I love the idea of NASA.
I grew up a space junkie. I remember my dad taking me to see Shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral. I remember him taking me to see Apollo 13 in theaters, still one of my favorite movies to this day. I love The Right Stuff, both the movie and the book.
I live right up against Marshall Space Flight Center and I’ve taken my kids to see the rocket center many times.
I work for a NASA subcontractor and I believe in its mission.
Had you asked me years ago, I would have told you that I love NASA itself. Unfortunately, O’Sullivan’s Law is killing it from the inside like a metastatic cancer.
As a reminder, John O’Sullivan is a conservative British journalist and a speechwriter for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
He coined a political law, known as O’Sullivan’s First Law, which states:
“All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
That has happened to NASA.
NASA apparently has an Equity Diversity and Inclusion Working Group.
You know that no good idea can come out of a group with a title like that.
This is their no-good idea.
Ethical Exploration And The Role Of Planetary Protection In Disrupting Colonial Practices
We recommend that the planetary science and space exploration community engage in a robust reevaluation concerning the ethics of how future crewed and uncrewed missions to the Moon and Mars will interact with those planetary environments. This should occur through a process of community input, with emphasis on how such missions can resist colonial structures. Such discussions must be rooted in the historical context of the violent colonialism in the Americas and across the globe that has accompanied exploration of Earth. The structures created by settler colonialism are very much alive today, impact the scientific community, and are currently replicated in the space exploration communities’ plans for human exploration and in-situ resource utilization. These discussions must lead to enforceable planetary protection policies that create a framework for ethical exploration of other worlds. Current policy does not adequately address questions related to in-situ resource utilization and environmental preservation and is without enforcement mechanisms. Further, interactions with potential extraterrestrial life have scientific and moral stakes. Decisions on these topics will be made in the coming decade as the Artemis program enables frequent missions to the Moon and crewed missions to Mars. Those first choices will have irreversible consequences for the future of human space exploration and must be extremely well considered, with input from those beyond the scientific community, including expertise from the humanities and members of the general public. Without planetary protection policy that actively resists colonial practices, they will be replicated in our interactions and exploration of other planetary bodies. The time is now to engage in these difficult conversations and disrupt colonial practices within our field so that they are not carried to other worlds.
This is what happens when “colonial” becomes a Woke jargon buzzword.
We are looking to establish a colony on the Moon and a colony on Mars. That means, in the strictest terms, we want to build habitable structures on them that allow for permanent and somewhat self-sufficient human life to be sustained there.
This working group has stretched the Woke definition of “colonialism” over that.
This article in Astrophysics is part of a document published by the working group.
All of humanity is a stakeholder in how we, the planetary science and astrobiology community, engage with other worlds. Violent colonial practices and structures–genocide, land appropriation, resource extraction, environmental devastation, and more–have governed exploration of Earth, and if not actively dismantled, will define the methodologies and mindset we carry forward into space exploration. With sample return missions from Mars underway, resource maps of the Moon being produced, and private industry progressing toward human exploration of Mars, the timeline is urgent to develop a modern, inclusive, robust, and enforceable policy framework to govern humanity’s engagement with other worlds
Yup, we say “we want to build a habitat and Mars” and they go straight to thinking about genocide. These people are broken.
Colonial expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade have been foundational to our present world. What we call globalization “is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and the colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power.” The result is a world where political and economic systems, namely capitalism, prioritize profit over human welfare, producing an environmental crisis 5 and vast inequalities further compounded by climate change. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “[c]hoices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself–the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over-heated.” Coloniality, the enduring system of domination born from colonialism that we are left with today, is the product of those choices. Understanding what those choices were, and how we are on the precipice of making them again, is essential to ensuring an ethical, anticolonial framework for exploring space. Several of these mechanisms of colonial violence are of particular relevance, as they connect to current practices in space exploration, planetary science, and astrobiology today.
This is Woke, historically ignorant drivel. Did NASA hire a bunch of grievance studies majors from Oberlin and Dartmouth?
Again, we are talking about having astronauts establish permanent living structures on Mars and they go straight to the Transatlantic slave trade.
Is there a transorbital Martial slave trade that I am unaware of?
Biological Contamination and Ecological Devastation: The spread of deadly pathogens was used as a form of biological warfare, playing a part in genocide against Indigenous peoples, both intentionally and unwittingly. Colonial expansion caused the population in the Americas to decrease by percent, an enormous loss of life that the dispersal of these pathogens contributed to, alongside concerted warfare and the appropriation of land. All of these practices, including biological contamination, had an impact on the ecosystems Indigenous peoples were a part of–and the destruction of those environments provided an additional way to attack the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonial dominance can be described “as violence that disrupts human relationships with the environment,” a framework that allows us to clearly see how coloniality continues to enact violence on Indigenous lives as well as many other communities through pollution and other environmentally-related effects. Biological contamination is nota politically neutral or accidental phenomenon and will always have an effect in the environment in which it is taking place amongst all actors involved – both human and nonhuman. This is true for both forward and backward contamination in missions to other planetary bodies.
Despite what my generation learned in school, the introduction of smallpox to North America was not purposefully or deliberate. Giving smallpox infected blankets to the Indians occurred centuries after the mass death had occurred, and it was largely ineffective because the native American population had established immunity by that point the way Europeans had, with those who were not immune dying off.
