Tech Won't Save Us - The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race w/ Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Mary-Jane Rubenstein to discuss how ideas that underpinned colonization and Manifest Destiny are now setting the foundation for the billionaire space race and the plan to colonize the cosmos. Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. She’s also a Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University.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, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:An excerpt of Mary-Jane’s book was published in Metapolis.Paris wrote about the business behind the billionaire space race and the problem with Starlink.Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin recently got a contract to build a moon lander for NASA.One of Barack Obama’s legacies is pushing for the privatization of space flight.The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 and Artemis Accords are attempts to unilaterally rewrite space law for US commercial interest.Catherine L. Newell wrote Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier.Support the show

So I recognize fully that our listeners here might be like, come on, God has nothing to do with this. This is a totally secular space industry. Yeah, sure, Mike Pence and Donald Trump referred to God, but like they don't mean it. What I want to encourage everybody to consider is that they didn't mean it in the 15th and 16th centuries either. the God language has always been, when it comes to this kind of imperialism, a means of making people feel better about the conquest that they are about to undertake. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Mary Jane Rubenstein. Mary Jane is the author of Astrotopia, the Dangerous Religion of the Corpor at least up in the air and has been doing that to some other people as well. And Elon Musk continues to charge forward with SpaceX and his larger kind of Starlink project. the Starship rocket explode after an attempted launch. And we also saw Jeff Bezos's company, Blue Origin, get a contract for a moon lander from NASA worth over $3 billion.

Now, we know that this private space race is not just because there are these billionaires funding it, but also because there's been a conscious decision by the government, especially in the United States, to start to privatize the activities of space and of NASA in particular, so that instead of having the public agency doing so much of these things, that instead it is kind of serving as a contracting body for private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. And that is the reason why these billionaires are becoming the face of the future or humanity's future in space instead of kind of national space agencies as in the past. But as people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos try to shape our ideas of what our future in space should be, you know, I think that it's a good moment to challenge those things and to think about whether this is really the future that we want, especially

when we see those ideas being kind of absorbed into NASA and accepted as part of, you know, public space programs as well. NASA is launching an Artemis mission whose goal is not just to get humans back to the moon, but eventually to Mars as well, kind of taking in these ideas from Elon Musk. And there's a question here as to why we think space and why we think these celestial bodies inherently belong to us, right, to us as humans, and that we should plant our flag on them, that we should claim territory on them, that we should say that whatever we find there, we should be able to take for us that we should be able to mine and kind of use for whatever goals that we quote, unquote, you know, speaking broadly there, but,

you know, really, I guess that we refers more to private space companies and some of these, you know, organizations like NASA actually decide that we should do with them. And part of the reason I wanted to talk to Mary Jane is because in her book, she so expertly goes into the history of where these ideas come from, not just, you know, these ideas for space colonization and the connections that space colonization has to previous colonization here on earth, but even much more kind of fundamentally our ideas that we should be taking and exploiting land, that land inherently belongs to us and is owned by particular people who can reach it by particular powerful nations or private companies that can just claim

that it is their own, right? And how this goes back to really kind of foundational ideas to a lot of kind of Western culture and economics and legal frameworks, and how that comes out of kind of colonizing rhetoric and colonizing practices, and, you know, early kind of what she calls imperial Christianity. And so I think that this is a really important conversation to have, especially in this moment where, you know, we're thinking about what the future is going to look like. That is being really clearly shaped and influenced by ideas from particular tech billionaires who are, of course, pulling from ideas from the past that are linked to colonization discourses

and questioning whether that should really be our future and whether, as we're thinking about the future generally or even humanity's future in space, we should be thinking about that through a very different lens than the one that we are being given from these billionaires and even from space agencies like NASA as they kind of accept those frameworks as well. So I was really happy to have Mary Jane on the show. I think you're really going to like this conversation. I really did. And if you do, of course, make sure to leave a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. You can share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can join supporters like Walter in Brooklyn, Simon from Toronto, Michael from

Milwaukee, and Jonathan from Freiburg in Germany by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Mary Jane, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. The visions of the tech billionaires and what they want to do in space is always a topic of interest on this podcast, and we've had many people to discuss it in the past. But I think that your new book gives us a different way into this conversation that I think is going to be really interesting to explore and gives people some different insight into what is guiding these visions of space colonization and these other sorts of things. And I want to start by

talking about this term that you use in the book that might be new or less familiar to some of the people who are listening to the show, and that is new space. So can you tell us what that means? Can you define it for us? Sure. So new space is actually a term of self-identification among private companies that are invested in the burgeoning space industry. So new space companies are companies that manufacture rockets, certainly, but new ones, not like Boeing, like newer ones than that, or that are trying to manufacture lunar landers or that are trying to manufacture a private space station like Blue Origin, Blue Origin, SpaceX, space mining companies, these all refer to themselves as new space. There are also slightly subtler ones that work on sort of virtual reality

enterprises in outer space. So anyway, any space industry company can refer to itself as a new space company. And again, that's a term of self-designation. When I refer to something like the new space era or the new space race or something like that, I am referring to an increasing trend in the U.S. political economic landscape to turn the space sector over to new space. And that is a move that really began in 2011. So that's more of like an outsider designation. That's what I'm attributing to them. Now, that makes perfect sense. And, you know, it's a good way to use their term, but also to kind of, you know, define it in a way that makes sense if we're trying to periodize this to understand what is actually going on, the kind of political shifts that underlie this industry that is kind of forming and growing in this moment.

