‘ No using such US-centric and colonisation/genocide-invoking traditional metaphors would be a better stop,’ British professor says
President Donald Trump’s plan to pursue” Manifest Destiny” by putting the first person on Mars has drawn mixed reactions from astronomers, with one expressing concerns about “imperialist connotations”.
However, others are more passionate about the government’s seeks.
President Trump stated in his opening speech that” We will do our present life into the stars by launching American pilots to place the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
In the crowd, Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and a longtime champion of Mars inquiry, could be seen excitedly giving a” hands up” to the lens in response to this statement.
One of NASA’s biggest vendors is SpaceX, which has already sent a number of unmanned aircraft to Mars. Before Trump finds company, Musk has stated that he wants to have people on Mars by 2028.
However, some scientists are not as likewise enthused about the idea of Mars invasion.
The new administration’s rely on Mars, according to Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor in astropolitics and storage war and co-director of the Durham University in England.
In a recent email to The Fix, he wrote,” I’d been concerned that yet another change of emphasis to Mars, away from the Moon as the Obama administration did in 2009, would divert attention from the Artemis Programme, which is in full swing and has attracted considerable support from several countries around the world for celestial exploration.”
The Artemis Program, a NASA program intended to “land the second woman and the first person of color” on the moon, is intended to serve as a first step toward Mars ‘ landing.
A departure from the project, according to Bowen, would make the United States” a more challenging partner to work with on the foreign dimension of human flight where the desires of Presidents and counselors can derail years of planning and financial-industrial commitments.”
Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astronomer at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, has a fairly unique take.
In an email to The Fix, Haqq-Misra wrote,” We are in the midst of a “new Cold War,” in which nuclear-armed nations continue to compete against one another.
” But instead of really demonstrating the dominance of their nuclear weaponry, countries like the United States, China, Russia, and India all apply space as an area for demonstrating the style of their spaceships technology”, he said.
Author of the book” Sovereign Mars: Transforming our values through space settlement” said space exploration gives nations like the U.S. an opportunity to practice and demonstrate nuclear power.
” The same technology that can bring people or rovers to Mars could conceivably be applied to launch nuclear weapons with greater precision,” he told The Fix.
MORE: Astrobiologists concerned about imperialistic consequences of space exploration
According to Haqq-Misra,” I think that striving for ambitious goals like sending humans to Mars is an excellent way to continue developing this technological capacity to ensure our national security while also being able to advance our scientific understanding of Mars.”
When asked about Trump’s use of the term, “manifest destiny”, Bowen had this to say:
The term “recalls a traumatic period of history where indigenous peoples and the working class were deliberate policies of dispossession, forced migration, genocide, or brutal exploitation by governments and private companies,” according to “many, both inside and outside the United States, are uncomfortable or deeply hurt by the imperialist connotations of the term.”
There are others who share Bowen’s concerns about space exploration. For example, Wesleyan University Dean of Social Sciences Mary-Jane Rubenstein once said that” European Christian imperialism” could be part of man’s expansion into space, as The Fix previously reported.
Rubenstein initially responded to an email from The Fix asking about Trump’s statement, but she did not respond to any of the questions or emails that followed, asking what practices she thought were and weren’t acceptable in space exploration.
However, Haqq-Misra does not share their concerns.
” I am not concerned that Mars exploration will mirror European colonialism”, Haqq-Misra told The Fix. It’s unlikely that any of Mars will ever be claimed as a new state or territory of the United States, or any other country that reaches Mars because Article II of the Outer Space Treaty forbids the sovereign appropriation of space.
A United Nations resolution establishing standards and rules for space exploration is the Outer Space Treaty.
If any nation establishes a permanent human presence on Mars, as Haqq-Misra noted, it will likely reveal more about our own preconceptions and limitations about our current forms of civilization on Earth and help us develop novel ways of civilization that can cope with the harsh realities of living in space.
Bowen said he is open to space exploration, provided the astronomy community changes the language used to describe it.
” Not using such US-centric and colonisation/genocide-invoking historical metaphors would be a better start if the US wanted to make its space exploration plans more palatable for more audiences”, he said.
He told The Fix,” You can talk about exploration and discovery without invoking empires and colonialism.”
However, his recommended terminology could be at odds with others in the astronomy community.
According to theoretical physicist and gender theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein,” I want us to move away from the idea of exploration and discovery,” as she defines them as “deeply fraught terms that have traditionally been used to refer to problematic behaviors by imperialists.”
Prescod-Weinstein, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, did not respond to The Fix‘s request for comment via email on Trump’s statement.
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