The Imperialist Fantasy of Going to Space
Photo by Nicolas Lobos on Unsplash
When the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, gave his final state of the union address before Congress, he invoked the spirit of the frontier to describe his desire to push America into space. He told them: “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier: America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
Manifest destiny has always been a loaded term. It was initially used to describe the belief that America had a right to expand westward — the rights of the people who already lived there be damned. Our leaders used its as a justification to settle the frontier, and displace millions.
Many people on the left saw this comment as yet another racist remark in a presidency that has embodied them. Yet, it actually struck at something far deeper: how our conception of space travel was built upon an imperialist fantasy of conquest.
Our mythos of space flight often supposes not only that we should leave our planet behind, but that for the betterment of humanity, we must expand outwards into the frontier of space. This expansionist vision of progress has nothing to do with helping humanity, and everything about the powerful grabbling with a settler’s mindset older than America itself.
When entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, he did so with the slogan: “not left, not right, but forward.” He advocated for an approach to politics not linked to one side of the political spectrum, but one instead backed by “the data.” Yang repeatedly talked on the campaign trail of crunching the numbers, and his supporters often carried around the slogan MATH or Make America Think Harder. He proposed technocratic, “innovative” solutions such as giving every American $1,000 a month to mitigate the effects of automation or to use giant space mirrors to reverse climate change.
Silicon Valley, the community to which Andrew Yang spiritually belongs, has long evangelized that technological progress is both apolitical and a supreme good — a philosophy sometimes referred to as “technological optimism.” We see this sentiment harkening back to the beginning of this country, with some of our nation’s imminent thinkers expressing it. In a letter to Joseph Priestley, scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin lamented that they sometimes regretted being alive at that moment in history because 1,000 years from then, science would be that much more advanced.
This march towards progress has included space as well. President John F. Kennedy famously told Congress over 60 years ago in his speech on why we must go to the moon that “…it in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” JFK painted traveling to space as yet another step in our inevitable march towards progress.
However, space goes far deeper for tech than simply nostalgia for this Cold War-era ambition. The innovations from that initial investment in the space program (i.e., technologies such as computing) formed the future tech industry's foundation. Many people within that field trace a throughline from the Space Race directly to the rise of Silicon Valley. As Basil Hero, reporter and author of the book The Mission of a Lifetime, told CNN Business on the space Apollo program that led the US to the moon: “Without [Apollo], I don’t think the computer revolution would have happened as quickly and on the same trajectory. It would have taken an extra 10 or 20 years.”
The Space Race is an integral aspect of Silicon Valley’s lore. Many of its most successful continue to hold onto the belief that the secret to human prosperity lies within the stars — that expansion is the best way for us to survive. When asked to defend his space venture Blue Origin at the Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony in 2019, Billionaire Jeff Bezos remarked:
“What sounds like freedom to me is moving out into the solar system, where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, unlimited resources. We’d have a trillion humans in the solar system, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That’s the world I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.”
If you were to believe the words of people such as Jeff Bezos, then we have been apart of an unending, unquestionable progression. Our reach for space is the next step in that journey — the final frontier. These entrepreneurs tell themselves it's for the good of humanity — that the gains reached from the stars will trickle down to the rest of us in the years and generations to come — and yet our recent history tells us this has not been the case.
Progress can be a very dubious word. Technological optimism comes with it a refusal to address the morality and politics of technological developments. Most tech is at best value-neutral, with people being able to repurpose it for both “good” and “bad.”
The Wright Brothers, for example, famously pitched that planes would bring about an end to all war because scouts would be able to detect advancing armies and halt their approach. Less than three decades later, bombers were used to level countless cities and towns worldwide in WWII. “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth,” said inventor Orville Wright shortly before his death in 1948, “But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end." When we only are willing to discuss the good that can come from technology, we become blindsided by its more terrible effects.
The Tech Industry was likewise portrayed during the last decade as a force for good, “disrupting” sectors of the economy such as media and transportation to better the consumer and society. However, this portrayal flattened all criticisms as either advancing technology or halting it, even when that tech was as ridiculous as a $400 juicer or as malicious as an all-encompassing surveillance system. It allowed tech companies to rebrand practices such as wage theft and union-busting as innovative when, really, they were taking advantage of gaps in the law, as well as precarious insecurity in the labor market, to extract wealth. As Nitasha Tiku wrote in Wired:
“It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction — -of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”
When men of industry talk about space, they often do so with the same deceptive branding of progress. The kings of Silicon Valley often see our expansion into the stars almost as a prophecy. When Jeff Bezos spoke in 2016 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, he framed space travel as an ultimatum, saying, “We need to go into space if we want to continue to have a growing civilization.”