So just to be clear, I guess these are kind of more of the newer companies who were involved in this. Obviously, you know, NASA and, you know, other space agencies have worked with private companies in the past, but there seems to be something quite distinct about this new kind of era and these companies that are defining themselves under new space rather than these ones that were previously contractors with these space agencies in the past. Would that be right? Yeah, that's right. And, you know, look, every historical development is a development and every process is a process.

And wherever you want to put the moment of transformation, somebody can say like, yeah, but it happened before that. I'm an academic. Everything's blurry, et cetera. But I do think a turning point in the genesis of new space and the proliferation of new space companies does come in 2011 when Barack Obama announces the cancellation of the space shuttle program and the reallocation of funds from the public sector to the private sector to be a spur to development for the private sector. He had had advisors saying, you know, just like, and you know, I know you Paris are a scholar of the transportation industry, but just like, you know,

cars and buses and airplanes are run for the most part by private industry, we should turn the space sector over to the private industry as well. I think that that was a big turning point that comes in 2011. And then there's this massive acceleration of new space in 2015 with this stunningly bipartisan act that's passed in the US called the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which assures investors that a resource that is recovered, that's the language they use, a resource that is recovered by a citizen in outer space can be owned and sold for a profit by that citizen. And of course, under U.S. law, corporations are protected as citizens. So, you know, suddenly in 2015, with the passage of this law, it became increasingly possible to make money in outer space. And so that's really when the futures of these companies really took off.

And can you talk about how that's kind of like a break from how we usually see kind of like space law and how this is supposed to work based on previous treaties with the UN that have been drawn up? Yeah, it's a complete mess. The only genuinely multilateral, almost unanimous piece of space legislation is the Outer Space Treaty, which was ratified in 1967 by a hundred and some odd nations, including, crucially, the US and Russia and China and India. And all those are the big space players and the smaller space players, Canada, right? But all of the major players have ratified this treaty. And the Outer Space Treaty says that planetary bodies are not subject to national appropriation, that nation states cannot own planets or planetoids, nor can they own parts of them.

So not only can you not own the moon, if you are the U.S., you also can't own the Sea of Tranquility. You can't own this particular formation. So nation states can't own planetary bodies. This piece of legislation in 2015, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, first of all, it's not a piece of international legislation. It's a piece of U.S. legislation that sort of ran around the U.N. and said, all right, sure, no nation can own a planet or a part of a planet, but nations can own the stuff inside planets, which is water or reg regolith or uranium if you find it or something like that. And there seem to be two major moves here. Well, three. One is that the US first acts unilaterally to make this declaration independently of the United Nations and then goes around through the Artemis Accords and gets other people who agree with them to make it a bilateral or multilateral agreement. Two, the U.S. is making this what seems to be a very strange distinction between a planet and the stuff that's in a planet. I don't quite know what the moon is

other than that which the moon contains. It's very hard to make this distinction. And third, what we are increasingly seeing is this legislation makes it clear that although the Outer Space Treaty says that no nation can lay claim to a planet or planetary body, they had not anticipated the role that corporations would play. So they don't talk about private citizens or corporations owning a planet or a planetary body. So really, you know, recent developments have exposed the loopholes in the only legislation really that we have that's guiding behavior in outer space. It's really worrying, right? Not only to see the U.S. moving in this direction, but then to see that diplomats or whatnot going around the world and trying to

get other countries to agree on this. So do we see like a number of other countries moving in that direction? Because I know, like, for example, places like Luxembourg seem to be trying to create a kind of space economy by making laws that suggest that companies can go up and claim, you know, aspects of whatever celestial body or planet or whatever, and kind of claim that for themselves. And so then you set up, I guess, the framework to begin to commercialize what is off of the planet. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So certainly the U.S. has, by virtue of the Artemis Accords, garnered the support for this, what I really see as like a UN runaround. That's my own interpretation. I'll lay claim to that. And I don't know, there may be 15 signatories at this point who are all allies of the U.S. Crucially, they do not have the agreement in this regard of China or Russia, in part because the U.S. Space Agency has barred itself from speaking at all or working at all with China. one nation says, well, look, we've decided that it's appropriate to commercialize space. It's very hard to be in a position of another nation that says, well, but we think that it's

not. As we've seen from the history of terrestrial colonialism, we know that if people who don't believe land is property come into conflict with people who do believe land is property, then the people who do believe land is property, then the people who do believe land is property end up owning the land. So the minute that the U.S. sort of throws down in this way is almost imperative that other nations do the same if they want to, you know, have a piece of it, if they're spacefaring nations themselves. Such an important point, and one that we're going to come back to quite soon as we discuss this longer history and how it plays into it. I'm wondering, you know, I want to go back to 2010, 2011, when Obama is kind of canceling that program and and what was coming out of the tech industry where you have people like Elon Musk kind of presenting this new vision for what

humans' future in space is going to be. How is that kind of influencing the policy decisions in that moment? Elon Musk, as you may know, spent years trying to get the US government to listen to him. He was like, I've got a company, it's called SpaceX. I was like, oh, SpaceX, that sounds ridiculous. I'm not going to pay attention to that. Right. So he ended up driving a multi-hundred foot rocket on a flatbed truck from Texas to Washington, D.C., and like parallel parking the thing on the street outside the FAA to get somebody to pay attention to him. So he had been looking for a long time for somebody to pay attention to him. So he had been looking for a long time for somebody to pay attention to him. It's my understanding in the years around 2011 that Elon Musk was finally getting people to listen to him on the one hand, that there was pressure on the Democratic

