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(Mike, Organizer/Writer, , 7-22)

While record-breaking wildfires burned across the Western United States, Amazon CEO and billionaire Jeff Bezos stepped out of his space capsule to a crowd of cheering fans. His company Blue Origin’s first launch into space was a success. Bezos became the second billionaire to reach space and cement his stature as a leading private space industry figure. The three billionaires building the private space industry so far are: Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk with SpaceX and Bezos with Blue Origin. . Musk has yet to make the trip to space himself. Upon his return, Bezos made it a point to thank Amazon workers, who “paid for all this,” a stark contrast to the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and the union-busting efforts pushed by Amazon around the country. After his return, with a cowboy hat on his head and a childlike grin on his face, Bezos fashioned himself a sort of jolly frontiersman. Indeed, these billionaires see themselves as virtuous trailblazers of a new space age. Branson, who preceded Bezos’s space trip by about a week, nearly said as much. “If we can do this,” exclaimed Branson as he looked out of the spacecraft's window, down at the rest of us, “just imagine what you can do.” With a billion dollars, he should have added. What do these men share in common beyond their money, eccentricities, and desire to float in space? They don’t like paying taxes. Branson has moved billions between tax havens to avoid paying in his home country of England. A groundbreaking ProPublica investigation revealed that most of the United States’ richest billionaires maneuver their fortunes to pay less taxes than most Americans. For a number of years, Bezos and Musk, the two richest men in the world, paid no federal income taxes. While Branson has the more docile plan of business expansion and commercial space travel (think space tourism), Bezos and Musk share a more intense ambition: a vision of capital-led space expansion and settlement. Bezos envisions settlements on the moon. Musk, famously, locates humanity’s future in the colonization of Mars. Behind their space ambitions is a recognition of the more earthly challenges to our future: the depletion of resources, population growth, and most importantly, climate change. In his post-launch briefing, Bezos even spoke of the Earth’s fragility and the need to protect it. “As we move about the Earth, we damage it,” he said. In a separate interview, he stressed the need to keep Earth “as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.” Admissions like this demonstrate a willful ignorance of the billionaires’ own complicity in these existential crises. Bezos’s Amazon in particular has become a pollution behemoth. The company is responsible for a carbon footprint that rivals that of some countries. At the same time, Bezos and his company fund a leading climate-change-denial think tank and reject grassroots employee demands for greater climate action. Bezos may be giving more attention to the company’s climate impact; Amazon has created the Amazon Climate Pledge to reach net zero emission by 2040, and Bezos himself has pledged $10 billion toward the new Bezos Earth Fund. But, one year after creating the pledge, the company’s carbon emissions increased by 19 percent, and Bezos has only given a fraction of his pledge. Climate change is an immediate crisis that, at this point, we are in a stage of harm management and not prevention. Proponents of the Green New Deal argue that to salvage our planet and its inhabitants requires a war-like scale of mobilization. Estimates of the cost of reconstructing a new, green economy usually amount to trillions of dollars of government spending. In short, $10 billion isn’t going to cut it. Today’s billionaires exhibit a power that entire countries once only dreamt of—and many still do. Where some find inspiration and awe, a growing number of people are disillusioned with the glaring, shocking inequality of billionaires doing somersaults in zero gravity. Even rocket launches have lost the shine they once held. Whereas in 1969 a country watched, captivated, as the first American stepped foot on the moon, this past summer, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successful launching in Florida was merely a blink in the news cycle. Why? To be frank, we had larger and more immediate concerns at home on Earth. And we still do. Inequality levels in the United States are among the highest levels ever recorded. During the pandemic, U.S. billionaires have collectively increased their fortunes by more than $1 trillion. A survey shortly before the pandemic showed that nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t have more than $1,000 saved. Upon his return from the sky, Bezos made it a point to thank Amazon workers, who “paid for all this.” This rhetorical thanks is a stark contrast to the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and the union-busting efforts pushed by Amazon around the country. It’s important to remember how these billionaires made their money and what their space race really means while so many issues persist at home. While they continue their privatized space race, the rest of humanity is imperiled. The planet will continue to burn, and inequality will worsen until massive action and investment is taken, which means billionaires finally paying their fair share. Billionaires would do best to put their space race on pause and focus more of their attention on this planet.

(Veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute’s weekly newsletter on our great divides. He also contributes a regular column to OtherWords, the IPS national nonprofit editorial service. , 7-17)

Let’s enjoy the ridicule. But let’s not treat the billionaire space race as a laughing matter. Let’s see it as a wake-up call, a reminder that we don’t only get billionaires when wealth concentrates. We get a society that revolves around the egos of the most affluent among us and an economy where the needs of average people go unmet and don’t particularly matter. Characters like Elon Musk, notes Paris Max, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, are using “misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement” and gain tax-dollar support for various projects “designed to work best — if not exclusively — for the elite.” The three corporate space shells for Musk, Bezos, and Branson — SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic — have “all benefited greatly through partnerships with NASA and the US military,” notes CNN Business. Their common corporate goal: to get satellites, people, and cargo “into space cheaper and quicker than has been possible in decades past.” Branson, for his part, is hawking tickets for roundtrips “to the edge of the atmosphere and back,” at $250,000 per head. He’s planning some 400 such trips a year, observes British journalist Oliver Bullough, about “almost as bad an idea as racing to see who can burn the rainforest quickest.” The annual UN Emissions Gap Report last year concluded that the world’s richest 1 percent do more to foul the atmosphere than the entire poorest 50 percent combined. That top 1 percent, the UN report adds, would have to “reduce its footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line” with the 2015 Paris Agreement targets. Opening space to rich people’s joyrides would stomp that footprint even bigger. Bezos and Musk seem to have grander dreams than mere space tourism. They’re looking “to colonize the cosmos,” with Bezos pushing “artificial tube-like structures floating close to Earth” and Musk talking up the terraforming of Mars. They essentially see space as a refuge from an increasingly inhospitable planet Earth. They expect tax-dollar support to make their various pipedreams come true. And how should we respond to all this? We should, of course, be working to create a more hospitable planet for all humanity. In the meantime, several egalitarian wags have been circulating online petitions that urge our terrestrial authorities not to let orbiting billionaires back on Earth. “Billionaires should not exist…on Earth or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there,” reads one petition nearing 200,000 signatures. Ric Geiger, the 31-year-old automotive supplies account manager behind that effort, is hoping his petition helps the issue of maldistributed wealth “reach a broader platform.” Activists like Geiger are going down the right track. We don’t need billionaires out to “conquer space.” We need to conquer inequality.

In response to Jeff Bezos’ space flight scheduled for Tuesday, Deepak Xavier, Oxfam International's Global Head of Inequality Campaign, said: “We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation. 11 people are likely now dying of hunger each minute while Bezos prepares for an 11-minute personal space flight. This is human folly, not human achievement. "The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections. US billionaires got around $1.8 trillion richer since the beginning of the pandemic and nine new billionaires were created by Big Pharma’s monopoly on the COVID-19 vaccines. Bezos pays next to no US income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos' fortune has almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began. "Billionaires should pay their fair share of taxes for our hospitals, schools, roads and social care, too. Governments must adopt a much stronger global minimum tax on multinational corporations and look at new revenues. A wealth tax, for example of just 3 percent, would generate $6 billion a year from Bezos’ $200 billion fortune alone ―a sixth of what the US spends on foreign aid. A COVID-19 profits tax on Amazon would yield $11 billion, enough to vaccinate nearly 600 million people. "What we need is a fair tax system that allows more investment into ending hunger and poverty, into education and healthcare, and into saving the planet from the growing climate crisis ―rather than leaving it.”

