Tech Won't Save Us - Space Mining Brings Capitalism to the Cosmos w/ Julie Michelle Klinger

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Julie Michelle Klinger to discuss the myths around rare earth elements and how they’re fueling a movement to enclose and mine space. But a better, more collaborative future that treats space as a commons is still possible, and the Global South may show us the way forward.Julie Michelle Klinger is the author of “Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes” and an Assistant Professor of Geography & Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her argument about why space is not the final frontier was recently published on urbanNext. Follow Julie on Twitter as @Prof_Klinger.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

You know, the SpaceX launch was remarkable in a number of ways, but the reason it wasn't this great unifying moment is because it was actually a demonstration of what a white supremacist approach to the cosmos looks like. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that really doesn't think any of these private space mining companies are going to save us from anything. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Julie Michelle Klinger. Julie is an assistant professor of geography and spatial sciences at the University of Delaware and part of the Mineral Materials and Society program. She's also the author of Rare Earth Frontiers, From Territorial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. The book won the 2017 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography.

In the interview, we talk about the myths around rare earth minerals and how that's fueling a new interest in space mining by private companies and certain governments around the world. But we also talk about what a more positive future of space and resource management might look like and how the global South is really key to that vision. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues you think would be interested in our conversation. And if you want to support the work that I put into the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a contributor. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Julie, welcome to tech won't save us. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here, Paris. It's great to speak with you. For people to understand where this discussion is coming from. I was hoping that you could start by talking a bit about rare earth minerals, what they are, what they're used for, and why they're really important

to this conversation. That's a really beautiful set of questions. Let's dig right in. Yeah, so I'll start just by giving the basic definition of rare earth elements. So it's a misnomer, but the term rare earth elements generally refers to the lanthanide series, which is chemical elements 57 to 71 on the periodic table. Like if you can picture the periodic table in your mind, there's that bar underneath the big chunk on top. It's that top part of the southern island, I guess, of the periodic table where you find rare earth elements. Scandium and atrium are also included typically in the rare earth element family. Rare earth elements are each distinct and unique and wondrous in their own right. But the reason they tend to be grouped together as a

family is that they share these fantastic magnetic and conductive properties. And some of them also have different color properties and things like that, that make them useful for all sorts of crazy applications. So just to give you an example, one rare earth element, we'll take cerium as an example. So cerium is an element that is used as a signal booster in fiber optic cables. So, you know, we have global internet connections, right? And the sub-oceanic fiber optic cables that wired the whole world together, right? Cerium is one of the elements that makes that possible. Serium also has this lovely pink color. So if in your grandparents' houses there's some decorative pink glassware, or if you're walking around wearing rose-colored glasses, chances are there's Serium in your house or on your face. Wow.

Here's the thing, though, that demonstrates this really wonderful multivalent character of rare earth elements, wonderful and terrible, both. Rare earth elements are also used in lasers for precision laser guided missiles. Not as good. Not as good, right? There's a number, and you could do a whole mixed bag of applications like that for every single rare earth element. But I think people are talking about them more and more these days

because they are essential to information technology, scientific instrumentation, and I think most importantly, energy generation technology. I found it really interesting in your book, you talked about how there's kind of this idea that rare earth elements, rare earth minerals are rare, right? Because it's in the name. People felt that that was more of a thing, I guess, in the late 2000s, early 2010s, when there was this big price spike, which you write about in your book, that kind of helped to spur the space mining industry, but a lot of a greater focus, I think, on these elements and where

they're located, how they're extracted. So how does this price spike around 2010 really kind of change the discussion on rare earth minerals? That's a good question. So the price spike that you're referring to in 2010, this occurred as a result of a rumor that China had imposed an embargo on rare earth exports to Japan. An embargo is an official act undertaken by a national government to halt trade against an aggressor state during a time of war. An embargo is a very specific thing. What happened in China is a handful of shipments that were bound for Japan that happened to be rare earth elements were held up by a handful of disgruntled folks in one particular port in eastern China. But the story that broke internationally was that China had embargoed rare earths to Japan. And so a number of things happened in really quick succession. Let me back up and say the day or the week or the months before, everyone had just gone