These men are confident in a future that has not yet come to pass. They speak of the Earth’s destruction without space travel as a near certainty, which is an ethically fraught thing to do for the people directly responsible for how our planet’s policies are shaped. By framing leaving the Earth as something that must and will happen, these men never have to contemplate whether they should or even if they have the right to — it simply is.
They use the mythos of technological optimism to avoid responsibility, so they can instead fantasize about being masters in space.
Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have desired to go into space for decades, if not their entire lives. Bezos allegedly once considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com after the catchphrase of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard. Elon Musk once said in an interview that he wants to make “Starfleet happen.” It’s clear from multiple interviews that the technological aesthetic of that future has inspired them greatly in their work.
However, these two men run businesses that, while technologically impressive, are utterly divorced from the egalitarian principles the Star Trek universe claims to represent. It’s doubtful that the Federation (i.e., the main polity in the Star Trek franchise) would approve of the union-busting and hazardous working conditions present in both of their businesses. The progress narrative is something they cling to as a rationalization. If men like Jeff Bezos truly want to create a solar system with “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einstein’s,” then we need more housing, food, education, and healthcare on Earth, not more spaceships.
The part of the Star Trek mythos that Silicon Valley kings want to replicate is not the Earth of the Federation — which is a democratic, post-scarcity society that has long moved past capitalism — but rather the endless exploration and conquest of space. When Marketplace asked Elon Musk to provide the reason for why we should go to space, it ultimately came down to excitement:
“…if you think about and sort of look ahead and see about a future where we’re out there exploring the stars and understanding the universe and the kind of things that you see in science fiction books and movies and reading books; that’s an exciting future and much more exciting than one where we’re just forever confined to Earth until our eventual extinction.”
Note that he’s not really talking about saving humanity — that’s simply the feel-good finish that’s put in a TedTalk presentation. The thing we should focus on here is this desire to explore the unknown and to make it your own. While that may sound harmless, the idea of laying claim to the frontier is a narrative that historically has had a very racialized and imperialist tinge to it.
When Europeans came to the “New World,” they found a continent ravished by the diseases they brought with them. We will never know the exact number of Native Americans that existed here before the European conquest. Still, some estimates place it as high as 112 million in 1492, with 90% succumbing to diseases by the time we reach 1650. European settlers conquered the lands on this slightly less occupied continent, and overtime, pre-First Contact America became reimagined by many white Americans as a pristine wildland untouched by man. As John Bakeless wrote erroneously in his book The Eyes of Discovery (1950): “the land seemed empty to invaders who came from settled Europe…that ancient, primeval, undisturbed wilderness.”
Of course, this perception was untrue with millions of Native Americans still existing on the continent, many of which became violently displaced in the process of Westward “expansion,” but that was not how countless White Americans portrayed their exploitation of this place. Many believed they had a God-given right or a “Manifest Destiny” to expand westward. Public figures such as President James Monroe made it a matter of US policy, addressing to Congress in 1823 that the US would “consider any attempt [by a European power] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
The continent of North America was the U.S.A’s to claim, and the U.S.A’s alone.
The cultural hero often seen depicted in this era was the cowboy, which, although based on a far-less glamorous, far-more diverse profession, has since been reimagined to be a white savior whose job was to create order in a lawless, savage land. Cowboys were played by men like John Wayne, who made a career portraying gunmen who protected white Americans from the outlaws and Indians “occupying” the West. The movie Stagecoach (1939) ends in a climactic battle where our white protagonists, led by John Wayne, have to shoot down attacking Apache forces until the U.S. Calvery ultimately saves them.
As a people, we never lost sight of the idea that exploration requires wiping away old paradigms and people to claim something as “new.” When we think of Space exploration, our go-to heroes are often captains such as Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) in Firefly (2002) or the rogue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in Star Wars (1977)— all of which are updated Cowboy archetypes that spend their time with bounty hunters or making deals in futuristic, yet retro-looking saloons.