administration to relieve taxpayer burdens and things like that. And that the stated hope, unless everybody's just demonic, but it seems like the stated hope was to take pressure off the taxpayers to fund this increasing industry, this burgeoning industry. What's actually happened though, of course, is that the new space actors now are sort of jockeying for government contracts. So the government, instead of paying NASA, is just paying private investors. So it's not clear to me that any tax burden has been relieved off, you know, us, the ordinary taxpayers. But it does seem like at least that's the way that it was sold. And also, of course, there's the capitalist dream of turning everything over to private industry in order to spur innovation, right? There's this longstanding sense that NASA

hadn't done anything since the Apollo missions, that it hadn't moved anywhere. And so again, the capitalist promises, if you turn a public industry over to private interest, you will spur innovation and you'll get a dying industry, bring it back to life again. Yeah. And obviously the kind of marker of that is the fact that there's not a human kind of placing their foot somewhere else in the solar system or whatever, rather than kind of the scientific explorations that have certainly continued to go on over that period. Right, right, right. Nobody at the time was like, have you seen what Hubble has shown us by means of its deep telescopic photographs, right? The marker of it would again be exactly the photos of the humans conquering some kind of new space. Yeah. There needs to be another American flag planted on the moon before we can say that something's been achieved.

Not nearly enough flags. Yeah. I do wonder if with this next one, they're going to have to bring up a Canadian flag as well. Or if maybe he's just on the mission kind of scouting out the trip. He doesn't actually land on the moon, this Canadian guy. We will see. As you may know, there was a whole subcommittee of NASA tasked with working out the ritualistic details of the Apollo missions. And the initial idea had actually been to plant a UN flag when Apollo 11 reached the moon, to actually land it on the moon, to plant a UN flag, because after all, the U.S. kept saying that it was doing this for all mankind, right? And because the science and the technology that had enabled the Apollo missions was clearly an international

affair. There were scientists from all places who were sort of helping out on this. JFK had been promising, you know, forever that the reason that the U.S. had to get to the moon before Russia was so that it could be a benefit to all humanity. So as a marker of that for all humanity-ness, the initial proposal was, you know, let's plant a U.N. flag there. The NASA committee struck it down immediately and said, no, no, no. What we're going for instead is that the U.S. has done something by itself on behalf of all humanity, right? So then you get the American flag. So it'll be really interesting to see, yeah, do they plant an American flag and like, I don't know, douse it with maple syrup? I don't know how you like acknowledge the Canadian participation there.

I'll be interested to see that, especially if they bring some maple syrup up to the moon. When you were talking up to the moon. When you were talking before about the US kind of, you know, starting to change these laws and then kind of pushing everyone else to do it, what came to mind was how you wrote in the book how Lyndon Johnson, when he was Senate Majority Leader, said that the communists going to space was like the Romans building the roads, the British ships, the US airplanes, you know, a kind of first step to dominance, even as there was kind of this kind of talk of for all mankind and whatnot going on at the same time. But it does really seem like in that case, the US had to kind of show that it was going to beat communist Russia

and not allow them to kind of take over space. But in this moment, it does kind of seem like the US is charging ahead and saying, we are going to kind of do this thing. We are going to change the laws around this so that our companies can, you know, kind of get up there first and have the first crack at all this stuff. Yeah. So, you know, Lyndon Johnson, when he starts talking about this, says, right, just as you're saying, you know, the Romans had control because they controlled the roads. The British had control because they controlled the seas. And now he says the Russians have got a satellite in outer space. And this is supposed to mean like, so get up there, U.S., and take control of the spaceways because whoever has dominance of the spaceways will have dominance. It's really with JFK that you start getting this like broadly humanitarian patina over the U.S. imperialism,

right? Clearly the primary mission is U.S. imperialism. But with JFK, you start hearing him say, yeah, but it has to be U.S. imperialism on behalf of everybody else, for everybody else. And this kind of humanitarian sort of, this humanitarianism sort of ebbs and flows as the centuries go on. As you may know that, you know, the plaque that remains on the lunar lander on the moon signed by Richard Nixon says, you know, these astronauts came here from the US with an American flag on behalf of all humanity. I think that that language is basic, is almost gone from political rhetoric at this point. Even, you know, Donald Trump said in 2020 that we need to go to back to the moon and then to Mars because

it is America's manifest destiny to conquer outer space. Not a single mention of anybody else, not, you know, on behalf of everybody. It's just what America is supposed to do for America. And even Joe Biden, you know, when he talks about space, which is not often, will say things that don't make a ton of sense. Like, you know, Americans are going to do this because Americans do great things. So we're going to do this because Americans do great things. So we're going to do this. But there isn't that, right? Again, that sort of patina of humanitarianism, like ideological purity is basically gone, at least from the political rhetoric. NASA still has in its statements

about Artemis, or at least in its posters, it'll say, for all humanity, it was deliberately sort of degendered. It used to be for all mankind. Now it's for all humanity. But they don't say what they mean. They just say it. So NASA still has like a little remnant of it, but I think it's gone from the politicians. Instead, we just get Elon Musk saying that he is spreading the light of consciousness and saving humanity by having us populate another planet. Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that's fascinating. It's almost like U.S. politicians have run out of tricks in their habits to pull out of hats. It's fascinating. It's almost like U.S. politicians have run out of tricks in their habits, like rabbits to pull out of hats. It's like they don't have rhetorically the tools to

