"What we need is here"
Should we tilt our gaze up to the stars, or reach our fingers back into the soil?
I really don’t know how to think clearly about SpaceX, the interplanetary exploration and rocket company founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Since that time, SpaceX has passed milestone after technological milestone that are, inarguably, at least partly responsible for reinvigorating Americans’ sense of wonder in the space program. I have no problem admitting that I not only watched live, but got enormous chills and a Chris Matthews-style thrill up my leg when in 2016 SpaceX managed to send its Falcon 9 rocket into the upper atmosphere, turn it around, and land it safely on an outrageously specific target in the Atlantic Ocean without destroying the rocket, thus preserving it for future missions.
Had you been working outside in Florida a few weeks back, however, you might have looked up to find your gardening interrupted by an exploding rocket streaking across the sky. This was SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, which was undergoing a flight test when it malfunctioned and disintegrated before it even left the atmosphere, raining debris all over Florida and halting all flights from Miami for hours. A statement from SpaceX reported that the ship had suffered "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" — which, as an accidental metaphor for Musk’s recent efforts to dismantle the federal government, was a little on the nose even for me. The classic Silicon Valley ethos is to “move fast and break things.” This rocket was doing both in dramatic style.
Then again, you might instead have come across SpaceX in the news just a couple weeks ago, when its Dragon Capsule docked with the International Space Station, onboarded three astronauts who had been stranded up there for months, then successfully delivered them back to safe ground here on Earth. This was unambiguously good news, and a huge technological achievement. By all accounts, it could not have been easily or cheaply done without SpaceX.
Holding both of these realities in our heads at once can be confounding, but I think it ultimately makes sense. SpaceX, as a company, is the perfect microcosm for both the promise and the peril of space travel. It was founded by Elon Musk with the same good intentions with which billionaires like him are constantly paving the road to disaster. It clocks big, inventive wins and just as big, explosive losses. It’s fueled by a passion for science, engineering, and discovery, all of which necessarily include failure.
Ultimately, SpaceX is just a tool that humans can use both for good and ill, and we’ve seen both result. Like all companies and organizations, SpaceX reflects back in its work the undeniable genius and ingenuity of the people who have made their massive achievements a reality; but it also reflects the kind of crippling carelessness that we’ve seen at work in Elon Musk’s disturbing, “rapid, unscheduled disassembly” of the federal government that’s thrown the country I love into a political crisis.
Even so, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however fascism-curious that water may appear. Is it possible to love the Earth — and to save it from ourselves — while also turning our heads and our imaginations to the sky, and ask ourselves that most simple and hopeful question: “What’s next?”
The idealism about the next great frontier that SpaceX has emblemized for more than two decades is difficult to shake, at least for me. I grew up fascinated by astronomy, and this interest has only blossomed as I’ve gotten older. My idea of a fun Saturday night when my wife is out of town is to pour a gin and tonic and watch re-runs of Cosmos. I’m sure I’ve already mentioned here that my favorite movie, unquestionably, is Interstellar.
Thanks to the recent and near-total destruction of Elon Musk’s reputation, and his now-permanent association with American technofascism, we might be tempted to toss SpaceX out the window entirely as so many have already done with Tesla; or more broadly, to abandon humanity’s interplanetary ambitions out of pure spite.
I really don’t think we should. Doing so would be letting the world’s richest douchebag totally predetermine what we do about one of the next great frontiers of human achievement, and how we do it. Especially because, prior to his radicalization, Musk had a history of making really interesting, worthwhile points about the possibility — and, perhaps, the necessity — of space travel as a means of preserving humanity.
In 2015, Musk granted a significant amount of journalistic access to Tim Urban, a blogger and writer who I sometimes (not always) find really smart and persuasive. On Urban’s blog, Wait But Why, he wrote a series of articles stemming from months of shadowing and interviews Urban conducted with Musk. The series is like a time capsule of Musk potentially at his best, before the social media platform he bought for kicks turned his brain into day-old oatmeal.
The articles about Tesla and Elon’s background are entertaining, and worth reading in their own right (or at least, they were ten years ago), but it’s the article detailing the founding of SpaceX, alongside its stated purpose of colonizing Mars, that’s given me the most food for thought over the past decade. In it, Urban (aided by firsthand insight into Musk’s company) ultimately explores the idea that humanity extending its presence to other planets is not only reasonable, but the only responsible, and therefore necessary, thing for us to do. Urban makes the case that, cosmically speaking, Homo sapiens as a species is unlikely to last forever on Earth, given planetary disasters like climate change, and (of course) our tendency to blow each other up every once in awhile. As a result, Urban (and Musk) argue that it’s the epitome of foolishness to keep the entire species in one place:
Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?