(Ian, https://www.ntdaily.com/elon-musks-mars-base-visions-are-fundamentally-flawed/)

Few people shape our perceptions of the future like Elon Musk. Through companies like SpaceX and Tesla, he’s presented an optimistic vision for the technologies of tomorrow and endeared himself to millions. Out of all his stated goals, one stands out in particular– creating a permanent base on Mars. Musk appears to care deeply about this. He’s regularly discussed his goals with the media, spoke at the Mars Society conference in 2020, and even said in 2014 that his purpose behind creating SpaceX was to develop technologies necessary for “a self-sustaining, permanent base on Mars.” The idea is a central part of his brand of futurism, and it’s easily his most ambitious proposal. However, those goals fall apart when faced with reality. Creating a Martian colony would be highly challenging and unnecessarily expensive. To discuss why let’s start with an obvious factor: space is big. On average, Mars is 140 million miles away from Earth, a distance that takes light and radio signals over 12 minutes to cover. Under ideal circumstances, rockets take nine long months to complete this journey. However, even that ideal transfer window only occurs for 30 days every 26 months. Outside that window, rockets need substantially reduced payloads to allow for higher fuel loads. For a permanent settlement, this is highly impractical. We also have to consider the substantial environmental and health risks of living on Mars. The thin atmosphere and extremely low temperatures would require expensive and complex life support systems. The Martian soil is toxic and unsuitable for crop growth, and the low surface gravity would have major long-term effects on colonists’ bodies. Perhaps the biggest hazard on Mars is radiation. Without the Earth’s magnetic field or ozone layer to protect them, Martian colonists would be exposed to dangerous cosmic rays, substantially increasing cancer risks. Admittedly, radiation doses could be lessened by building shelters underground with few or no windows. However, confining stressed colonists to cramped quarters that are isolated from almost all of humanity could cause the colonists mental strain. Combined with the difficulties of maintaining the colony, psychological breakdowns would be inevitable for the colonists. In Antarctica, researchers enduring the continent’s brutal winters often develop “winter-over syndrome,” with symptoms including depression, insomnia, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and aggression. Even then, Antarctica has a breathable atmosphere and relative proximity to civilization. Mars lacks both, so living there would be even more miserable.

(Paula, https://greekreporter.com/2023/02/11/colonization-mars-practically-impossible-says-greek-american-space-expert/)

Greek-American space exploration scientist Dr Stamatios Krimigis told a TV interview on Thursday that the colonization of Mars is practically impossible, at least for the next 200 years. Speaking to journalist Nikos Chatzinikolaou on Greek private network Ant1 TV, Dr Krimigis opined that Elon Musk, a passionate advocate of the colonization of Mars, hasn’t realized the actual difficulties of such a venture. “Manned missions for visit and exploration, that is something else, but colonization, certainly not,” the acclaimed space expert said. SpaceX, the rocket company co-founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has made it an ultimate goal to send manned flights to Mars and eventually colonize the Red Planet. The billionaire businessman stated recently that a manned mission to Mars could happen as early as 2029 when asked on Twitter. Colonization of Mars not possible “in Elon Musk’s era” This isn’t the first time that the Greek space exploration scientist doubts the feasibility of human colonization of Mars. In a previous interview with AMNA in spring 2022, he had called plans of a human settlement on Mars a distant dream. Dr Krimigis, who has a PHD in the ways that particles are diffused during solar explosions, now went into more detail and explained to Greek talk show host Chatzinikolaou that humans on Mars would be completely unprotected in the event of a solar explosion due to the lack of magnetic fields and an atmosphere on the Red Planet. If they were to colonize Mars, humans would need shelters dug at least one metre underground to protect themselves from such events, he added. And while that could perhaps be feasible in 200 years from today, it will not be so “in Elon Musk’s era.” He does believe though that a manned mission to Mars could materialize in the next decade. Krimigis’s participation in space exploration programs Born on the island of Chios, Dr Krimigis is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, where he serves on the Board of Trustees, per NASA. He has built instruments that have flown to seven of the nine planets, while he has published over 350 papers in journals and books. In addition, Dr Krimigis has contributed to many of the United States’ unmanned space exploration programs of the Solar System and beyond, and in 1999, the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid 8323 Krimigis (previously 1979 UH) in his honor, according to Wikipedia.

(Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled, “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues. https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4085526-no-private-space-colonies-will-not-be-dystopian-hellscapes/)

The idea of pulling up stakes and moving to a space colony to start a new life is a compelling one. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to build a city of a million people on Mars. Jeff Bezos wants to build free-flying colonies, first envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, that can sustain even more people. Space colonies are the stuff of science fiction dreams, invoking the settlement of the American West. Not so fast, according to a story in Scientific American. Space colonies founded by private businesses are likely, in the story’s view, to be dystopian hells. The theory is that space colonists will be subject to the whims of their tech overlords. Free from the restraints of earthly laws, the founders of the first communities of humans beyond the home planet will do with their subjects as they like. The story cites accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment at tech companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to buttress his case. It even invokes Werner Von Braun in his brief against private space colonies. Von Braun, before he moved to America and became a champion of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, served the Nazi regime, even joining the Nazi Party and taking rank in the SS, though no evidence exists that he agreed with Nazi racial ideology. It seems to imply that space colonies could resemble the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where people were literally worked to death to build V-2 rockets. The story seems also to have problems with what it called “American superiority in space” and resource extraction on the moon. It mischaracterizes the former, since the Artemis Accords, started by NASA, stipulate a regime of cooperation on the space frontier and not the dominance of any one nation. Why there’s disdain for mining the moon or other celestial bodies is left as an exercise for the reader. The story’s thesis encounters one problem. If Musk’s Mars colony or Bezos’s free-flying space cities become latter-day East Berlins, who would want to move there? Space colonies are going to need the best and the brightest to become their citizens in order to survive and thrive. No one is going to sign up willingly to become denizens of outer space gulags. Real-world experience on Earth proves the point. The United States is not a perfect country by any means. Yet millions of people, either legally or otherwise, aspire to move to that country to enjoy its freedom and economic opportunities. Neither Russia nor China can make the same boast. Elon Musk has opened his mind about how he envisions his Mars city being governed. Far from being a company town ruled as a dictatorship, he envisions a direct democracy, much like an Ancient Greek polis, in which everyone decides government policy. He believes that representative democracy gives too much power to “special interests.” Still, some set of principles for how a space colony should be governed could be laid out in advance so that people who decide to leave Earth forever to make new lives in space could be assured of what they are getting into. Something similar to the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution should be drawn up and agreed to. Anyone proposing to establish a space colony should promise to adopt a Space Colonist Bill of Rights stipulating what the government of a space colony can and cannot do with its citizens. Nations of the world could sign an agreement, much like the Artemis Accords, that promises to defend and enforce such a Bill of Rights. People in the future who contemplate moving off of the planet should be aware that they will not be settling down in a utopia. Elon Musk has assured one and all that the first settlers on Mars will have a not insignificant chance of dying. While a Mars colony is unlikely to become the dystopian hell that Scientific American warns about, human freedom, as is always the case, will have to be balanced by the need for survival. Still, people in the mid to late 21st century will have an opportunity that none have been offered since the closing of the American frontier in the late 19th century. They will have the chance to move to a literal new world, to participate in the next phase of human history. They will be in on the beginning of the spread of human civilization across the solar system and, in the fullness of time, to the stars.

(Graeme Wend-Walker is an assistant professor at Texas State University-San Marcos. His research interests include postsecular theory. “The Inexplicable Moon and the Postsecular Moment: The Apollo Program in Two Picturebooks” Children's Literature, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 169-194 (Article) – via Project Muse

DOI: 10.1353/chl.2011.0008)

(P. Post-colonial space exploration at the Equator - 2015 DasQuestões,n#6, setembro/dezembro, 2018 http://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/dasquestoes/article/download/18712/17430)