to see Avatar, which was the highest grossing film of its time. I did not expect we were going to get an Avatar reference in this interview, but I'm cool with it. It ties in in more ways than one might expect. So that was the highest grossing film of its time. And I don't need to rehash the plot here. But basically, people then woke up one morning to this headline that China embargoed rare earths to Japan, and they had to learn a couple of things very quickly. Wait, what are rare earth elements? What are they used for? Where are they mined? And so these have been relatively under the radar outside of specialist audiences. And so people made the obvious conclusion like, well, oh my gosh, they're used in everything. So they must be really important. And they're called rare, which means they must actually be rare. And most of them are mined in China, which means, oh my gosh, China must have most of the deposits. These were three inaccuracies that were just

repeated ad infinitum for years after this event. And there are a number of people who, if they know anything about rare earth elements, those are the three things they sort of quote unquote know. So all of a sudden, people got really worked up. They thought, oh my gosh, well, if China is flexing its geoeconomic muscle and the whole world is dependent on China for rare earth exports, they could just decide to hold the world hostage, right? And so there were lots of words like this thrown around, like China's going to hold the world hostage. Stranglehold was another choice word that a lot

of people use. You know, China, quote unquote, flexing its economic muscle. There were a whole bunch of metaphors like this that basically framed the gradual subcontracting of environmentally destructive industrial processes to China as like a nefarious plot that China had had for years to all of a sudden bring the world to its knees. That's not what happened. But because rare earth elements are really important for just about everything, if we want to build the greatest, greenest, most peaceful future, we have to have rare earth elements. And also, if we want to build a fossil-fueled, hyper-militarized dystopia, rare earth elements are also essential for that. So no matter where you are and no matter what kind of future you want, where rare earth elements are extracted, and whether or not they're available is important to you. After I read that passage in your book, I even went to check I was like, so has this really

changed? Like has the price for rare earth minerals like skyrocketed since his book come out? And no, it hasn't. Yet, this event is still kind of playing into the public discussions, the government discussions, kind of the discussions being put forward by these private companies about rare earth minerals. And I feel like it's also kind of played into this growing rivalry between the United States or the West and China, right? But that's also used by these private companies, which want to start looking at mining the moon, mining asteroids, whatever, and taking these minerals down from space for us to use in all of our technologies, right? So how does that happen? How does it go

from this thing happens in China, this big event that's kind of taken out of context, to then being used as the justification by these companies for this kind of new project of space mining? I think that there's been demonstrably over the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century, there's a real appetite in the West for anything that spikes or feeds paranoia about China. You know, before it was China, it was Japan. You know, there's just this deep fear about, quote unquote, them coming to get, quote unquote, us in one way or another. And so China's global dominance in rare earth production and export fits really neatly into that mindset. And so what you saw in the aftermath of this teeny tiny little period, right, it was really in the last quarter of 2010 and going into the first quarter of 2011 that you had the precipitous price increase,

it was a shock. And so a number of different ideas or agendas that had been sort of simmering or maybe hadn't gotten as far as they wanted to or were kind of frustrated or seemed outlandish, they latched onto this. And the space mining crowd is a really key example of this. So for a number of years, there's been proponents of colonizing the moon, or building a lunar base or things like that. And you know, on one hand, you have the international scientific community that would indeed like to build a lunar base someday. So it could operate much like the International Space Station as sort of a paragon of international cooperation, regardless of whatever geopolitical BS is happening between countries on Earth. And then you have the folks who view it very much as a competition. They have to get there first.

There's a couple of these space entrepreneurs in Vegas and California and a few other places who latched onto this and said, look, China has most of the rare earth elements that we need. And also China is really planning an aggressive space strategy. Like, you know, China launched lunar landers and things like that. These were in fact milestones for all humankind, but that's not how they were framed. I even read earlier today that now they're planning to send some stuff up to Mars, right, to take a look there. Yeah, right. You know, we're all entitled to drive robots around on different planets as long as we behave. Yeah.

You know, according to the laws that we've assigned to ourselves, right, we're all entitled. But anyway, so they were among a group of people who really latched on to this fiction about China. China has the most rare earth elements. China is planning a subsurface. That's the only way to get out from under the thumb or out of China's stranglehold and also secure US supremacy in outer space. And these may sound totally crazy, you know, maybe even laughable, but the thing is they actually generated results. So, you know, the broader space community, the new space community, you know, whether or not they necessarily drank the Kool-Aid on this particular conspiracy theory, you know, there are a lot of people who are looking to mine outer space for different reasons. There are actually some scenarios that are consistent with international

law under which space mining makes sense. But those are not the scenarios under which the most vocal proponents of space mining and colonizing are advocating for. So just to give a little bit of a background on the sort of broader geopolitical context, the use of outer space is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It designates outer space as a global commons and the province of all humankind. That means that outer space belongs to you and you and you and me too.

