify the emergency rather than prevent it. A species with a spare planet is one that has already abandoned its first.
Any potential benefit we stand to gain by developing territory on Mars is dwarfed by what we stand to lose in redirecting that capital away from a planet that is, at this moment, in dire need of our help. What we need, more than any resource outer space is capable of providing, is the existential weight of having nowhere else to go and everything to lose. The nothingness of our cosmos is not representative of human failure or inadequacy. It is the most powerful motivator for the spiritual and physical health of our species.
Our Earth is, as far as we know, the only planet capable of producing birdsong, cove hardwood forests, and the overwhelming beauty of a coastline at dusk. The vast, indifferent darkness is the contradiction to our rich and teeming world necessary to appreciate its provenance. The great emptiness of the cosmos shows us exactly how miraculous our tiny, vibrant planet is. To lose that nothingness to a growing swarm of satellites and martial developments is to kill the very dark which makes our world luminous.
Terraphilically,
Maccabee Anderson
Image: Elihu Vedder, The Fates Gathering in the Stars, oil on canvas, 1887 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).