Our contemporary imaginary of space has been dominated by the space race and the cold war of the twentieth century, super powers and menacing aliens. This exhibition seeks to reappraise this imaginary in the light of postcolonial thinking, open software and hardware, the anthropocene and art, because how we see space is how we see ourselves. This intimacy of space and earth, the overview effect felt by many astronauts, is a continual thread throughout the exhibition and already appears in the first works of the exhibition, 3 reproductions of Simone Chambelland's seminal 1970 space prints. In two of them we see enigmatic missile or rocket like forms floating above the earth, in the third, entitled "University of Space, we see a space station covered with antennas, announcing another theme of the exhibition, the antenna, the ability to listen and observe, key to our relationship with space. Simone was a French artist who emigrated to Chile in 1939 and died there in 2013. The print was an important technique in this period for a whole generation of South American artists, generally from the Left, who sought to step out of the privileged world of fine arts and assure that their art arrived to the people. The workshop was a fundamental place for both production and meeting, like Taller Rojo in Bogotá, Colombia, and Taller99 in Santiago de Chile where Simone Chambelland created these pieces. This DIY and popular ethic is also a constant presence in the exhibition, the reclamation and appropriation of space as a commons and the Overview Effect for everybody. Haiku A Gaia is the first of two works in the exhibition by the Mexican Arcangel Constantini, its an old decaying globe that is being bathed in electromagnetic pulses from a parabolic antenna, their form and frequency generated by a text to voice software reading haikus. Between the earth and the antenna is a mist of water generated by sound. Its a mistreated earth suffering from global warming and political and economic regimes that are unable to change. The Anthropocene is the geological age that we are living in, where the effects of humans are the most powerful force in modifying the earth. This age is full of dangers and the necessity for change. The overview effect permits us to think the earth in another way, but this thinking seems so far from the economic and social realities that surround us. It is from observation and listening that we can build our relation with the cosmos and nowhere is this clearer than in the pre-colombian civilisations of the Andes. In the area of Quito, especially in Cayambe were the equatorial line passes, many ancient architectural formations can be found, aligned with solstice and equinoctial positions of the sun. The work of Carolina Ibarra "Kunan Skywatcher" opens the section of the exhibition that we call "Escucha" (Listening) but it could also be called Observation or Connection. The section starts with Ibarra's work, based on a precolombian solar observatory from Cayambe depicted in an 18th century engraving by Juan de Olloa and continues with the Artisanal Kosmic Drawer by the Brazilian artist Denise AlvesRodrigues, a dispositive made of bamboo to draw one's own maps of the stars, and 13 sculptures by the Ecuadorian artist Felipe Jacomé, burnt trees that look up at the sky, searching for the overview from a dying planet, or observing the movement of the stars as we have for millennia. Today an antenna is the obligatory interface with the celestial beings we call satellites and if they seemed remote and unobtainable in Chambelland's images the videos by Foco Critico from Colombia and Bruno Vianna from Brazil show them in a completely different light, home-made from recycled parts, based on the physics commons of waveforms and frequencies, they can be built by anyone. This challenge to technological hegemony, the appropriation of the radio waves and the fight against imperial dispositives is central to Alejandro Duque's work. Originally from Medellín and now living in Switzerland, Alejo is a founding member of the Movimento Sem Satelites (MSST) and one of the leading exponents of the anti-launching wing of this movement, split between those who are in favor of launching a satellite and those who are not, arguing that space is already full of artefacts - thousands and thousands that float in orbit around the planet - better to hack what is there, penetrate security systems and occupy radio space. His sound piece "You'll never be an astronaut" is a homage to radio and its position as principal mediator between humans and space, and thus an ideological and technical battleground. The first country to launch a satellite was the Soviet Union in 1957 with the Sputnik. It circled the earth approximatively 1400 times before falling, 92 days after its launch and burning up. It was a sphere of aluminium, 58 cm wide with 4 antennas of 2.4 and 2.9 length. The same dimensions as Simon Vega's version, which appropriates the form and the material of the Sputnik but the sphere is made of pieces of aluminium from beer cans and the antennas are bamboo. The 3rd World Sputnik is part of the El Salvadorian artist's Tropical Space Proyectos, a series of historical space craft made from trash, and an imaginary space agency, where these trash constructions appropriate the imaginary of space power. As curator Fabiane Borges writes in one of the curatorial wall texts that accompanies the exhibition : "Imaginaries and symbolic appropriations function as tools for the struggle and for the affirmation of territories. There is always outer space for the dispossessed and the cultivation of empowering technologies and poetics. In the articulation between peripheral cultures, blacks, indigenous, feminists, gender and body diverse, the figure of the alien appears as an ally in this process of searching, for recognition and autonomy. Satellites and spacesuits made from rubbish, home made precarious space craft, are a political critique, appropriations of the codes of the dominant cultures, assuming the imagination as an extremely real intervention in the codes of the intelligibility of society."

(Martin, Cosmic Society. Towards a Sociology of the Universe Peter Dickens and James Ormrod, London, Routledge, 2007, £75.00, 221pp. The Sociological Review, 56:4 (2008))

I have long thought it odd that sociology, and cognate areas, spends so little time looking up at the stars, and it seems to have been one of the few areas of enquiry that was largely unmoved by the vainglory of the Apollo programme. But then perhaps ours is a subject of the earth, of the human scales of the city, the factory and the home. The very idea of ‘cosmic society’ cradles this tension, as the intimate warmth of the socius is dwarfed and frozen before the inhuman scale of cosmos. But what Dickens and Ormrod have done in this remarkable book is to argue that what we understand as ‘space’ is always already a projection of the social, and bears the imprints of the patterns of power and legitimacy that shape the earth. For a long time, humans have worshipped the sun, and organized the constellations, but now satellites and Mars rovers are extending the human into places where it has never been. Fifty years after Sputnik, it is time that sociology looked up. So what might a ‘cosmic sociology’ look like? For Dickens and Ormrod one key aspect of this is the ‘humanization of the universe’, a term that might be understood in many different ways.Their understanding of the term is primarily dialectical, in the Marxian sense of cosmos being a human work on the very ground from which the human emerges. However, since (again following Marx) the societies of earth are unequal, they will reflect the sky unequally. No wonder that a ‘cosmic elite’ dominates space policy and projects its militaryindustrial interests across the stars. But no wonder either that this dominance should be contested by various pro-space libertarian groups, and antimilitarization activists. Using some ideas from David Harvey, Dickens and Ormrod argue that what is at stake here is an ‘outer spatial fix’ to periodic crises of capitalism in which this new frontier is being used ‘to promote imperialism and capital accumulation’ (12). At the same time, they use psychoanalytic ideas to suggest that much of the ideology of space advocates is narcissistic, in the sense that it involves projecting fantasies of individual heroism onto the figure of the space explorer. This psychic economy echoes ideas about market freedoms, and leaves little room for collectivist views of humankind. In a mere 190 pages, Dickens and Ormrod move from pre-industrial cosmologies to industry and empire in outer space. It is a dizzying ride, and those who prefer detail to generality will find that the view gives them vertigo, but I felt that empirical and theoretical materials of considerable intricacy were handled with a deftness of touch that would make this an admirable textbook for an undergraduate ‘Sociology in Space’ module, should one exist. (And yes, one should exist. The imagined place of humans in the universe has been deemed to be crucial for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, so why not us ‘moderns’?) Backing up their claims is evidence from a 2004/5 UK mass observation survey on attitudes towards space, alien life, horoscopes, science fiction and so on; interviews with various pro-space activists; and general data on the political economy of the space industries. This latter covers military applications, satellite communications and observation, elite space tourism of theVirgin Galactic variety and proposals for various forms of off-earth manufacturing, extraction and energy production. Not that any of these are easily separable, simply because (for example) NASA is effectively joined at the hip to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop-Grumman. Just as satellite surveillance is inseparable from smart weapons, the global positioning systems that enable tagging, the global dominance of a few media companies, and the global dominance of a few states. But there is an odd thing about the sort of Marxist Freudian telescope that Dickens and Ormrod use here. After recounting various more collectivist cosmologies, they suggest that contemporary capitalism has produced a sovereign individual who only sees their own restless narcissism reflected in the stars.The ‘humanization’ of space then involves the universalization of a selfish and insecure character, and a set of social relations that support an unequal status quo. Fair enough, but can space travel and exploration provoke other forms of thought too?What Dickens and Ormrod label as childish narcissism might be articulated by radicals of a less materialist (or realist) bent as ‘revolutionary romanticism’. Risking glibness, this is perhaps what distinguished young Hegelians from historical materialist Marxists.No wonder that Dickens and Ormrod tend to see popular science, utopianism and science fiction as a distraction, precisely because they look to them like escapism. These authors are more attentive to structural constraint than imaginative possibility. Now there is no particular reason to argue that (for example) all science fiction is radical, any more than we might suggest all utopias are good places. However, many radicals (and liberals too, such as Durkheim and Mannheim) have suggested that imaginings of other times and spaces have been central to the possibility of change, and hence a contributor to cracks in whatever hegemony reigns. To put this another way, I suppose that one of the other senses of the ‘humanization’ of space might be that there is no space left for the sublime, for the sense of the insignificance of the human standing on the moon, blotting all of earth out with his gloved thumb. In other words, that a sociology of space of the kind that Dickens and Ormrod propose might end up leaving no space left to think about, because it is now already filled by humans, and the machinery of the actually existing. Nonetheless, this is an extraordinarily interesting book, and it deserves a cheaper paperback edition in order that the ideas can be more widely read. Though my temper may be more speculative than theirs, I (and Kurt Vonnegut, I think) agree entirely when they conclude that ‘the ultimate aim of this must be a relationship with the universe that does not empower the already powerful.’ (190)Where we might disagree is the role of ‘fantasy’ in shaping a future that might achieve such an aim. (691-3)

(Martin Collins is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the author/editor of several books on space history and on science, technology, and society in the twentieth century, including Space Race: The US-USSR Competition to Reach the Moon (1999). A Chapter in the Book: Remembering the Space Age – Chapter 11 “A Second Nature rising: Spaceflight in an era of Representation” – http://www.nss.org/resources/library/spacepolicy/Remembering_the_Space_Age.pdf)