And it can only be used peacefully. And it cannot be used in a way that excludes others. So really written into this treaty, which all the global superpowers signed on to in the depths of the Cold War, is the proviso that you have to share. And so if you build a lunar base, you have to accommodate someone else's request to visit. It's a beautiful document. But under such a document, there's no such thing as like exclusive private property rights or exclusive mining concessions or things like that. And boy, was that a burr under the saddle of,

you know, these space colonizing types. And so a handful of millionaires and billionaires and real estate entrepreneurs and new space entrepreneurs lobbied Congress really hard. And they got the Space Act, the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship Act passed in 2015. And Obama signed it into law November of 2015. And this is one of the Obama legacies that the Trump administration has left intact. So this effectively brought capitalism to the cosmos by recognizing the private property rights of U.S. citizens to any resource in outer space, including mineral resources, and also providing U.S. citizens exercising their private property rights in outer space with the right to sue any entity that impinges

on their exercise of private property rights in outer space. So that means technically, if, you know, a three person startup of a couple of eccentric billionaires decides to sue an international multilateral organization, right, for, you know, upholding the OST or something like that, they can under US law. So there were a number of other things that actually contributed to momentum around the Space Act. But this, this fear around China and rare earth elements and the absolute scarcity of these things, it was a really potent factor. You talk about how a lot of these space mining companies, and I'm sure their perspective has been seeded into other areas, position space and

position mining the moon and asteroids and what have you as the new frontier and the next stage of colonialism, right? Making these really direct comparisons to Columbus and settling the Americas and like going West and all of these things that most people would think are pretty negative and not a thing that you'd want to replicate, right? So how does this happen? How common is this discourse? And is this really part of what's driving, I guess, this new movement to mine the cosmos? I would say that the pro-colonization camp is an extreme minority, but they are a disproportionately empowered and loud minority. The global majority still lives according to the Outer Space Treaty. This includes the 70 plus countries that have national space programs and private space related firms operating within their national soils or national territories.

But the thing is, you know, we've seen this manifest destiny discourse, this fantasy that just because something is a commons, that it's free and open for the taking. I mean, the legal and moral justification for European expansion to the Americas required the ignorance of or the deliberate mischaracterization of indigenous land governance regimes, right, or simply murdering or silencing people who attempted to defend their existing territorial claims. So this pro-space colonization discourse, right, where it's the final frontier, it's the Wild West, or it's up for grabs, or what have you, it's actually a strikingly un-innovative rehashing of these sort of hackneyed frontier tropes. I mean, it's framed as a no man's land and a wild west and up for grabs, but the international consensus,

which is codified into international law through the Outer Space Treaty, is that it is a global commons, which means that it must be governed according to international consensus. I think the lesson in all of this is that whenever there's a great legal milestone achieved, it has to be enforced and defended in order to actually keep them alive.

If we think more broadly about the environmental advances of the 20th century and then the sort of breathtaking regression of the last five years, that can kind of actually help us think about this, right? Like the 20th century saw this global revolution in designating wilderness areas to be protected and demarcating indigenous lands in order to halt these sort of centuries of colonial expropriation. And, you know, it was kind of in this context that the OST was formulated and adopted. But here in the second decade of the 21st century, a lot of these protected areas have been eroded. A lot of international conventions have been abandoned and governments have given free reign to private extractive interests to operate in protective areas and

violate the sovereignty of the commons and enclose them. The lesson here really is that while enshrining things into law is a really important milestone, they require ongoing democratic defense in order to actually be effective. I think we should actually pay a little bit of attention to the timing of a couple of recent developments with respect to the privatization and militarization of outer space in the U.S. You know, it was in early April of this year where where the US and many countries around the world are under a national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are sheltering in place. The formal economy has basically ground to a halt.