inspire the populace, at least when it comes to outer space. But I don't really think when it comes to anything, but certainly when it comes to outer space, they don't have it. And that torch has been passed to these private, charismatic CEOs of these immense corporations. They don't have it. And that torch has been passed to these private, charismatic CEOs of these immense corporations. They've got stories that people listen to, right? When Elon Musk says, I am trying to save humankind, people are like, whoa, he's trying to save humankind, right? A lot more compelling than, you know, we're going back to the moon and Mars because America does great things. I don't think that stirs anybody at this point. Yeah. And it sounds a lot better in Elon Musk's telling of it than listening to kind of a

politician say it these days. Well, right. Because, you know, we're on the side of the renegade. We're on the side of the, you know, the free thinker, the uncoopted, self-made human who sees his own way and does his own thing and calls it like it is. Absolutely. And you don't have the same, you know, obviously there's the growing escalation with China, but you still don't have the same kind of Cold War framing or mentality as existed with the Soviet Union back the last time we had to do this whole thing. So I do want to go back to where these kind of ideas around space colonization come from, because this is a really core central piece of your book that, you know, obviously we talk a lot now about space colonization come from? Because this is a really core, central piece of your book

that, you know, obviously we talk a lot now about space colonization. There are a lot of ideas around this because, you know, it's being driven by people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But these particular ideas are rooted in something much deeper and much more fundamental that's been kind of guiding Western society for quite a long time. So where do you think would be the best place to kind of start explaining this, to kind of put the foundation of this for listeners? Okay, so I think the easiest place to start, and again, you can always say like, yes, but this had its roots in the Islamic empire. Let's go to the 12th century. Let's go to the 11th century.

I think the easiest place to put it is in the 15th century, the end of the 15th century, the dawning of the 16th century, when Pope Alexander VI gave, and I use this verb in an attempt to call attention to how ironic it is, gave the so-called New World to Spain through a papal bull that basically said, hey, Ferdinand and Isabella, you've been so good at ridding your own nation of Muslims and Jews that we know that now that we've discovered these lands, they should go to you for the purpose of Christianizing them. There's a document that was written that the Spanish conquistadors would read when they arrived at the shores of the so-called New World that basically laid out the whole authoritative structure and that would say to any indigenous person in what's now the U.S. who happened to speak Latin, which is

to say none of them, that would say, hi, people in Latin, just want to let you know, you, like us, are the creation of a God whom we call God, who's the only God in the universe. God made us, God made you. This God was incarnate in a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth lived for a little time, and then he died. And when he was dying, he gave his authority to a guy named Peter, who gave his authority to a bunch of dudes after him, the last of which is a dude named Alexander VI. Like, are you paying attention? These are right. And Alexander VI, just so you know, has just given us your land. So this is to say, what this document does is that it draws all of humanity into the same story.

It says we are all one. We're all humans. We're all children of the same God. And that God told us that this land is Spain's. Like, sorry. And you can either recognize that and submit yourself to the rule of the church and of Spain, and then we'll love you and we'll celebrate you. Or you can try to fight it. And if you try to fight it, we will absolutely destroy you and all of your children

and all of your nations and all of your things the name of all humanity, while talking about like a universalized humanity, that you see renewed in the 19th century as white descended Americans make their way across the entire continent in the name of what's called manifest destiny, gods having chosen them to take the entire continent. And that you see the moment the space program is announced, sort of given legs in the early 1950s, when a former Nazi rocket scientist now in the US named Werner von Braun says that outer space is now the final frontier, the last frontier, and it is America's manifest destiny to conquer that space in the name of God, because God wants us to do it, and for, again, all of humanity. These are broad brushstrokes, but I think you can draw a very clear line across the seas and then across the North American continent and then right up into, it's not really up, but you know, into outer space.

Out at least, you know, out there. I think that you've connected it really well. And I think it's so interesting to understand that and to see how those threads, you know, continue from all those hundreds of years ago through to what we are talking about now and what is supposedly supposed to guide us into the future decades and centuries, basically, if we are to kind of follow the vision that Elon Musk and these people have given us, right? And I think that one of the important things that you outline in kind of telling this history in the book is how by recognizing the role that Christianity had in shaping Western politics,

ethics, science you describe in the book, and kind of how we see our societies kind of growing and expanding and spreading to new places, basically, that then kind of shapes or gives permission to capitalism for a certain kind of economic model, because there is this linkage between science and technology and this changing in how we perceive nature and how we think about nature in order to serve this sort of model, right? Can you talk a bit about that aspect of it and kind of the changing views on nature, the changing views on science and technology and these sorts of things and how that helps this particular model to spread, not just in Europe and to the new world, but kind of across the world, basically. So I recognize fully that our listeners here might be like, come on, God has nothing to do with this. This is a totally secular space industry. Yeah, sure. Mike Pence and Donald

Trump referred to God, but like, they don't mean it. What I want to encourage everybody to consider is that they didn't mean it in the 15th and 16th centuries either. That the God language has always been, when it comes to this kind of imperialism, a means of making people feel better about the conquest that they are about to undertake. Alexander VI promised the new world to Spain, not because he was really excited about all those souls in the new world, but because he was really excited about the gold and the spices and the riches that the land contained. inherent to all Christian teaching. It's a kind of political Christianity, and all Christianities are political, but this is a particular kind of political Christianity that teams up with empire in order to increase economically the position of the nations that it has teamed up with. Sylvia Winter makes this point very clearly in a piece called The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, basically, to give this land to Spain. The point is that the church has,

at least since the 15th century, just been an accessory to the expansion of European imperialism and capital. The church's role has become more diffuse as we move from the Roman Catholic endorsement of the doctrine of discovery of the Americas, to a more sort of Protestantized, more diffuse idea of like just God having a hand in manifest destiny, to the even more secularized idea that some God we don't even always talk about wants America to be out there in outer space, to the idea that Elon Musk is saving human consciousness, right? But all of these attempts to conquer space and to take its resources and use them are relying on what seem to be very secular ideas that I want to argue have particularly religious inheritance. And some of these secular ideas include, first, the idea that

land is property. Second, the idea that land is just land, that it has no value in its own right, that it is only there for the comfort and wealth of human beings. And third, perhaps most importantly, the idea that humanity is separate from the rest of the earth and all of creation, and that it's not only separate from the rest of creation, but it's more important than everybody else out there. These are not objective ideas. These are not ideas that hold for everybody. They're not ideas that people throughout all time have taught. They're not ideas that people throughout all time have taught. They're not ideas that many communities continue to teach. They are specific interpretations of Genesis, the first book of the