It’s interesting that the Woke always talk about the incidental spread of disease in North America by smallpox as a genocide, but do not use that same language when describing the spread of bubonic plague out of Asia into Europe, which decimated 60% of the European population, or even the spread of Coronavirus into the West today.
While forward and backward microbe transmission is something NASA has considered for years, and we do sterilize all outgoing probes for a reason, applying this Woke, historically ignorant history of smallpox to that concern deligitmizes it.
When Europeans first started coming to the Americas in the early 16th Century, it was only 150 years since the Black Death. People still believed in Miasma as the cause of the spread of disease.
The germ theory of disease didn’t begin until the mid-1800s. Ignaz Semmelweis first came to the theory of “cadaverous particles” as disease transmission in 1847, and he was laughed out of medicine for that. When he suggested that doctors wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime (bleach) before assisting in birth, he was chastised by a fellow doctor with the statement “a gentleman’s hands are always clean.”
When it came to smallpox, in Europe, the mortality rate was about 10%. There was no predicting how a virus like smallpox, which had been interacting with Europeans since the domestication of livestock thousands of years ago, would react to humans who have never been exposed to viruses like that before.
We know better today. This is why contemporary criticisms of the spread of European disease in North America during early exploration is intellectually dishonest, historically ignorant, and immoral as trying to apply Woke critical race theory to Shakespear.
Making the argument “we can’t go to Mars because when Columbus came to America he spread smallpox” ignores everything we learned about disease for the last 500 years and all the effort that NASA puts into trying to prevent that from happening.
The commodification of land through extractive practices has led to significant disruption of the ecosystems that Indigenous
communities rely upon for their livelihoods. Examples of extractive exploitation and colonialism abound; while many people in the US think only of the gold rush, mining of rare minerals in Central and South America and Africa incentivize and continue to accelerate colonial expansion even today
The field of planetary science and space exploration in the present day is not divorced from these practices, and both existing and planned space infrastructure continue to encroach upon Indigenous land. This is often justified by falsely framing opposition to such encroachments as
“obstructions” to “the future.” 21 For example, construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea has begun despite opposition from many Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians), who note that previous astronomy development atop Mauna Kea has already had substantial adverse effects.
The field of planetary science and space exploration in the present day is not divorced from these practices, and both existing and planned space infrastructure continue to encroach upon Indigenous land.
Most immediately, lunar resource maps seek to enable public and private sector mining actors to plan for extraction of water ice and other resources. Similar proposals exist for asteroid mining. This is presented under a guise of “sustainability,” but in actuality replicates the practices of extractive capitalism that have contributed to the environmental degradation of Earth. In the long-term, this exploitative approach to extraterrestrial exploration will be similarly detrimental, and recommendations provided in the white paper “Asteroid Resource Utilization: Ethical Concerns and Progress” address these issues in more depth.
This is eco-socialist bullshit.
The solar system is full of dead rocks made up of valuable resources.
When we mine an asteroid that was not known of until modern astronomy telescopes made it possible is not an encroachment on native land and resources.
Imim Earthers na sasa minerals Beltalowda
If Moon mining is to bean extensive enterprise as is planned, those changes will be visible from Earth, fundamentally changing one of the few communal human experiences of gazing at the Moon. In addition, the Moon and other planetary bodies are sacred to some cultures. Is it possible for those beliefs to be respected if we engage in resource utilization on those worlds? Lunar exploration must be prepared to adjust its practices and plans if the answer is no. An alternative approach to how we interact with these environments can be found in Indigenous knowledge, which is inherently interdisciplinary, multigenerational, and expressed through sustainable practices. “Space and place” is an important aspect of Indigenous knowledge, where learning takes place in harmony with a particular place and time.
Indigenous knowledge, aka mysticism. This is that same Woke noble savage bullshit that I’ve written about before where Progressives want to shut down industrial agriculture that feeds the world and let “indigenous people” teach us their methods of agriculture, even though those cultures were at best subsistence farmers.
Also, it would take a lot of mining to change the surface of the moon enough to be able to see it from earth with the naked eye.
Lastly, most lunar mining is expected to occur on the far side (dark side) of the moon. That is because the moon is tidally locked in orbit and the part of the moon that gets blasted with the most solar winds is the side facing away from us. So most lunar mining would occur where it can’t be seen from earth.
You might expect people at NASA to know that but they don’t.
Many people consider it inevitable that resource extraction will be a fundamental part of space exploration, if not the reason for doing it at all. However, it is worth questioning whether our current mode of extractive capitalism is something we should take with us when interacting with
other worlds.
Space Marxism.
That’s all this shit is, space Marxism. These are people who have used Woke Progressivism and critical theory to attack the fundamental mission of NASA. To visit and eventually colonize other celestial bodies in our solar system.
This Woke bullshit spreads like cancer and kills innovation and though.
It must be rooted out of NASA before it kills the agency.
I don’t want to look at my grandchildren on the 10th anniversary of the moon landing and say:
“We used to be a nation that did great things like land on the moon, but now that were Woke, we sit here on earth and get lectured about how wanting to go to the stars is white supremacism.”
We need to take everyone who participated in that memo, fly them up to the ISS, then eject them out of an airlock wearing nothing but a buckskin spacesuit manufactured using Indigenous knowledge.
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