Let’s shake this mix of semiotics, capitalism, spaceflight, the global and the local, and consider a couple of examples. In public discourse on globalization, capitalism—restless, u.S. and european-centric, with asia on the rise—has drawn the most attention. But the u.S. military, as already inferred, has played an essential part, creating seemingly strange linkages between national security and a rampant transnational consumer culture. Consider the example of the global positioning System (GPS), a network of satellites designed and operated by the u.S. air Force (uSaF). Conceived in the early 1970s and only becoming fully operational in 1995, gpS’s history straddled the Cold War and its market-oriented aftermath. the system provided a soldier, ship, airplane, or missile with information on their exact position anyplace on the planet via signals encoded with highly accurate time data, its profound effects symbolized by its use in guiding “smart” bombs and missiles with deadly, precise accuracy in the post-September 11 conflicts in afghanistan and Iraq.26 In recent years, satellite photographic images of these “smart” actions have been a staple of television news and are widely available on the Internet.27 In the 1990s, though, GPS became not just a tool for the u.S. military, but for anyone, anywhere in the world—for a hiker in the rocky Mountains, for mom and dad driving the family car, as well as for past and present adversaries such as a Chinese soldier or a terrorist. In its posture toward users, the system became egalitarian in the extreme. Not surprisingly, in the go-go market-driven post-Cold War world, business and consumer use of gpS vastly outstripped that of the military. Imagine a use for location, tracking, or accurate time information and one found gpS there, often in the intimate contours of daily life— say, tracking a spouse suspected of having an affair. Indeed, one can “google” a phrase such as “cheater tracker” and find gpS products marketed for that purpose. Combined with a geographic information system (such as satellite-based google maps), one can track and visualize the itinerary of an errant mate.28 Such uses are not just confined to the u.S.: as the New York Times observed, “the world has incorporated our gpS into its daily life as rapidly as americans took up the atM banking network.”29 Nothing, perhaps, speaks more to the distinctive conjunction between production and semiotics in the global era, to the total, actual, not merely metaphorical, planetary scale of this conjunction, than GPS, its radio signals equally available to friends and foes, to weapons in flight, and to off-the-shelf products offering to meet every consumer need. the gpS story is not the same as that by-gosh, by-golly story of the origins of the Internet—of “isn’t it strange that a research project into maintaining command and control during a nuclear holocaust gave us this wildly diverse, unpredictable, electronic social universe.” It is different and more revealing of the transformation in the world order since the early 1970s. It still is, in essence, controlled by the u.S. military, and in a way unprecedented in u.S. history unites a classic function of empire—controlling and maintaining its perimeters—with the churning demands of capital and consumer appetites. and not just those based in united States, but everywhere. gpS has become a military-consumerist hybrid, in which each political-cultural domain has continually redefined the other. We—a transnational we—know the precision bomb blast from afghanistan or Iraq and the “cheater tracker” originate in and depend on the same system of production, yet in our everyday cultural frame of semiotics, we allow them to maintain their separateness. It is tensions such as these that continually redefine the global and the local, geographically and in time, and keep the united States—and its preeminence and exploitation of spaceflight— in the center of this dialectic. Consider another example, drawn from my current research that tracks Boorstin’s concern about semiotics and the structuring of our sense of the real. Like gpS, Iridium was and is a satellite constellation that completely embraces the planet—but with a different purpose, to provide telephony and data services, and with a different institutional actor in the lead, a multinational corporation. Conceived in 1987 at Motorola, a Fortune 500 company and a leading firm in cellular phone equipment and systems business and in semiconductors, the Iridium satellite project seemed to epitomize the historical moment: as the Cold War waned and collapsed, markets rather than government would lead into a techno-democratic future, and corporations rather than nations would articulate the pathways through which the local and the global took shape. the largest privately-financed technology project ever undertaken, and with an array of international investors, including the newly constituted russian Federation and the people’s republic of China, Iridium stood as symbol of this fusion of technology, corporations, markets, and international politics. In 1998, as the system neared completion, Wired magazine proclaimed, “It’s a bird, it’s a phone, it’s the world’s first pan-national corporation able to leap geo-political barriers in a single bound. part of my challenge in untangling this story has been to understand the varied ways in which semiotics functioned in a multinational corporation (MNC). You might expect that a MNC, deep-pocketed, well-connected politically, at home and internationally, with tens of factory and sales sites around the world would be an instrumental historical actor extraordinaire, a big “them” guy able to exert power in ways unavailable to all the little “us” guys. and, of course, that crude truth is there. But so is another one, one in which Motorola regarded the semiotic realm as real, a reality that required substantive corporate responses that intermingled culture, politics, and identity. as a literally planetary project, incorporating flesh-and-blood actors from around the world, Iridium dramatically highlighted the problem of semiotics—local, global, multiple, contesting, and not readily controlled—and the need for solutions. the Motorola’s response to this condition can be glimpsed in a 1998 book entitled Uncompromising Integrity: Motorola’s Global Challenge.31 the concept of culture stood as organizing precept. the narrative provided definitions of culture and related concepts that showed it as a structure, but varied in place and time, and as a process—national culture, subculture, host culture, enculturation, and transcultural. two key additional notions situated the discussion in the corporate context: “Motorola culture” and “home culture.” the first made clear that the organization had a semiotic sphere, derived from its own history and as a U.S. - centered capitalist institution. the second that that sphere was permeable and in flux because employees hailed from many localities around the world and because, as a multinational, the corporation always was operating in someone else’s backyard. Culture was something around which a company had to define itself (Motorola culture). Yet, in the global age, “home” was complex and mobile, reflective of the world’s many diasporas—of people, individually and en masse, following the flow lines of capital. home inhered in individuals even as they moved (with Motorola employees themselves an example) and in those places from which they came. Motorola and home cultures were oppositional and profoundly interpenetrating.32 Uncompromising Integrity’s preoccupation with culture—perceived as variegated and everywhere, in specific geographical places, in institutions (including Motorola), in individuals, and pulsing through the many channels of the media—had a corporate history. It encapsulated more than 15 years of high-level managerial attention to the global. It led executives in the late 1980s to create a hybrid academic-corporate institution—Motorola university—to engage and comprehend the fauna and flora of culture-world. this book was a product of that—a Motorola university press publication! Lest this example seem quirky and isolated, note that it exemplified a larger trend: over a decade, from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, more than a thousand corporate universities were created in the united States—all of which were a response, in one fashion or another, to the perceived challenge of culture and semiotics to transnational business practice.33 the biography of the lead author—r. S. Moorthy—makes concrete some of the issues of identity and politics embedded in these developments. Born into an Indian family and raised in poverty in Malay, as a young man he found work in a Motorola facility in that country. his professional life at Motorola became one of reconciling his origins in a place with a specific history, one tied to colonialism and the new globalism, with the purposes and outlooks of a multinational firm. he found a way to marry his interests with Motorola’s culture preoccupation and he came to play a major role in establishing Motorola university, creating a subunit of that enterprise, the Center for Culture and technology. this vignette only is meant to suggest the complicated and non-obvious ways in which social boundaries got created and negotiated and how semiotics constrained and enabled this process at different levels of corporate activity. as one instance, consider this graphic (see figure) outlining the manufacturing flow for the Iridium project, one that required a transnational “virtual factory”— Motorola’s own phrase. In the lower right corner, we find included in the virtual factory Baikonaur, Kazakhstan and taiyuan, China. that Kazakhstan and China could be integral, functioning elements of a u.S.-based business project made sense only in the context of this belief in the everywhere-ness of culture and the reality of semiotic structures—whether in dealing with transnational elites or with questions of politics and identity in specific geographic locales. But as the project moved from planning and manufacturing execution to marketing, the instrumental view—think the way I, Iridium, want you to think, buy my phone—comes to the fore and you find a different way of presenting geographical specificity and cultural accommodation, bleached and abstracted back to the aims of the corporation and neo-liberal capitalism, and using enlightenment universals to facilitate those aims.34 Where do these examples leave us? What might we draw from this mix of state action and capitalism, of semiotics and on-the-ground practice, of geographical specificity, local meanings, and the meta-narratives of the West? and where does spaceflight fit into this contested field of action? I would point to two things. First, my recitation here advances a particularly modest claim: deep and important issues become visible when we recalibrate our interpretive lens and see spaceflight in history, rather than expecting it to be sui generis. Spaceflight—especially those near-earth applications cited here—has been a major element in creating the incarnation of the global we have experienced over the last 40 years. It has provided images and practices that have made the category of the global, natural and insistent, even when different actors give it different meanings. It has been a primary site in which prior categories of the modern—the nation state, the military, civil society, capitalism—have been refashioned and given new meanings. and in helping to elevate the importance of the global—to distribute its effects across regions and places, to recalibrate our sense of distance and time, of identity as a creation of community or the flows of transnational semiotics—it has helped to invigorate the meaning of the local. This has led to an intensified scrutiny of globalism’s origins in the West— emanating from its military, economic, political and cultural institutions—and in its ideological underpinnings, the legacy of the enlightenment, of universal values inhering in universal humans. Spaceflight thus has enabled the dominant vectors of the global and its critique.35

