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the ecological COLONIZATION OF SPACE
PEDER ANKER
| "IMAGINE THAT MARS is a Utopia in which there is complete trust, total harmony, no selfishness and no deceit," Richard Dawkins encouraged readers of The Extended Phenotype, published in 1982. "Now imagine a scientist from Mars trying to make sense of human life and technology [on Earth]." Dawkins attributed this Martian outlook to the "pop-ecology literature" of James Lovelock and to the followers of Lovelock's Gaia thesis. The image of an ideal community on Mars was not accidental; leading ecologists in the 1970s were investigating how to construct colonies on Mars and how this research was relevant to understanding ecosystems on Earth. In 1975, Edward O. Wilson, for one, advised readers of his Sociobiology to view life on Earth as "a perceptive Martian zoologist."1 |
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This article investigates what ecologists sought to do on Mars and what the Martian perspective meant for their understanding of life on Earth. It is a history that originated in military research into constructing self-sufficient closed ecological systems within submarines and underground shelters. In the U.S. space program of the 1960s, this know-how was used by leading ecologists to suggest construction of closed ecological systems within space capsules, ships, and colonies. Their research into the ecological "carrying capacity" for a given number of astronauts within a spaceship subsequently was used to analyze carrying capacity onboard Spaceship Earth. In the 1970s, environmental ethics became an issue of trying to live like astronauts by adapting space technologies such as bio-toilets, solar cells, recycling, and energy-saving devices to general use. Technology, terminology, and methodology developed for ecological colonization of space became tools for solving environmental problems on Earth. |
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Space colonization caused hardly any controversy until 1975, when royalties from the counterculture sourcebook, The Whole Earth Catalog, were used to finance space-colonization research. In the debate that followed, the overwhelming majority thought space colonies could provide well-functioning environments for astronauts seeking to push human evolutionary expansion into new territories, while also saving a Noah's Ark of earthly species from industrial destruction and possible atomic apocalypse on Earth. To supporters, space colonies came to represent rational, orderly, and wise management, in contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill-managed Earth. Some of them built Biosphere 2 in Arizona to prepare for colonization of Mars and to create a model for how life on Earth should be organized. The skeptical minority argued that space colonization was unrealizable or unethical, yet nevertheless adopted terminology, technology, and methodology from space research in their efforts to reshape the social and ecological matrix onboard Spaceship Earth. |
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The use of colonial terminology was deliberate and in line with the imperial tradition from which ecology as a science emerged. According to Stewart Brand, a leading defender of space colonization, the term "space colony" (instead of "space settlement") was unproblematic since "no Space natives [were] being colonized."2 Yet, as this article argues, when space colonies became the model for Spaceship Earth, all human beings became "Space natives" colonized by ecological reasoning: Social, political, moral, and historical space were invaded by ecological science aimed at reordering ill-treated human environments according to the managerial ideals of the astronaut's life in the space colony. |
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