Hebrew Bible, which becomes the first book of the New Testament, a book in which a disembodied God creates humans as distinct from the rest of the earth, gives the earth to humanity for their betterment, tells them they're in charge of it, and also designates humanity as being in the image of God. And so having that kind of dominion that God has over the world. So these are religious inheritances. And so it doesn't really matter, even if nobody's talking about God. If you've got a totally anthropocentric, Western descended viewpoint that holds that humans are the most important things, that land is just there for human use, and that humans are somehow separable from the rest of creation. You're operating within the

worldview that sort of imperial Christianity gave us. Does that get it all to that big question that you're asking? Absolutely. Yeah. I think you covered it like really well. And I think that that sets it up for the audience, right? That explains why we have these particular ideas today and how our culture has kind of moved in this, or our politics, our, you know, in itself was a bunch of different beliefs, but really helped to ensure that, you know, when you are extracting resources, cutting down trees, all these sorts of things that you don't need to think about, you know, the spirits and the trees or the forest or anything like that, you can destroy them because those things obviously don't exist. Those resources are there for humanity, for mankind to use to better itself or to sell or whatever. And you don't need to think about these bigger questions anymore. What it brought to mind to me, and maybe some Icelandic listeners will hear this and say, oh, this is just a stereotype about us. But I've heard stories that like, apparently, in Iceland, you know, there are still kind of fairy stories about fairies and

gnomes and things like that. And that sometimes there are protests around development saying that like, this is in a traditional place where these sorts of mystical creatures would be, so it shouldn't be built here. But I think that was like a connection that I made as I was reading that in the book. Yeah, well, look, when the water protectors protesting the North Dakota Access Pipeline are saying the water is sacred, what they're saying is you may not poison this water for the sake of profit. prophet, whether it's because there are spirits in the land or whether it's because the element itself is alive or whether it's because the element itself exists in kinship with other beings and human beings. The conviction that the more than human world is itself alive or is itself even sacred puts a limit on the extent to which humans can exploit that more than human world, right? Of course, humans can't live, nobody can live without making some kind of use of land, of making some kind of use of what we now call resources. But there is an

immense distinction between living in a subsistence manner, taking what you need and also giving back to the land so that it can regenerate itself, and living in a manner that prioritizes profit over everything else. And so it tries to maximize productivity and attacks the soil agriculturally and cuts down trees rather than using parts of them and clear cuts forests and removes mountaintops. None of that from a subsistence standpoint is necessary. It's only necessary if you're privileging profit over everything else. I think that as you describe that, you can also see kind of the incentive to argue that these things don't matter, that we don't need to think

about the history of where these ideas come from, that we don't need to think about how it has influenced our culture, you know, as it stands today, because that obviously goes against the desire to extract these things, the desire to continue this economic model. And if we do interrogate it, if we do think about, you know, what is actually undergirding it, what is guiding it, what has made it possible, and what continues to make it possible, then that kind of allows a challenge to it to say, you know, this is not natural. This is not the way that things have always been. We can think about these things in a different way. And if we start to do that, then that's a big threat to, you know, the people who have benefited from the system and continue to do so. And as you're saying, want to see it extend into space now too. That's the hope. The hope of this particular book is to say all of our actions are guided by stories.

And the actions of the contemporary space race are guided by a particularly destructive set of stories. But they're just stories. There are other stories. There are other people telling stories. And we can, if everything we do is guided by stories, which I firmly believe it is, we can listen to better stories. We can listen to stories that reflect our collective values better than these particular ones do. Absolutely. And speaking of stories, you know, to get Americans and to get the world interested in the space race, you know, you talked about a number of things that ensured that these ideas that you're talking about were then kind of brought into this larger project and extended out to space. You talked about Werner Von Braun, but he also inspires Disney and the stories that Disney puts out around space. Can you talk a bit about Von Braun's vision and how that gets kind of

brought into American popular culture and becomes accepted as kind of the idea of what should be guiding the American space program. Sure. And I should say that I owe all of this to my colleague, Catherine Newell, who's written a marvelous book called Destined for the Stars that unearths its history. But here's the way it goes. So in 1953, Collier's Magazine in the U.S. publishes a series of articles under a big cover that says, Man Will Conquer Space Soon. And the articles therein are written by a number of these transplanted German rocket scientists who came to the U.S. through a then-secret CIA operation called Operation Paperclip. The U.S. went in to, you know, ally-liberated Germany and basically kidnapped a bunch of rocket scientists and offered them amnesty for war crimes in return for their service to the U.S. military.