(Daniel Sage 2008 Department of Civil and Building Engineering Loughborough University ) Book Reviews, Space and Polity, 12:2, 269-279, DOI:

10.1080/13562570802173414) Peter Dickens’ and James Ormrod’s Cosmic Society comprises an important rallying-cry for the social sciences to consider the socio-political significance of outer space. With the help of Marx, Gramsci, Lefebvre and most importantly perhaps David Harvey, the authors seek to uncover the underlying material conditions which explain the dialectic between “universe and society” (p. 5). This vast spatial dialectic is then used to assemble a Marxist critique of hegemonic cosmic-power, which incorporates religion, science-fiction, chaos theory, the Apollo programme, national missile defence, Isaac Newton, ‘the war on terror’, social Darwinism, satellite television, space tourism, military strategy and nationalistic hubris. The clarity of theoretical expression and selection of empirical support are consistent throughout; nevertheless some readers might be left disconcerted by the ease with which this hegemonic cosmos is established and then left remarkably intact. The first two chapters of the book establish the Marxist modus operandi: outer space seems to provide a locus for a range of utopian or dystopian myths (religious or secular) or esoteric scientific knowledges, yet these only serve to distract us from or subjugate us within its increasingly important role as a new arena in which the rich and powerful seek to perpetuate their own social hegemony by warding off various in-built crises of capitalism. These two chapters present the epistemological position: the first positions centuries of cosmic imaginaries, from pre-modern to technoscience, as a superficial accomplice to hegemonic power while the second explains the underlying interests and forces at work beneath the surface. Many readers will be rightly cautious about some of the historical generalisations made in chapter 1 to set up the explanatory concepts in chapter 2. For example, surely the ‘ontological’ shift from an organic (divinely ordered) cosmos to a mechanical cosmos (human controlled) is overstated. It is easy to cite examples where both of these religious (imaginative and speculative) and technoscientific (material and visible) views co-existed and interacted, including Newton’s own cosmology or even George W. Bush’s ‘new vision’ for space exploration. Alongside the ontological distinctions drawn between gods/ humans, imagined/real cosmos are other dualisms established in these early chapters between culture/nature and humans/non-humans. These make it impossible to admit cosmologies (or ontologies) that cannot be explained within the structure–agency dialectic of historical materialism. We might consider, for example, John Law’s (2006) aboriginal stories, where multiple universes are enacted through assemblages of humans, imaginations, animal, spirits, landscapes and tools. Such dualisms are evident within much Marxist thought, but their presence is even more consequential and problematic when studying a topic—cosmos and space exploration—that has involved so many subtle interactions between humans, gods, technologies, imaginations, animals and other non-humans whose becoming is not reducible to either deep structure, human intent or cause–effect relations. Instead of addressing the way such diverse cosmologies are assembled through humans and non-humans, we are given the solutions up-front in chapter 2: historical materialism, spatial fixes of capital, contradictions of accumulation, hegemony, power and class interest. The authors create a seamless web of social relations that explains away all the paradoxes and uncertainties that characterise ‘reality’. Non-humans are treated with a particular disdain. All spin-off technologies surrounding NASA, including CAT scanners, are deemed to be creating “false needs amongst the public” (p. 57) to encourage more capitalistic exploitation. The uncertain work of technologists in constructing and developing these technologies or the multiple uses they might create for their customers are ignored in favour of dystopian power conspiracies. Similar treatment is reserved for satellites as they become props for rival strategies of capitalistic accumulation by dispossession on Earth (chapter 4)—they survey land and enable communication and missile guidance—and the authors consider warfare in space an inevitable conclusion (p. 64). Of course, occasionally a glimmer of hope shines through this dystopian vision—the recognition that satellites (p. 93) are more or less useless in winning ‘the war on terror’ points to the potentiality of objects to act outside structure–agency—yet this insight is quickly subsumed under a conceptual wave of other underlying ideologies and hegemonies. The later chapters continue with similar dystopian pronouncements on the threat of space militarisation (chapter 3), satellite power (chapter 4), space tourism (chapter 5) and space-industry (chapter 6). Here pro-space narratives of progress, spiritual fulfilment, nationalism and utopia are treated as retrospective justifications that obscure imperialistically exploitative forays into outer space. If it is true that such mythical entities possess such power, then surely we deserve to know where, how and when? How are they enacted, what relations, desires, affects/emotions, imaginations and realities might they assemble, how might we interpret them differently and, crucially, can they transform government policies or technocratic thought? Although the book admits differentiated audience reactions (notably in chapters 1, 4 and 6), too often the utopias and motivations of individuals (and objects) are discounted as false ideologies that are not worthy of further attention. And yet, these unearthly spirits have frequently found themselves implicated in the desire for conflicts, such as ‘the war on terror’, at least as much as the Marxist spectres of capital and imperialism (see p. 100). Ultimately, the difficulty that spans this book is, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, that it explains the social through the social and in so doing conflates through the dialectic of the cosmos two entirely different things: the name of an already cohesive collective (society) and the non-social forces required to assemble that collective. The cosmos hosts a breadth of more-than-human hybrids, formed out of hetegeneous actors, including gods, technologies, animals and scientists; these offer possilbities for a range of agencies and subjectivities to form. Some of these mythical entities have been channelled into particular power-effects, often with unpredictable consequences. The fact that these transformative associations remain largely invisible within historical materialism perhaps explains why the authors end up retreating to a counter-hegemonic human subject; a subject that echoes capitals’ capacity for thought-action defined strictly in terms of underlying structure/intentional agency. Unfortunately, this tactic only ends up doubly obscuring many of the fragile relations through which power-effects and multiple societies, capitalisms and cosmologies are enacted. Hence, the concluding statement—that “any [space] project is going to be ‘human or ‘anthropocentric’’” (p. 190)—appears simultaneously as both an affirmation of the narcissistic capitalistic subject so derided throughout the book, and a death knell for the Deleuzian (or Latourian) cosmic-subject capable of becoming-other.

(“Capitalism 2011: Space exploration takes place in sheds while libraries are closed” – Socialist Party of Portsmouth – Feb 16th – http://socialistpartyp.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/capitalism-2011-space-exploration-takes-place-in-sheds-while-libraries-are-closed/.)

In this age of austerity when capitalist governments are cutting education budgets, closing libraries and making further education ever more unreachable, the likelihood of mankind progressing through the bold scientific feats typified by the achievements by Gagarin and Jahn are null to void. Yuri Gagarin was a son of a peasant family from the Urals. Jahn was the son of a working family from Vogtland. Following the cuts in education and scientific research could a child born in Stratford, Portsmouth or the Bronx even dream of following in their footsteps? This is why the closest thing that capitalism can conjure to a manned mission to mars, the most ambitious voyage of exploration ever conceived by mankind, is to place 6 men in a hamster cage in a Russian warehouse. As socialists, we should respect the achievements of men like Sigmund Jahn and we should not hesitate to proclaim that while capitalism is looking to save itself by crushing the living standards and life opportunities of working people; an alternative society with the values of progress, science and bold endeavour for the betterment of humanity at its heart is not only possible, but could allow us all to reach out into the stars.

(Ryan, , 8-20)

It’s a common retort when the expense of space exploration comes up: Aren’t there bigger problems to solve here on Earth? The implication is that humanity has enough to worry about, and maybe space is too expensive in light of all these issues. This oversimplification ignores the nature of humanity, the drive that has made us the dominant species on Earth. If we want to stay that way, space exploration is vital. Here are five reasons why we belong up there. New Technologies and Research Humans did not evolve to go into space, but we go there anyway. That has led to the development of various technologies that feed back into the economy and improve our lives on Earth. Without space programs, we wouldn’t have GPS, accurate weather prediction, solar cells, or the ultraviolet filters in sunglasses and cameras. There’s also medical research happening in space right now that could cure diseases and prolong human lives, and these experiments can’t be done on Earth. Space exploration could save your life. Asteroids Don’t Care About Us Speaking of saving lives, space exploration could save all our lives. The solar system has calmed down a lot since the early eons, but there are still an unknown number of big asteroids and comets out there that could smack into the planet and really ruin your day. It’s happened several times in the past, each one causing a mass extinction. It’s not a matter of if another large asteroid hits Earth, but when. A robust space program is the only hope we have of deflecting such an object. If we’re not working toward that goal, humanity already has an expiration date. Colonization Is the Ultimate Backup There are currently more than 7 billion humans, which is a lot. However, we’re all crammed together on this one planet. If something happened to Earth, our species could be wiped out. For example, the aforementioned asteroid impact. Colonizing other bodies in the solar system (or building our own orbiting habitats) is a way to create a “backup” of humanity that will survive no matter what happens to Earth. Maybe future humans will be Martians who will never set foot on Earth. The technology to make that possible isn’t going to develop itself. Space Mining Could Save the World As we develop new technologies on Earth, the strain on our natural resources continues to increase. The extraction of valuable minerals has led to a host of problems, including environmental damage and human exploitation, but there’s a wealth of precious materials in space. Startups like Planetary Resources want to mine asteroids instead of Earth, which would mean an effectively unlimited supply of raw materials that are rare on Earth. We Are Explorers There are more practical reasons for space exploration, but one of the principal reasons we must continue is that we’re explorers. That’s why humans number in the billions — from our earliest upright steps, we’ve endeavored to learn more about the world around us, and this allowed us to build civilization. Exploring space is an opportunity not only to discover new worlds and build advanced technologies, but to work together toward a larger goal irrespective of nationality, race, or gender. If we stop exploring, we stop being human.