You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.
Choosing not to expand the civilization to other planets, then, is the species-level equivalent of putting all our eggs in one basket. Our darwinistic tendency, we are told, is towards survival. We pass down genes and behaviors that help us survive, and our sentience and intelligence is the biggest whopper of them all. Making the affirmative choice to give ourselves a backup option, should the worst happen here on Earth, is one that no other species on this planet has ever had or is likely ever to have. Why, then, should we not use the gifts evolution has given us to achieve what no known species has before: a kind of ultimate survival that persists even if the planet we started on doesn’t?
Beyond this practical approach to species preservation, there’s something to be said for space travel, and potentially even planetary expansion, that I won’t pretend isn’t deeply moving and motivating to me. It’s a Great Dark Hope — a mysterious point on the horizon to give us something to fight for and achieve as a single, unified human civilization, rather than succumbing again and again to the same divisions and rivalries we’ve saddled ourselves with for centuries here on Earth. The boundaries we draw between us, and the difference and animosity they generate within us, are permanently and necessarily attached to the geography of our home world, because it’s all we’ve ever cared to know.
Aiming for something grander, and giving our species a second chance at getting things right — after getting this perfect planet so wrong — is an unbelievably tempting offer.
But that’s just one side of the coin. I continue to be something of a space nerd, and I feel confident in saying that Elon’s hard turn over the past few years has not totally soured me on the possibility of visiting or making our mark on other planets, or on any of the arguments I just offered.
Over time, though, my outlook on space travel is no longer a uniformly optimistic one. It’s been seriously complicated by a potent mix of two newer understandings:
The reality and persistent limitations of the technology we have to achieve this, and;
A set of much bigger, more complex, and ultimately more important ethical and philosophical questions about what it really means to colonize the stars.
Both concerns need to be dealt with; and so far, spacefaring technology companies like SpaceX only seem interested in contending with the first; but they’ve done even this imperfectly, if the recent downpour of fiery debris over Florida is any indication. If it’s space travel and planetary colonization we’re talking about, “move fast and break things” is not just a dumb ethos, but a dangerous and possibly deadly one. Instead, we need to be circumspect and realistic about the challenges and perils posed by diving headfirst into the great beyond.
One big problem with this whole enterprise is that, so far as I know, prospects for actual, lasting foreign planetary occupation are currently slim, and likely to remain that way for awhile. All of the potentially habitable exoplanets that astronomers have located thus far are completely unreachable without the aid of near-light-speed travel, which (I’m fairly certain) is still well beyond our technological capacity. According to NASA, the closest thing resembling a habitable planet outside our solar system is Proxima b, which is 4.2 light years away; meaning, the fastest object humanity has ever built would take about 28 years to get there, even if we were able to solve the pesky fuel problem (we haven’t), or find a way to safely house a large enough group of humans on a ship we could attach to that rocket (we can’t). In the science fiction genre, these problems are easily solved with neat innovations like suspension chambers that can keep humans alive for decades or centuries; algae-powered ships with near-light speed; or infinitely sustainable solar sails attached to the hull of a miles-long spacecraft. Here in the real world, these things are not even close to being in reach.
Meanwhile, our only real nearby option — our solar system neighbor, Mars — would be an enormous challenge to make even minimally livable. Depending on where on the planet you decide to set up shop, Mars’s temperature range from 70 degrees Fahrenheit at its warmest to -225 degrees at its coldest. Regardless of where you set up shop, the air isn’t even close to breathable. Any permanent settlement on Mars would require either living in an artificial habitat (like Matt Damon’s character enjoys in The Martian), or a kind of core-level alteration of the surface and atmosphere of the entire planet, commonly known as terraforming. In addition to being technologically improbable, this would also require a supply of innovation, energy and resources that, again, is currently only available in sci-fi books.
The second big reason to press pause on our renewed galactic ambitions is that there’s just no reason to believe we wouldn’t screw up other planets in the exact same ways we’ve screwed up ours.
Humanity’s efforts to expand into every livable space on this planet, the one we already have, has brought with it such rapid technological innovation that it can hardly be tracked. It has also brought with it some of the bleakest human suffering imaginable, and the trampling of whole other, much more rooted civilizations like the indigenous populations who lived off the land we now call America long before Columbus or his cohort stepped foot here. If every rose has its thorn, then “manifest destiny” — as both a patriotic concept and an actual historical practice — has thousands.