Everyone's in crisis mode. Hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. And the White House does a couple of things. They unveil the flag for the Space Force, which is now the sixth branch of the U.S. military. They issued a memo calling for greater private sector engagement to develop capacity in lunar mining. And they also disavowed the recognition of outer spaces of global commons. So in the time of crisis, as many of us are sheltering in our homes to the

fullest extent that we can, cosmic expropriation is going on. And it continues to be justified in terms of resource scarcity. And just to bring all of this back to rare earth elements, you know, not only are rare earth elements not rare, but we currently recycle less than 1% of the elements that we consume. And so if we really actually were worried about resource scarcity and security, we could just recycle. There's plenty of amazing reasons to go to outer space. There's so much awesome stuff to discover about life, the universe and everything. But beating China in some sort of fictionalized rare earth contest is just simply not a credible reason to do any of that. I completely agree with you. And one of the space related events that you didn't mention there was the launch of SpaceX's new rocket,

where Donald Trump and Mike Pence went down and kind of watched it happen. And as all of this was taking place, it was like at the same time as Black Lives Matter protesters were out in the streets being attacked by police. So it really kind of provided this really significant contrast. And I think in some ways kind of showed what this new vision of space that is being presented by these private companies and by certain governments is really driven by. It's really not in the interests of a lot of the public. It's really driven by these kind of capitalist imperatives, these kind of imperatives of enclosure and control. And now when we think about that, and you started to bring it up just

that time, we can also imagine more positive futures for resource management, the future of humanity in space. As you say, we're in this time where there's this pandemic sweeping the world, where there are a lot of people getting sick, a lot of people dying, like there's a lot of negativity around us, right? And so it really is a time not to kind of dismiss what is happening to so many people, but it really should be a time for us to wake up and think like, okay, like things really need to be better. How can they be better, right? I love the forward looking questions. As we are very carefully analyzing and documenting

all of the ways in which, you know, our rights are being violated and we're being expropriated and all of that, we have to also really fiercely protect the time and the capacity to envision the kind of world that we want to live in. And I think especially now where people have something that's called apocalypse fatigue or catastrophe fatigue, right? Pandemic fatigue is certainly a thing too. You know, we absolutely have to talk about this. You know, the SpaceX launch was remarkable in a number of ways. But the reason it didn't resonate with so many people, right, the reason it wasn't this great unifying moment is because it was actually a demonstration of what a white supremacist approach to the cosmos looks like. Right. A white supremacist approach to the cosmos looks like, right? A white supremacist approach to the cosmos puts space milestones above everything else. If outer space is truly for all humankind,

then we have to be able to enjoy it and think about it and engage with it equally. And one of the ways that that inequality is expressed has to do with access to and control over information that is generated from space-based infrastructure like satellites. So since I kind of already alluded to, you know, the fact that we could just recycle, right, in order to solve our resource needs on Earth, I'll talk a little bit about what a more democratic space future might look like. Because honestly, let's just get our act together and recycle. There's not much more we need to say about that. It was so wild to me when I read that it was like 1% or something of these resources are being recycled.

But what might be harder to grasp for some people is, as you say, what a more positive future of space might look like, because it does seem much more disconnected than the things that happen in our everyday down here on planet Earth. So what is your vision for what that could look like? Because as you say in the book, we kind of already have a framework for what that could be, right? Yeah, we're not starting from scratch. And I think it bears emphasizing that the majority of the world that does engage with outer space does so peacefully and with peaceful intentions, including here in the US, right? I don't want to paint the US space community as like a monolithic white supremacist nightmare. No, like a lot of people are in that community because they watched

Carl Sagan when they were kids, and they have a dream for peace and scientific transcendence and all of that. Those values are real, and they're important. And right now, they, however, are not the loudest voice in the room. So I think what a more peaceful and positive future in outer space looks like, it is actually inextricably intertwined with how we relate to each other and our environments here on Earth. Because if we continue to say, for example, dig rare earths out of the ground instead of getting them from recycling discarded technologies, we are going to apply the same practices to outer space, right? In fact,

there's already papers out there, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are worried that we will deplete our near solar system of mineral commodities within three centuries if current rates of extraction and consumption are held constant and extrapolated into the future given economic growth and population growth and all of that. And so right alongside that, the sort of reformist as opposed to revolutionary approach is like, oh, well, why don't we designate like one eighth of the solar system as wilderness that can't be touched, right? And look, there's good intentions behind all of this, but we need only look at the fate

of designated wilderness or protected areas on earth to know that that is not a foolproof plan. Right. I mean, the current administration has authorized drilling and resource extraction and protected areas. Right. In this country, beautiful landscapes that give the phrase like America, the beautiful meaning. Right. These are up for grabs. So how we relate to environments on earth absolutely influences or will shape how we relate to environments in outer space. So building our beautiful future in outer space or with respect to outer space is absolutely it must start with getting our act together here. So that's the resource dimension. And that's much more future oriented. There is a very immediate question that is really apparent right now as