(Frank, Charles, organizational consultant, Bringing the Overview Effect Down to Earth , 4-15)

The Overview Effect is an experience that has been reported by astronauts and cosmonauts who have traveled into Low Earth Orbit or to the moon. There are many aspects to the Overview Effect, but at its most basic level, it represents a cognitive shift in which one sees the Earth as a planet moving through a star-filled universe. (1) For most, there is also a realization that there are no borders or boundaries on this planet, except those created by human beings. Many of these space travelers returned to Earth with an altered point of view about possibility, collaboration, and the future of our species. Some of them considered the experience to be transcendent and life-changing. The astronauts have received a message from the universe about who we are and who we might become. Now, we need to transmit this message throughout society in a way that makes a difference. The question before us is this: can this shift in awareness be taught within corporations, universities, and government agencies so that they begin to operate from the perspective of a unified whole system? We believe that the answer is yes, and that “Bringing the Overview Effect Down to Earth” offers such a learning opportunity. We are convinced that the message of the Overview Effect is not only for astronauts but for all human beings. It is urgently important to teach this perspective and reap its remarkable benefits, yet there is no need to make enormous changes in organizational structures. Only our mindsets need to change, but that may be a greater challenge than might be expected. We are advancing a radical—even revolutionary— notion: if the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts can be reproduced in other settings, the world will change in subtle yet profound ways as the consequence of millions of brain cells reorganizing themselves into a new worldview. In the years since the first astronauts left the planet, the coupling of the Overview experience and the hard-edged excellent performance required for space travel has infrequently found its way back to Earth in government, universities, and business in practical ways. As astronaut Ed Gibson put it: Our coming back and sharing our experiences is like a drop of dye going into the ocean; it is quickly diffused. (2) Gibson is right, and yet the experiences of only 500 plus people have already had a huge impact on our thinking, bringing a great boost to the environmental movement as only one example. The Phenomenon and the Abstraction The Overview Effect is both a phenomenon and an abstraction. Most of what we can say about it is an abstraction, a description of what someone else experienced. Words do not do it justice, any more than the feeling you have on seeing your firstborn child, or falling in love with your soul mate, or hearing a great piece of music. For 60 years, the astronauts have been describing the feelings evoked by the Overview Effect, visions of the possibilities of a world without boundaries, a lifting up of one’s own spirit, and a sense of connection with others and the planet. However, the phenomenon itself is almost impossible to communicate with enough nuance, detail, color, and emotion to capture the sensation of rushing around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, or standing on the surface of the moon and looking back at your home rising in a star-filled sky. Beautiful pictures and videos are helpful and some have succeeded in creating “aha” moments for viewers on Earth. However, none of these are the phenomenon itself. Regardless of the challenges, when the astronauts return to Earth, they are asked to describe it, and they do their best. To date, one of the most successful efforts at communicating the Effect has been accomplished by a group of young filmmakers from the United Kingdom, Planetary Collective. Their short film, “Overview,” has now been played by 1.7 million people on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/planetarycollective/overview The Problem on the Surface Goes Deep The authors have been facilitating organizational change for more than 50 years. They have found that corporations, universities, and government agencies are divided into parts that are isolated from one another – “silos” —wherein lack of communication, superficial relationships, and individuals and departments going their own way are commonplace. In many cases, knowledge about the workings of the whole system accompanies this isolation and a grand future for the organization is beyond the vision of the people in it. The primary issue for all organizations is identity. For the most part, people hold onto their individual identities as a necessity for their survival. They contrast this individual identity against that of the larger whole. When individuals are successfully integrated into small teams, they then contrast the team against the larger organization or other teams. This tendency leads to “turf wars” and failure to get the most out of everyone. Leaders too often seek local intelligence rather than “Collective Intelligence.” By contrast, the Institute for Co-Intelligence says the following: 3 Collective intelligence is the intelligence of a collective which arises from one or more sources… Intelligence is variously defined as ‘the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge,’ ‘the ability to effectively adapt,’ or simply ‘the ability to solve problems.’ (3) In general, institutional intention to develop collective intelligence is rare because their leaders have not heard of it. They know they have a problem, but they have no concept of a solution. And all too often, bureaucracies turn the natural energy of people away from collective intelligence and toward individual survival. All of these characteristics of organizations reflect the fact that on the surface of our planet, we see a great deal of diversity or chaos, depending on how it is interpreted. The wonder of the Overview Effect is that some 500 plus people have now risen above the surface, and seen that for all the apparent disjointedness of the parts below, it suddenly reveals itself as a beautiful whole. (4) The Overview Effect Points to Co-Intelligence The Overview Effect points directly to the existence of collective intelligence. In one of the authors’ books on this subject, The Overview Effect describes a “planetary overview system” that includes the physical system we call Earth, the human system we call humanity, and the global technological system, technos. (5) An overview framework creates the infrastructure for co-intelligence not only on the planet itself but also in all organizations that are a part of it. The Overview Effect creates the awareness that it can be brought into existence on the Earth, and then to the various parts of the global human system, such as companies, universities, and governments. Our task now is to bring the Overview Effect “down to earth” so that leaders, managers, and participants in a system can experience the overview and masterful performance at the same time. This happens through a designed mix of work relevant experiments, education, and individual practices that bring out collective intelligence and release participants’ holding onto the boundaries of what they already know. In other words, these organizational systems need to see themselves as overview systems. We believe the first step lies in learning four distinctions that are inherent in the astronaut experience of the Overview Effect and practicing them as they apply to the context of one’s own work and life. Distinction One: Knowing vs. Experiencing The astronauts did not come to “know” something new when they saw the Earth as a planet moving through the universe at a high rate of speed. We, and they, already “knew” that, but they experienced it. As the first American in space, Alan Shepard, put it: I had been well briefed on what to expect…But no one could be briefed well enough to be completely prepared for the astonishing view that I got. (6) 4 Most organizational behavior is driven by what people think they know, what they already like or dislike, what they’re attracted to and what they avoid. It’s important for us to be “right” about what we know and it’s threatening to have that called into question. This tendency accounts for the stultifying effects of left/right politics and “sides.” As one of the authors of this paper (White) is fond of pointing out, however, “A planet has no sides.” A lack of “overview thinking” makes fundamental change a threat to identity. A merger becomes an attack on personal survival for leaders and administrators who have identified themselves with one company, and with policies and practices, that already exist. By contrast, space exploration is a grand experiment. It’s in the nature of an experiment to discover what new things might take place. Distinction Two: Earth vs. Space The astronauts experienced the reality that the distinction between Earth and space is a false one. The Earth is in space, has always been in space, and will always be in space. All of us are crewmembers on Spaceship Earth, but we don’t behave in that way because we don’t have the context to do so. And the astronauts not only saw the Earth from space but also in space. (7) In the words of shuttle astronaut Jeff Hoffman, speaking at the world premiere of the film, “Overview” about the view he had from orbit: You do, from that perspective, see the Earth as a planet. You see the sun as a star. You are seeing it from a cosmic perspective. (8) The transformation from an organization with segmented goals, dissociated policies, and limiting relationships among the parts cannot happen without altering the meaning that people give to their experience, moving from the limits of their individual identities as a point of view to a holistic view of themselves and the system as occurs in seeing the Earth from space. Most efforts to change or improve a system involve changing structure or process, which does not change mindset or context. It simply changes the form. The personal meaning people give to their experiences is a function of the context, their point of view, which is emotionally driven. The new perspective made visible by the Overview Effect comes from just such a change in context. When this change is deliberately put into practice in companies and schools in service of high performance, there is a surge of human energy and cooperative results. Distinction Three: Unity vs. Diversity In our own work, we have demonstrated repeatedly that transformation begins with the ability to distinguish content from context. Similarly, from the surface of the planet, it is hard to see the reality of co-intelligence because our senses are overwhelmed by a chaotic swirl of diversity. From orbit or the moon, astronauts see that unity appears as the context of that planetary diversity. The two coexist, but we will see one or the other as primary or secondary, depending on perspective. (9). This ability to 5 clarify content and context brings the Overview Effect down to earth in ways that can transform organizations and the people in them. We all have seen co-intelligence in action in great sports teams, wondrous musical performances, moments of intimacy, friendship, and sharing, or in hot projects that achieve goals everyone is proud to own. These are moments of a cognitive shift, even of transcendence, becoming more than yourself, in a boundary-less condition. Shuttle astronaut Bonnie Dunbar said: Team participation is the key. Being on a mission is like playing team sports or being on an air crew. (10) As International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Ron Garan puts it: If I had an epiphany [in orbit], it is the sobering contradiction between just how unbelievably beautiful our planet is versus the reality of life on the planet for many of her inhabitants, so it caused me to ask how we can use that perspective to inspire people to make a difference and make life for the inhabitants of our planet as beautiful as our Earth looks from space. (11) Garan is himself working on a number of projects to use his insights from space exploration to improve life on Earth. (12) In the course of work and life on the planetary surface, the unity recedes into the background. If we can discover how to communicate the Overview Effect and bring this perspective to individuals’ commitments to high performance, magic will happen. If we can trigger this cognitive shift, we will begin to see non-astronauts working together in the way that astronauts do and that will be the beginning of something really new “under the sun.” Distinction Four: Cognitive Shift vs. Masterful Performance For some astronauts—and for many who have heard about the experience—the essence of the Overview Effect is transcendence; a state of being above and beyond the norm. But without masterful performance back on the surface, transcendence is a fleeting experience and loses its credibility and power. That is why we prefer the term “cognitive shift,” something that is more easily put into practice. Bringing the Overview Effect down to Earth will eventually involve many more people going into space. The impact will be even greater if it can be done with some training and preparation of the “new astronauts.” (13) However, we don't have to wait. Similar shifts, taking place on a large scale, can be achieved through training and coaching leaders in a company, school, or government agency to appreciate the Overview Effect through simulations, dramatic, powerful visuals, listening to astronauts talk about what it is like, practice in focusing on their experience rather than what they already know, clarifying content and context, and appreciating the power of collective intelligence. 6 There can then be a movement from an identity of disparate parts to one in which people see themselves as functioning within a collective intelligence that has the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, effectively adapt, and solve problems. Then, thousands of leaders would see the content of their work from the context of the Overview Effect and Collective Intelligence. For organizations embracing these concepts, it would not only give their school and companies a creative edge but would also advance planetary civilization as a whole. To quote shuttle astronaut Story Musgrave: “Ultimately, nothing matters except performance.” (14)