So Werner von Plauen is probably the best known of these rocket scientists. He had developed the V-2 rocket that decimated London. And in 1953, Werner Von Braun writes the lead article that he calls Crossing the Last Frontier. This is the first reference that I found to space as the last frontier, the final frontier. During the gold rush, the California governor called California the last frontier, right? So as you're pushing out that, because any farther than that, you're in the ocean. Von Braun in 53 says, no, actually, there's a new last frontier. And this one, thankfully, is infinite. So this is just really it, like the final last frontier, and it's outer space. And he and his colleagues write these pieces in order to petition the U.S. government to create a space program

right now. And they're saying, we need space dominance right now in 1953. And the U.S. is like, this is before NASA, by the way. NASA is not established yet. But the person who does listen bizarrely is Walt Disney. Walt Disney had been trying to break ground in Anaheim, California, on Disneyland. And he had the whole thing planned out. He was going to have Sleeping Beauty's castle anchoring a place that he was going to call Fantasyland. And then he was going to have Adventureland where you could go off and visit supposedly exotic countries that were very far from the US, this sort of Orientalist dream. And then he was going to have Frontierland where you could go and put on a Davy Crockett cap and ride in a little mine train and pretend that you were heading off to California to go make your fortune, like the glorious days of old of Manifest Destiny of the 19th century. So if Frontierland was America's past, right opposite, he was going to position what he called Tomorrowland.

And Tomorrowland was going to give us a view of America's future. And it's 1953, and Walt Disney is like, what the hell is tomorrow going to look like? Like, what are we going to do if the mine train is the mode of transport for America of yesterday? And like the wagon, you know, the ox and the wagon, the Oregon Trail kind of thing. That's Frontierland. What's Tomorrowland going to look like? What am I going to put there? I have no castle. I have no mine train. Like, what am I going to stick there? One of his animators presents him with this copy of Collier's Magazine and says, I don't know, there are a bunch of these rocket scientists saying that we're going to conquer space. And Walt Disney writes the guy a blank check and says,

get them all. Get them all here. This is going to be Tomorrowland. Tomorrowland's going to be outer space. He gets Werner Von Braun to come in with his rocket prototype. He looks at it and he's like, damn, man, that is an ugly rocket. So von Braun then takes like aesthetic recommendations from Walt Disney to make his rocket nicer looking so that it can anchor Tomorrowland in Anaheim, California. And then that like Disney tweaked rocket, V2 rocket prototype becomes the model for the Saturn V rocket that the Apollo missions use. I mean, it's absolutely crazy. So in the process of doing all of this, in order to sort of announce the launch of Disneyland in 1955, and in order to, you know, get Americans on board, Disney releases a set of videos that feature, among other people, Werner Von Braun explaining to the American American public how rockets are going to work and how we're eventually going to get to the moon. And so there becomes a sort of popular buy-in among everyday Americans who start imagining

themselves living on other planets, taking a jetliner, kind of Pan Am flight off to the moon to live there or to visit there or something like that. We can really credit Disney there with sort of selling the idea of space travel to the American public before Sputnik, and Sputnik hits in 1957. And then suddenly Lyndon Johnson's like, damn it, we need a space program. And von Braun is like, I told you. And then, you know, the rest is history. It's absolutely wild, like to see how influential Disney becomes in kind of shaping this vision of what the kind of future in space is going to look like, you know, obviously taking these rocket scientists and von Braun. And then, of course, how that is all in place and ready to go when Sputnik goes up and all of a sudden the U.S. is scrambling to also have its own space program so it can compete with the Soviets and

make sure that they, you know, as we were talking about, that they don't kind of capture space and take over space. One of the things that I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that you quoted in the book where he says that he wants the U.S. to go to space to secure, quote, the position of total control over Earth, you know, end quote. Of course, long before the talk of for all mankind and things like that. Yeah, it's the position of ultimate military supremacy. I mean, if you can bomb the earth from outside the earth, I mean, that's ideal. You want to be able to navigate to anywhere. That's the way you do it. If you don't have to launch from Texas to get to North Korea, you can get to it much more easily from outer space. So that becomes the position of

ultimate military control. Yeah. Right. So militarily, that's the argument. But again, there has to be like some degree of public buy-in. And the public buy-in is not so much excited about like space cannons, as Catherine Newell says. The public is excited about like watching TV from living rooms in outer space. They're like, oh, we're going to be like the Jetsons. I mean, that's what the Jetsons is, right? The Jetsons is an imagined suburban lifestyle in the future. Yeah. Based on, you know, the social conditions of that time, you know, the wife still stays home and takes care of the home and all these sorts of things. You have the female robot maid, all these sorts of aspects of society in that period. I'm wondering, you know,

obviously you talked about the military aspect of it. To what degree is that vision or, you know, to what degree can we say that that vision is also kind of inspired by von Braun? You know, the fact that he does come from Nazi Germany, that he was working on, you know, rockets for that government. To what degree are those ideas kind of driving his vision for what this military aspect of the space program is going to look like? And then that kind of gets brought into these visions that the U.S. adopts. Yeah, I think, well, it's a funny feedback loop because of course there's the military idea of wanting to gain ultimate military supremacy. But there's also the political idea, the political economic idea of just expanding the room of the nation state of just getting more land. And that's why we start hearing Manifest Destiny language sort of reignited in the 1950s to say, you know, oh, gosh, there's a new promise, there's a new promised land and it's in outer space. Von Braun was among the people who started using Manifest Destiny, sort of reigniting that Manifest Destiny language in the 1950s. And if one asks like, how the hell did