we're seeing the wanton illegal surveillance of people and capturing of their data and these things called, I think, preventative or proactive or preemptive arrests of people that are happening, of people who are exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to peaceful assembly, is that we actually have very little control over what information about us is gathered and transmitted through space-based and space-linked technologies and how it is used. And so that's actually a really important frontier for positive action. I think that we can significantly democratize that by opening up the whole practice to public scrutiny. I mean, right now, there's a number of illegal practices that are happening in this

country in particular that, you know, there's no enforcement action because they are serving the interests of the current administration. But more broadly and more globally, like say, for example, if you are a post-colonial state that is staggering out from underneath the burden of 30 years of IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs and a natural disaster hits. You don't have a space program. You don't have a satellite in space. You don't have a remote sensing capacity in your country, right? That satellite imagery, in order to coordinate disaster responses, assess the damage, coordinate logistics and all of that stuff, that needs to be freely and readily available. There's a number of countries that

have agreements already, particularly global south countries that have joined together to create these disaster monitoring satellite constellations. But the thing is, when a disaster strikes, your satellite might not be in the right place to capture that imagery. So there's an example that the Nigerian Space Agency is quite proud of, where they were actually one of the first countries, space programs to provide satellite imagery to the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And so I guess I tell that story to say that the beautiful, collaborative future in outer space is already being built, particularly among the global South. There's a lot of fabulous partnerships that are proceeding according to the ethos of third world solidarity, South-South cooperation, all of this. And we don't know about that. And a number of folks from these countries who are educated, say, in elite institutions in the US also don't know

about it, which I think is interesting. So I think if this is going to listeners who are primarily in North America, Western Europe, who are really wrestling with how to build a positive future in and in relation to outer space, actually, I would suggest take a look at what's happening in Africa and South America, because they have been doing it this whole time. A lot of the countries at the forefront of this South-South space cooperation where previous generations of leaders from these countries were instrumental in crafting the language that made outer space open and peaceful for all. I think that's so fascinating. Just last week, I was speaking to Juan Ortiz-Freuler

about kind of the global tax negotiations that are going on right now, and how the EU is putting forward one vision for what that could look like, which is based on sales and revenue. But the Global South, especially the African countries, are putting forward this much better, I think, you know, vision of what that should look like, which is trying to recognize not just sales, because obviously sales will be much lower in the Global South, but also the digital labor that all of their users, because most of the users of these platforms are actually in the global south, are putting into them to kind of train their algorithms and all this, right? And it's like, in the discussions of that in the Western press, you only hear about the EU perspective. You don't

hear about what the Africans are putting out. So it is a perspective that we completely miss. And I have no doubt that the same is true when it comes to the space programs and thinking about space collaboration in the future, right? Can you give us like a brief idea of what space programs look like in the global south? And what are the kind of things that they're doing? How are they working together? I don't have the numbers right in front of me. So I might be inaccurate. And my sincere apologies if I am incorrect about this. But there are 11, possibly 12 countries in Central and South America that have space programs, and 15, possibly 16 countries in continental Africa that have space programs. And these really range. So for example, you know, you might take Brazil, right? So Brazil has a space program that's decades old, right? It's one of the older space programs in the world. Argentina, I think, founded its space program shortly after the US did. And so if you have a space program like Brazil's, for example, you have multiple satellites in orbit, you have a space program like Brazil's, for example, you have multiple satellites

in orbit, you have space scientists all over the world, you're also receiving scientists and students from all over the world to be trained in various space sciences of remote sensing practices and all of that stuff. Brazil has the world's most advanced tropical forest satellite monitoring array. And a program that they had in place that was active, effective, and robust, you know, until the current administration came into power, basically worked like a sort of environmental police program, where the Brazilian space program had all of these different satellites that were tracking land use and land cover change in the Amazon in near real time. And so if they identified illegal burning, illegal deforestation, they then sent that data to a federal government agency that then sometimes within 24 hours would