Similarly, back before the Mariner 4 flyby in 1964 revealed Mars to be a dead world, it was widely speculated that it was teeming with life. Some scientists even believed that Mar’s color on the infrared spectrum mimicked that of vegetation. This captured the popular imagination, and we were bombarded with stories of a lawless landscape tamed through brave exploration. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter franchise, for example, was about the titular hero and his adventures on Mars as a heroic warlord. The late 40s and early 50s were likewise littered with Mars-themed B-movies such as Invaders from Mars (1953) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959).
Our evolving understanding of space has made it seem colder and less vibrant than our image of the cosmos sixty years ago. Still, that spirit of conquest and limitless possibility remains. Admirers of space no longer talk as much about encountering alien life, but, instead, how they can shape the vastness of space to their dominion. When, for example, Jeff Bezos laid out his vision for building out O’Neil colonies throughout the solar system — basically gigantic space stations with independent ecosystems — he talked less about how to create an ideal society and far more about how that environment would be shaped, saying:
“…these are really pleasant places to live. Some of these O’Niel colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities….These are ideal climates. These are shirt sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day. All year long. No rain. No storms. No earthquakes…”
Much has been written about how rich Tech entrepreneurs are attempting to buy themselves a segregated society in the stars — away from our deteriorating planet's dangers. There may be some truth to that worry, but ultimately it’s far easier to build a bunker underground in New Zealand than it is to jumpstart a delicate, spinning deathtrap in space.
This is about control.
Space, by its very nature, must be a heavily regulated environment. The void is dangerous, and one poorly planned decision can lead to people being jettisoned to their deaths. Everything from the water these future citizens consume to their air they breathe will be tracked and logged by necessity. Every move a person makes can easily be monitored because, unlike on Earth, there is no elsewhere to run off to.
Space is also simultaneously lawless in the sense that the governments and regulations of Earth are very far away. All laws are only enforceable as far as your employer or owner wishes to acknowledge them. It’s an inherently authoritarian environment as citizens are now under the whim of someone who can rightly define dissent as illegality. In this situation, the outlaw isn’t some mercenary alien or rogue AI, but any person threatening the delicate ecosystem the rich control, as all challenges can be conflated into existential threats.
Space offers the rich the final frontier of ultimate control.
Tech heroes love to talk about Science Fiction. They gush about Star Trek and Star Wars and how that technology is just within reach. They claim it's our right to expand outwards into the stars. They tell us that we will be there soon— if only we give them the reins to get us there. However, when we look at those futures more closely, it doesn’t always bode well for the humans left stranded on Earth.
In science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the Earth is a radioactive backwater that has long been abandoned for newer and better colonies. The planet has fallen so far into obscurity that no one in the galactic community even remembers that it’s the origin of humanity. The twenty million or so people who continue to live here endure increasingly harsh circumstances, with all citizens undergoing mandatory euthanasia by the age of sixty.
The idea of having to abandon Earth is a common one in science fiction: in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the planet is thought to be uninhabitable; Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga takes place millions of years after catastrophic wars caused humanity to flee the Sol system; in the cult classic Firefly our planet is referred to as the Earth That Was. The prevailing narrative in the cultural zeitgeist is that we will eventually destroy this planet and will have to spread ourselves into the ever-expanding void of space to survive.
As someone living on Earth, this template has me quite concerned. It might seem as though this essay is trying to dissuade you from supporting space travel, but this is not a call for technological pessimism anymore than it’s an endorsement of blind optimism. We very well could reach for the stars in a responsible and good way for the majority of humanity, but that would involve caring about the policies used to shape that future. It would involve looking to shows like Star Trek for more than just their ship designs.
The Federation did not achieve a peaceful polity through Faster Than Light travel (known as warp on the show). It started when the creator of the warp drive, scientist Zefram Cochrane, chose to peacefully make First Contact with the alien race, the Vulcans. Even before the invention of transporters or replicators, Earth expanded the Federation by prizing policy that uplifted peace and exploration over cold, merciless value extraction.
That world is also within our reach.
If we want Earth to be like the Federation and not like the radioactive wasteland in the Foundation or the abandoned surface of Dune, then we will have to prioritize the Federation’s goals. It will not only mean setting the opinions of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk aside (and redistributing their wealth and influence to more people) but also creating a world where everyone has the potential to be an Einstein or Mozart, not just a couple thousand.
We all have the potential to be extraordinary, not only a few rich men struggling for control.