Humans boldly going into space should echo the guiding principle of Captain Kirk’s Star Trek crew by resisting the urge to interfere, researchers have said, stressing a need to end a colonial approach to exploration.
As a Trekkie (watched The Tholian Web again last night), a libertarian, and a convinced anti-speciesist, I would gladly join with these brave scientists to demand an end to the colonial oppression of our fellow sapient beings… but before we end it, is there not a small logical barrier that we need to cross first?
Nasa has made no secret of its desire to mine the moon for metals, with China also keen to extract lunar resources – a situation that has been called a new space race.
But Dr Pamela Conrad of the Carnegie Institution of Science said the focus should shift away from seeking to exploit discoveries.
Indeed it should. What about the intelligent aliens bleeping piteously for release from the human yoke?
Oh.
OK, then, alien animals. Tell me how they are oppressed so I can send them thoughts of solidarity across the light years…
“Regardless of who or what is out there, that attitude of exploration being almost synonymous with exploitation gives one a different perspective as you approach to the task,” she said.
Regardless? FFS, lady, give me something to work with here. This is the Guardian, it doesn’t have to be much. I’d have been satisfied with some oppressed alien fungi, but “regardless”, as in “regardless of whether there is any victim whatsoever”, does not hack it.
“Because if something that’s not here [on Earth] is seen as a resource, just ripe to be exploited, then that [perpetuates] colonialism.”
She wants me to feel bad for objectifying rocks?
Conrad said such attitudes matter because a colonial approach can impinge on the rights of others to explore – whether in space itself or by looking at it from Earth.
Researchers have previously argued that light pollution creates just such a problem, with low-orbit satellites threatening to hinder the ability for astronomers to make new discoveries, and lighting associated with urban expansion and the use of LEDs making it increasingly difficult to pick out the constellations when stargazing.
Perhaps I should not have been so quick to mock. Immaterial things like the ability to see the night sky do matter, and it is not enough to blithely say “The polluter pays” as if those three words solved the problem. That link goes to an essay by Matt Zwolinski in which he quotes David Friedman on light pollution. While anyone can see that sending a thousand megawatt laser beam into someone’s eyes counts as aggression, Friedman pointed out that the principle remains the same if the intensity of the beam is reduced to that of a flashlight. Where should the lower limit of what counts as actionable light pollution be? It is not easy to say.
Nor am I unsympathetic to the point Dr Conrad goes on to make that the uncompensated harm suffered by any human being whose view of the night sky is impaired is even greater for those peoples who have not forsaken gazing at the stars in favour of gazing at liquid crystal displays, but who still see them, as most of humanity did throughout history, as portents and wonders.
Then she blew it. Can you see what is wrong with this sentence?
The latter, some have argued, amounts to cultural genocide as the stars, and the ability to observe them, play a key role in many indigenous traditions and knowledge systems.
Did someone buy a job lot of genocide references on eBay recently and flood the market trying to shift them on? I see them everywhere, going cheap.