(Daniel L, PhD, Psych@Harvard, Frank White, Mphil, Bruce W. Shackleton, EdD, Overcoming the Tribes Effect: The Overview Effect as a Means to Promote Conflict Resolution Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pac0000414)

Although humanity has made significant progress in mitigating destructive conflict (Pinker, 2011), it now possesses the means to inflict increasingly devastating effects on individuals and groups. In response, the field of conflict resolution has sought new theoretical models and practical tools to reduce intergroup polarization. A key finding is that conflict is driven not solely by rational interests but also by an emotional matrix of threats and counterthreats that entrench each party in an opposing identity; the conflict becomes us versus them (Rothman, 1997; Shapiro, 2017). This article proposes a novel approach for mitigating such polar-ization through means of an expansive mind-set known as the overview effect (White, 2014). The Problem: The Tribes Effect Despite substantial applied research on ways to resolve social conflict (e.g., Coleman, Deutsch, & Marcus, 2014; Sherif, 1958), additional scholarship is needed on how to address its relational dimensions (Shapiro, 2010). Consider social identity theory (SIT), one of the most widespread frameworks for understanding intergroup conflict (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). The unit of analysis in SIT is a broad category—the group—and disputants are assumed to be “in” or “out” of it. But intergroup conflict tends to involve relationships that are emotionally fluid, and the lines of loyalty are not so categorically clear. In Shapiro’s negotiation trainings with Israeli and Palestinian leadership, for example, he has observed participants building complex relations that are simultaneously close and distant, trusting and distrusting, based on factors such as whether the workshop is in the Middle East or in a remote region of Europe; inclusive or exclusive of participants who have shared their life stories; and run during periods of relative calm or political upheaval. To account for these emotional dynamics, Shapiro has developed a model of conflict resolution called relational identity theory (RIT), which proposes that disputants constantly negotiate the perceived nature, quality, and degree of their relationship (Shapiro, 2010). The model identifies two motives that define this identity: affiliation and autonomy. How close do parties feel to one another, and what is their perceived degree of freedom to make decisions without the other’s imposition? RIT suggests that when individuals’ relational identity feels threatened—as is the case in nearly any conflict—they enter a divisive mind-set called the tribes effect (Shapiro, 2017), which bifurcates their perception of identity into an oversimplified ingroup– outgroup distinction: They see their association with the other side as adversarial, they adopt a self-righteous attitude, and they psychologically insulate from others’ conflict narratives. As a result, they are likely to act in ways that are consistent with this binary division of identity even when a collaborative relationship promises a more optimal solution to the conflict (Shapiro, 2010). Thus, this mind-set can undermine standard approaches to conflict resolution, such as interactive problem solving (Kelman, 2008) and interest-based negotiation (Fisher, Ury, & Patton, 2011), which rely on disputants’ sharing needs, listening to each other, and engaging in cooperative problem solving. Influenced by the tribes effect, disputants may go through the motions of joint problem solving without authentically engaging in it. Strategy: Identity Expansion The key to breaking out of the tribes effect is to shift from a myopic conception of identity to an expansive perspective that includes one’s tribal affiliations but also transcends them (see Haslam, 2004). Parties must redefine their identity in the conflict as not purely tribal but also communal, cultivating a broader affiliation that is connective rather than adversarial, compassionate rather than self-righteous, and open to, rather than insulated from, learning new perspectives (Shapiro, 2017). They still may disagree with each other’s way of life, stance on issues, or spiritual beliefs, but they now view each other within the same conception of humanity. In short, they must expand their relational identity in order to be in closer connection even while in objection to each other’s ideas. Three characteristics of identity expansion promote its utility in conflict resolution. First, unlike the tribes effect, which divides parties into independent adversaries (me vs. you), identity expansion links parties within a single cooperative unit (us). Thus, disputants face the conflict, not each other. However, even tactics that appear to build an expansive relational identity may do so to only a limited extent. Consider William Ury’s advice that disputants imagine themselves “going to the balcony” to gain new perspective on their conflict (Ury, 1993, p. 31). The distance from the “balcony” to the “stage” is enough to help parties reconceive of their conflict as being between “me and you”—but not so far as to make their coexistence as a single unit (“us”) entirely salient. The balcony produces distance but not transcendence. Second, identity expansion is most effective when parties emotionally internalize their unified relational identity (Kegan, 1983). Cooperative behavior and mutual influence are more likely when parties negotiate on the basis not of compliance or identification but of unconscious assimilation of interconnection (Kelman, 1958). Finally, identity expansion is most potent when the process for inducing it is generic—useful for anyone in any context. Having a single approach to dealing with a multitude of conflict situations is economical, optimizing cognitive and emotional resources and ensuring a potentially useful tactic for overcoming the tribal mindset. In the next section, we propose the overview effect as a novel approach to shifting relational identity from a tribal to communal mind-set. This perspective emphasizes the “us” over “me vs. you,” is as much experiential as cognitive, and can be used across a variety of contexts. The Overview Effect: A Potent Means of Promoting a Communal Mind-Set Over the past three decades, White has systematically interviewed more than 40 astronauts about their experiences in outer space and has uncovered invaluable data about their experience when viewing Earth from orbit or the moon. He has discovered that when these space travelers return home, they share a profound shift in their view of human relations, experiencing the world’s troubles as secondary to the Earth as a whole and believing that even significant struggles can be resolved through a more holistic perspective. White (2014) named this mind-set the overview effect. Understanding the overview effect as both an intellectual concept and transcendent experience is central to developing an effective protocol for combatting the tribes effect. The astronauts had not adopted a new understanding of their identities through a thought process. No policymaker or social scientist had manipulated their goals or incentive structures. Rather, they had directly experienced Earth from a new vantage point, which shifted the way they viewed their identity as individuals and as part of the human species. In many cases, these astronauts left the Earth with a strong dose of the tribes effect guiding them, because almost all flew as part of national space programs, but they usually returned home with a transcendent view of identity. Apollo 9 astronaut Russell Schweickart underscored the power of identity expansion through his experience, reporting that [the] whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are—hundreds of people in the Mideast killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of and that you can’t see. (see Schweickart, 1977, p. 9) White’s (2014) research suggests that the overview effect can transform a disputant’s perspective through the power of the experience. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell observed that it is precisely this shift in viewpoint and what it implies for the capability of the human being and for our view of the universe that makes it so powerful. Until the last 20 years, all philosophers, thinkers, scientists, and poets have been Earthbound. They had an Earthbound point of view. Spaceflight is one of the more powerful experiences that humans can have, and the technological event of breaking the bonds of Earth is far more important than the technology that went into it, because of this perspective. (p. 194) Not all astronauts reported experiences matching those of Mitchell’s and Schweickart’s, but all the astronauts whom White interviewed reported a fundamental shift in worldview, and most found that spaceflight had induced a feeling of self-transcendence. Although the overview effect is, on balance, a positive experience, there is a painful aspect to it, because astronauts often feel a contradiction between the beauty of the planet they are seeing from space and their knowledge of the suffering that is taking place on the surface (White, 2014). RIT conveys the same discomfort as the inescapable dialectic between autonomy and affiliation, in which disputants wish for freedom from their counterpart’s influence but realize the necessity of working together to resolve their differences (Shapiro, 2017). But this tension is surmountable. When disputants struggle through conflict, they tend to constrict their conception of identity and resist efforts to expand it, moving toward the tribes effect. The overview effect provides a powerful remedy, fundamentally reorienting the way disputants view conflict and their relation to each other. Creating an Overview Analogue The overview effect offers a powerful possibility for conflict resolution, but it is currently impractical. Sending disputants into orbit is at present difficult and costly. Current prices for private flight are high, only a few passengers are able to fly at once, and conflicting parties locked in the tribes effect are unlikely to have much appetite for the joint flight. Therefore, one must look for “overview analogues”—Earth-based methods of induction into the overview experience (White, 2014, p. 193). There is a wide variety of overview analogues, including the following illustrative examples. First, third parties could organize political mediations in locations that induce the overview experience. The World Economic Forum, for example, hosts its annual summit in the mountains of Davos, creating a sense of distance from the rest of the world. Second, an overview analogue may be induced through what Maslow (1970, p. 19) described as a “peak experience,” such as intense prayer, meditation, or climbing to a mountaintop. In even the most pernicious conflict, a mediator may be able to persuade parties to begin the session with a prayer or wish for the well-being of future generations. Third, with the rapid advance of virtual reality (VR) technology, mediators could consider the nontraditional intervention of meeting separately with each side’s disputants prior to the negotiation and inviting them to use a VR headset to engage in a simulated experience of the overview effect. Fourth, conflict resolution instructors could introduce students to the overview experience through online videos incorporated into the classroom curriculum. Finally, disputants could learn how to regain emotional equilibrium in conflict situations by imagining themselves on the space station looking back at the Earth. The scholarly arena is ripe for additional research on the overview effect as a means for countering the tribal mind-set. For example, researchers can examine similarities and differences between the brain activity of astronauts and nonastronauts in times of conflict. At this point, one can only conjecture that overview analogues are “similar” to the overview effect, because no one has yet conducted rigorous comparison experiments. But researchers can create and test novel overview analogues and evaluate the impact. For example, does showing disputants a 5-min video on the overview effect change conflict behavior? Or does the experience affect behavior only if internalized through VR technology? How might the overview effect be infused into political negotiation processes? Summary This article extends relational identity theory by proposing the overview effect as a means for overcoming the tribes effect. Overview analogues—such as envisioning what Earth looks like via photographs, space movies, and pure imagination—can create unique emotional experiences that have the potential to expand disputants’ relational identity and open new possibilities for conflict resolution. As many astronauts have observed, “We are all in this together.” (1-3)