Von Braun know about Manifest Destiny? Like, wasn't he? It's because Adolf Hitler and the agents of National Socialism had learned the doctrine of manifest destiny from reading American history and had sort of rebranded it into the German doctrine of Lebensraum, which was the idea that the German nation needed more space to live in and to be excellent in and to be beautiful in. So they were invading Poland in order to expand the size of Germany because Germany needed more living space. Hitler said at one point, look, our only destiny here is to invade this land, by which he meant Poland, and to treat the natives, native Polish people, as redskins. So he takes direct inspiration from the white conquest of the Americas

and the displacement and destruction of indigenous life and applies it to continental Europe. And then von Braun takes Lebensraum and like retranslates it back to manifest at a new sort of space era manifest destiny that he extends into outer space. So there's some of that. There's also the like little known truth that again, Catherine Newell unearths that von Braun during his denazification on American soil, became an evangelical Christian himself. So he thought it was incumbent from a military perspective, from a political perspective, from an economic perspective, and even from a theological perspective, to head into outer space, where he imagined that the US would convert aliens

to Christianity, just the way that the Spaniards had converted indigenous Americans. It's a wild and kind of chilling history when you actually go through it and see how these ideas travel, which is a lot of what your book and kind of what this interview is about. I want us to fast forward then back to around this period and what we've been seeing in the recent past. So how would you say that these ideas then kind of inspire the visions of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as they present what our future in space is going to look like as they kind of draw their grand plans and try to sell the public on what this future is going to be? Okay.

So I want to say from the outset that Musk and Bezos don't tend to talk about God. I'm just going to get that on the table. They don't tend to talk about God. What they do is they appeal to this broader, what you could call religious structure, even theological structure, of a threat of an impending disaster and the promise of an eventual salvation. So each of them, in their own way, they have different narratives. We can talk about it if you want. But each of them says, like, disaster is coming for us.

We can't live like this forever. Either the earth is going to be destroyed or humans are going to be destroyed. This is coming to an end. The world is coming to an end. I mean, like, you can imagine them as like these little prophets with beards on the street holding their little signs. The world is coming to an end, but follow me and I will lead you to a new world, a better world where you can be totally free.

You can use as much energy as you want if you're Jeff Bezos. You can be totally free from regulation if you're Elon Musk. Look, you've never seen this world. You've never been to this world. You doubt that such a world is possible, but I'm here to tell you that another world exists and it's going to be better than this one. You're going to get salvation there. So there's this, again, sort of broader religious structure that's animating it. And you see, again, in both of these figures, these old ideas that I was trying to talk about earlier, these sort of what you could call like theologemes, like little theological units of instruction, of the inanimacy of the land,

right? We don't care at all about Mars for Mars' own sake if we're entertaining the idea of nuking it with 10,000 missiles, as Elon Musk is. So the inanimacy of the land, the land has somehow promised to a particular subset of humanity and the importance of human beings over everything else on the planet. You see these motivating, these sort of broader messianic promises for both of them. It's fascinating to look at that, right? And they, you know, you explain in the book that they kind of need us to buy into these visions to kind of have faith in the futures that they're selling, because then that justifies kind of the broader project, right, of extending capitalism into

these spheres so that it's not just here on Earth, it's not just in the United States, but it's moving on to these other celestial bodies and we can start to make money off of them. We can start to commercialize them. You quote Robert Zubrin in the book, who was a big pusher of kind of Mars colonization and these sorts of ideas, who says that the U.S. is in decline because it needs a new frontier. Can you talk about that kind of aspect of it where, you know, these are visions, there is kind of a faith that is needed that this is going to be our future, but kind of the capitalist project that that undergirds, that it serves as the foundation of, I guess. I actually think in this particular regard, Bob Zubrin is different from some of the spacey CEOs. I think Bob Zubrin wants to colonize Mars for the sake of colonizing Mars.

I think he does. He really does believe America needs a new frontier. That frontier is Mars. We have to go there at all costs, prioritize Mars, get to Mars. Because why? Because everybody's gotten stupid and lazy. And without a new place for restless white folk to go, we're just going to keep deepening our addictions and, you know, fading into obscurity. We need a new frontier. Mars is the new frontier. Let's go. I don't think that Bezos or Musk is any less earnest than Zubrin, honestly, or honest. I think that they genuinely believe what they say. But I think what they hope is that it's not only that we can expand our living space, but also that we can make a really good profit on the way. about like the destiny of humanity or the salvation of humanity is a much more palatable

story than the real story, which is, look, capitalism, which demands infinite economic growth, has reached real limits. There aren't a lot of places we can expand the economy into at this point on a finite planet. We're running up against the limitations of resources. We're running up against the limitations of what people are willing to buy. We're just hitting some real limits. And so if we're going to keep going with this model of infinite growth capitalism, we need more space. We need more stuff. We need more stuff to sell, and we need more land on which and from which to sell it. That's not a really rousing public claim. If you're an investor, then that's easy like a really rousing public claim. If you're, you know, an investor, then that's easy to get behind. But if you're like an ordinary citizen,

like, oh yeah, I guess I'm going to support the emerging space sector. Otherwise capitalism is doomed. Like that doesn't do anything. But if all of that, if the expansion of the economy into outer space is a mechanism, not for the salvation of capitalism, but for the salvation of the human species, well, then we've got something to get behind. And if in the meantime, it might also make us money, then it's fantastic, right? Then you get to make money in the short term as you're supporting all these space industries. And you also get to be supporting the salvation of the species, which is delightful. Who doesn't want to support the salvation of the species, right? So people often ask whether or not I think that Elon Musk will actually ever

get to Mars or whether it's actually possible to terraform it or it's actually possible. I don't think it ultimately matters. If it is, it's going to be awful there and you shouldn't go. But I don't think it ultimately matters because what matters is that it's that long-term vision and that utopian vision that's selling the more near-term endeavors of these new space corporations. You wouldn't get a lot of buy-in if you just said, like, hey, support this stuff because you'll make a lot of money, right? It's support this stuff because you're going to participate in the salvation of the species. And also, incidentally, you're going to make a lot of money. Absolutely.