“Manifest destiny” has, over my lifetime, transformed from a triumphal term in my elementary school textbooks to a darker, more complicated understanding of how colonization destroyed whole cultures that we thought weren’t as important as ours. I wonder if we should begin to consider spacefaring the same way. Whenever we put our fingerprints all over new spaces, we bring with us all that makes us us; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Maybe the very human sense of unbridled discovery and expansion that leads us into space will drive a new generation of equitable, inclusive moral industry. But just as likely, our journey to the cosmos will bring along with it the same ruinousness wrought by colonization here on Earth. Things can go just as wrong out there as they have here; and if they do, then the catastrophes we’ve created a species will be replicated in travel across the stars as they have been in travel across the continents.1
A final related point here: if a planet is desolate, it is (like Mars) by definition not a good candidate for colonization. Generally, astronomers who study exoplanets are on the hunt for ones that fall within what’s called the “habitable zone.” A planet in this zone would be potentially capable of sustaining life as we know it thanks to the right balance of compounds, chemicals, and physical size (right temperatures, near-Earth gravitational pull, abundant water, breathable air, etc) that are friendly to human life. But if a new planet is thriving with life and possibility, isn’t it also thriving with opportunities for us to endanger that life? We’ve decimated the vast majority of Earthly plants and animals that predate us, and beaten down biodiversity to within an inch of its life. Why should we expect any different from ourselves somewhere else?
Earlier, I mentioned this as-yet undoable process called terraforming, in which (at least, they way they do it in sci-fi books) humans could theoretically use advanced tech to introduce earthly elements, chemical compounds, and biological processes onto otherwise-desolate planets in order to totally transform the land, create oceans, and raise up life from the ground — basically, to make it exactly like Earth. It’s cool to read about, and wondrous to watch play out in your own imagination.
But the more I’ve thought about this process, the more terraforming sounds like a perverted, too-clever-by-half version of what we should actually be doing right here, which is proper Earthly stewardship. Does it really make sense to sink trillions of dollars, man hours, and ingenuity into a probably-hopeless quest for some planet in a “habitable zone” when we are currently sitting on by far the most habitable planet we’re every likely to find, the one that “terraformed” humanity in the first place? In other words, doesn’t putting a singular focus on the great horizon of space imply that we’ve completely given up on Earth?
It’s hard not to think this way as the weather warms up and I begin to touch the dirt again, preparing my home garden for the next few months of green wonder. Instead of looking up at the stars at night, I’ll be spending many of my days looking down at the surface of our own planet, hands deep in the soil trying to miraculously grow things and improve (in my tiny way) the richness of life on Earth that we’ve so carelessly tossed aside.
As I do this, I’ll be thinking of the words of some of my favorite writers, who have put much more eloquent words to the tune I’ve been singing in this post. Take, for example, the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil:
Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.
Or the writer and essayist Scott Russell Sanders, making direct reference to Weil’s “here below” depiction of the Earth:
How could our hearts be large enough for heaven if they are not large enough for Earth? The only country I am certain of is the one here below. The only paradise I know is the one lit by our everyday sun, this land of difficult love, shot through with shadow. The place where we learn this love, if we learn it at all, shimmers behind every new place we inhabit.
Or even President Theodore Roosevelt, who — shortly before declaring the Grand Canyon a national monument in 1903 — urged his fellow Americans to “leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
But as usual, my favorite expression of this sentiment comes from Wendell Berry, the legendary writer, poet, and Kentucky farmer who is, in my opinion, the best living writer, period:
“What We Need is Here”
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.One possibility I haven’t mentioned that you’re probably already thinking: What if we atoned for the sins we’ve committed against our own planet by getting down in the dirt and making things right with the Earth, while also turning our eyes upward to explore the heavens?
Can we do both? And more importantly, can we do them both safely, smartly, and responsibly? I don’t know. I worry that it’s impossible in the current climate (political, ecological, and otherwise), but I also know that we have more than enough abundant resources, wealth, and prosperity to make both things happen if we really want them to, and in ways that align with values we know to be universal, and not simply self-interested. If, for example, we learned how to get along down on Earth well enough, maybe the US (for one) could redirect some of the $800 billion it spends each year on national defense towards a combo of the restoration of our current home, and the cultivation of our next one.
I’m not holding my breath; but because I’m lucky enough to live on a planet with breathable air, I’m happy to know it’s at least a non-permanent option.
Already, less than a century after we began firing stuff into space, humanity has accumulated mountains of “space junk” in Earth’s surrounding areas, including about 3,000 dead satellites, and tens of thousands of other large bits of debris from spent rockets and other objects we’ve put there.
It’s so easy to dismiss all of Musk’s interests, what with his silly Spacex T-shirts and love of all things destructive. But I also love space movies - The Martian, though excellent, was even a better read. I’m old enough to have vivid memories of Neil Armstrong’s giant step. So thanks for reminding us of the awe. We can keep that alive without wavering in the consistent vigilance needed right in front of us.