send special forces, sometimes they look like an environmental SWAT team, out to these areas to arrest the people who were burning or mining or things like that. It's basically like the FBI, but for the environment. And Brazil also built up this satellite capacity in their own countries, and they then trained all the other Amazon-based countries, personnel from these countries in order to download data from the Brazilian satellites and process it themselves. And then they expanded this program to include tropical forested countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in Southeast Asia. So literally, like, it's a global program. It's

amazing, right? And a lot of this is for free. So you have that as sort of like one example of a global South Space program. And then, you know, another example of a global South space program. And then, you know, another example of a global South space program is Ethiopia's. They established a space program a couple years ago. They have a contract to build and launch a satellite. In a couple of years, it'll be communication satellite, that's all. And they have a handful of people that they've sent overseas to Europe, to China, to receive training, then bring that expertise back to their own country. It really covers the whole range. of like, oh, no, China's like catching up to us. What are they going to do? Right? Like, not really presented in this kind of objective way, like of how they're trying to move things forward in a way that might contribute positively to the space program. It's like, oh, no, China's doing it. It's negative, right? Because in the book, you talked about how in this kind of pursuit

of space mining and the privatization of space, it's these wealthy countries that have built up space programs that are really able to kind of take further advantage of that. So these countries kind of benefit because they already have this infrastructure in place. So do you think that there are things that need to be done in imagining this more positive future in order to kind of give more countries in the global south the resources to engage with this and to work together and to kind of build these programs collaboratively to ensure that space remains this kind of commons that's for the good of humanity and not just kind of benefiting certain countries that have a lot of power and are trying to enclose space and the companies that they're using to do that? Yeah, I think the simple answer there is that

we can stop kicking away the ladder. When all this really significant space treaties were drafted and then signed and then entered into force, it was expected that there would be a handful of countries that would be front runners in human engagement with outer space. And the expectation then and the obligation under the treaty is that it's like when you're climbing a mountain, once you summit a little cliff or a certain spot, you don't then kick rocks down on the face of the people behind you, but you turn around to extend a helping hand, right? You pull people up with you. You climb and you lift and you climb. I think it's really important to be clear and to remember that cognizance as we critique space colonization. Because like I said, there's so

many incredible reasons to explore the cosmos, like whether it's, you know, piloting robots around on nearby planets, or if it's actually figuring out how to provision sort of longer term deep space missions, you know, we can do it in a way that lifts us all up collectively. But this actually, this requires going against the white supremacist colonizer ethos that has governed land use practices in the global north for centuries. And even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in this country, and then, you know, the reparations that never came, and the number of policy measures since then that have just been designed to kick away the ladder, to kick away the ladder, right? So

that people should instead, you know, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, right? Which was originally intended as a joke, right? That saying meant an impossible thing because you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And the fact that the meaning has been inverted, I think is actually quite telling. But we also need to, you know, countries that are heading first and further into outer space also need to make sure that they don't close the pathway behind them. And one way that this is happening is actually with the orbital debris issue, right? So there's millions of pieces of garbage orbiting Earth at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. And this actually constrains

the orbital and also exit pathways. So say if you're a country that, you know, 30 years from now is ready to send something to Mars or is ready to build an international space station or something like that, if the exit pathway around Earth is too polluted, right, it actually becomes a very dangerous thing. And the politics of orbital debris actually really closely mirror the politics of climate change, right? There's a handful of countries that have the majority of their responsibility for creating the problem and also have demonstrated the greatest intransigence for cleaning it up. And I think that's a really important point because there is this narrative or this view that is driving our perception of space right now

that is really based on this kind of colonizer ethos, this kind of capitalist view of space where we have to enclose it, make profit from it. And there is this alternative that still exists within the space community in Western countries, certainly, though in the United States, they're not communicating with the government as easily, say, though, you know, in the United States, they're not communicating with the government as easily, say, as these leaders of these private companies. But at the same time, there's this growing communication and collaboration between these countries in the global South who are potentially showing the way forward for a better, more collaborative future of what space could be. Absolutely. Yeah, they're showing us how it should be done.

Julie, it's been fantastic to speak with you. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your perspective with me and with the listeners today. I really appreciate it. All right. Thank you so much. Be safe. You too.

Julie Michelle Klinger is an assistant professor of geography and spatial sciences at the University of Delaware. She's also the author of Rare Earth Frontiers, From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes, published by Cornell University Press, and hopefully available from your local library or independent bookstore. You can follow Julie on Twitter at at prof underscore Klinger. You can also follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you liked our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks for listening. Thank you.