No, I completely agree. And I've argued the same in the past. Like, if you look at Jeff Bezos, he says, we basically have a choice, right? We stay on Earth, and we're doomed to stasis and rationing. Or we go into space, build these colonies, have a trillion people, and we have growth and dynamism well into the future. And you can see how that then justifies what Elon Musk is doing in Texas, where, you know, an environmental preserve is put at risk to enable his kind of space fantasies. But also,

we kind of ignore not just the environmental damage, but also how, you know, he's putting these Starlink satellites all over the planet and the potential impacts of those things get downplayed. And all of these potential issues kind of get pushed to the side because, as you say, it's not just about earning profit. It's we need to do this to save the species, to ensure that we have a future and that future is in space. I think it's very worrying to see how that works and how it does work, you know, not just on parts of the public, but also on kind of policymakers, right? I wanted to end by asking you about this, because at the end of the book, you say that obviously we are kind of driven by these ideas right now, and that this is kind of driving a lot of the public conversation, but also the direction of lawmakers and of governments

as they are helping to try to realize this vision that these tech billionaires are putting out there. But it isn't set in stone that this has to be the way that we think about the future, that we think about space, that we think about our economy and society and all these other sorts of things. So, you know, if we were going to challenge the visions of the space billionaires and this particular orientation towards space, what would that look like? So I think that there are a lot of alternative

visions out there. And some of the ones that I propose are, you know, the first, I think, crucially would be the process of listening to and learning from the stories of various Indigenous communities across the world that have managed to live on their land, with their land, as their land for generations, for centuries, for in some cases, for millennia, without decimating it, right? And to use those stories of reciprocal care, of kinship with land, as different kinds of models for existence, both on Earth and elsewhere, if we're going to go elsewhere. I think it is important also to listen to the experiences and the testimonies of those

Indigenous communities who are saying, you know what? It's actually, from our perspective, not the case that space is uninhabited. The Biwaka people of Northern Australia have written an academic paper saying, we have just learned about what Musk is doing with Star saying, we have just learned about what Musk is doing with Starlink. And we've learned about it because even in the outback, when you look up at the sky now, you can't see the stars the way that you're supposed to see them because you're seeing all these satellites instead, or because the light is blocking them out, the light reflected from the satellites. And what they explain there is that according to

their ontology, outer space is not uninhabited. Rather, it's inhabited by the spirits, the lives of people who have died before them. And anytime a person from the Biwaka community dies, they're sent up ritually past the atmosphere through the solar system along the River of Stars or the Milky Way, where they dwell forever and help regulate the affairs of the community on Earth. And if the spaceways are polluted, and if we're attacking other planets, and if we're nuking them, and if we're, we are disturbing the greater ecological balance between the living and the dead, between Earth and the solar system, between Earth and the entire galaxy of which we are a part.

So both technologies of how to live on and with land in a mutually beneficial way, and also these stories about who's out there seem to me important to listen to. It seems important to me also to branch out a bit and look into the world of fiction, of science fiction, of speculative fiction, particularly science and speculative fiction written by communities whose lands have been expropriated from them or who have been dispossessed from their own lands. So I'm thinking particularly of Indigenous futurism, Afrofuturism, these genres that imagine, and imagine very concretely other ways of building community rather than centering profit and exploitation. And third, I think it's important to listen to the exegesis, which is to say the commentary on the Bible, of contemporary Christians. In particular, people like Pope Francis, who happens to have a very important job, who has said very clearly that the idea that humans dominate the earth is false. It is a false reading of scripture. It is false. It is a false reading of scripture. It is inappropriate. It was, you

know, done in the interests of nation states and it has done untold harm. The task of the Christian is to live in kinship. He actually uses this term brotherhood and sisterhood with the rest of the planet for the sake of the wellbeing of the entire planet. And particularly if we're talking about human beings of the poor on the planet. So it's like even Christianity itself in its most institutional form, which is to say the Roman Catholic Church, has moved on from this line of thinking. This line of thinking that says that it doesn't matter what we do to land. The line of thinking that says that humans are the most important thing on the planet. These are some of the places we can listen. And so it seems to me that those stories are kind of everywhere.

You can find them everywhere. The question is how we figure out how to center them and how we figure out how to use them to approach our exploration of outer space in a different way. Absolutely. And, you know, I think it's essential. And I think that this is something that is ongoing right now, right? Both from thinking about different ways of seeing the world. And I feel like this is making progress, but even questioning these older ideas, you know, in Canada, you know, there have been calls in recent years to get the Pope and to get the church to rescind the doctrine of discovery going way back. Right. And what does that mean for the way that we see land for the legal and economic structures that we've built up on top of it? These are all huge questions that I think we're all kind of grappling with as a society

and that are important to grapple with. And I think that your work and that your book gives us an in to think about these futures that were being sold by these very powerful people and to think about them in a different way and hopefully to challenge them. And I would recommend anyone go pick up the book because it's absolutely fascinating.

Mary Jane, thank you so much for joining me. Of course, it was such a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much. Mary Jane Rubenstein is the author of Astrotopia, the Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, and a professor of religion in society at Wesleyan University. You can follow me on Twitter at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.