(Michio, , 3-2)

Your own preferred solution is what you call laser porting. Explain what this is—and how the Human Connectome Project may be laying the foundations. The first big scientific project was the Manhattan Project, which gave us the atomic bomb. The second was the Human Genome Project, which gave us the human genome. The third could be the Connectome Project. Many nations, including the U.S., have said that the brain is the key to understanding mental health, depression, and suicide. All that could perhaps be unraveled if we understand the connectome, which is a map of the entire brain. We expect to have this perhaps by the end of this century. But once we have it, what do we do with it? We could look at mental illness, but we could also put it on a laser beam and shoot it into outer space. In one second, you’d be on the moon; in 20 minutes you’re on Mars; and in years you’re on the nearest star. So laser porting is perhaps the most efficient way to explore the galaxy without booster rockets, radiation dangers, or problems from asteroid impacts. You just laser port yourself!

(Michio, , 3-2)

Another problem with deep-space travel is that it may take hundreds of light-years to reach your destination. You suggest deep freezing astronauts, then thawing them out at the other end. To quote John McEnroe: You can’t be serious, can you? The stars are extremely far away, but one day we hope to use advanced physics to go faster than the speed of light—warp drive. Until we get warp drive, we’re stuck with rockets that are below the speed of light and the planets we have discovered that are Earth-like would take hundreds of years to reach. This means we have to find the secret of extending the human lifespan or learn how to freeze ourselves. Some companies already offer to freeze your body so that when you are thawed out, there’ll be cures for cancer and other diseases. Don’t believe it. These companies, I think, are bogus. However, it’s a possibility that has to be looked at. We’ve discovered about 60 genes that seem to influence the lifespan of human beings and we know that certain genes allow animals to live for centuries. The Greenland shark, for example, lives to be over 400 years of age. So genetics may make it possible to slow down the aging process.

(Michio, , 3-2)

You use the phrase “the fourth wave of science.” Explain what this means and how it could one day make it possible to terraform Mars. We’ve had three waves of scientific innovation. The first wave, the Industrial Revolution, gave us the steam engine, the locomotive, and factories. The second wave was electricity and magnetism, whereby we had TV, internal combustion cars, a beginning of the space program. The third revolution is high tech: computers, lasers, the Internet. Now we have the fourth wave of innovation: artificial intelligence, biotech, and nanotech. That’s going to change the way we view Mars. Many people say Mars is cold and desolate, and there’s nothing to grow there. We can genetically modify plants and algae to thrive in the Martian atmosphere. But who’s going to do the heavy lifting? We all would like to see futuristic cities on Mars, but robots are going to become much more adapted to working in these harsh environments by the end of this century, so we expect to see robotic construction workers building the fantastic domed cities you see in science fiction novels.

(, 10-3)

Human exploration of Mars need not stop before it starts, though. Space agencies and private companies are actively working to mitigate space radiation. An Israeli startup is developing a body vest designed to more fully absorb radiation, for example, and one NASA scientist recently pitched the idea of deploying a satellite that’d serve as an artificial magnetic shield to divert harmful radiation around Mars. And as the researchers noted in their study, “significant differences” exist between mouse-model cancer rates and those actually seen in people. “These differences could limit the applicability of the predictions described in this paper,” they wrote. But the scientists add that this knowledge gap is precisely why future deep-space explorers and their respective agencies should exercise caution. “[S]tudies … are urgently needed prior to long-term space missions outside the protection of the Earth’s geomagnetic sphere,” they said.

(Denise, , 8-9)

But some experts are not so willing to throw in the towel. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and founder of the Mars Society, disagrees with the study’s conclusions. He said the researchers “grossly underestimated” the amount of carbon dioxide on the planet. In a 1993 paper, Zubrin calculated that there is enough carbon dioxide in Martian soil that, if it were released, could create an atmosphere comparable to the air atop Mount Everest. Zubrin acknowledges that efforts to terraform Mars are unlikely to happen anytime soon, but he remains optimistic. “I’m a 21st century engineer grappling with a 22nd century problem,” he said. “There’s no question that it can be done. The question is: how hard is it, and at what point do humans get the industrial capability to do it?” Musk also seems unconvinced by the new research. Several hours after the paper was published, he tweeted, “There’s a massive amount of CO2 on Mars adsorbed into soil that’d be released upon heating. With enough energy via artificial or natural (sun) fusion, you can terraform almost any large, rocky body.” But Jakosky said the study was never meant to sound the death knell for terraforming Mars. “Our results are not the be all and end all,” he said. “It’s the best estimate today of where that gas is on the planet. But this isn’t a dead end. It’s really just a next step in the process.”