The Awe of Space

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The End.

That was Terry Prachet’s final message, delivered in a series of tweets.

Elon Musk’s response to the night sky is the desire to create slave colonies on Mars, where people can pay off their debts and where a bunch of people will probably die. Jeff Bezos plans to create sacrifice zones where he can launch Earth’s waste at will, and charge us for the pleasure. We can easily imagine that these are the opening scenarios for dystopian sci-fi novels that describe the end of humanity. I suppose I am grateful that all Richard Branson wants to do is Disney-fy space, so he can rent lunar hotel rooms to billionaire clients. He speaks about giving people access to space in the same way neoliberal politicians speak about giving people access to healthcare.

The aspirations of these mediocre men are not only dangerous to the rest of us, but profoundly banal. I suspect those two characteristics have a lot to do with one another as empathy requires a certain amount of imagination. As tainted with nationalism that the 20th century space race was, there was a sense that humanity had achieved something. In stark contrast, Musk, Bezos, and Branson only advance their own names and brands. What’s worse however, is the role the nation states have played in constructing the billionaire class to the detriment of their own citizens. Humanity hasn’t achieved anything here, and what these people did manage to carry out (with the help of huge government subsidies, despite this performance of rugged individualism) pales in comparison to what NASA and the Soviet Union were able to achieve 60 years ago, with a fraction of the computational power and knowledge.

As the media broadcasts these billionaire launches on all channels, while simultaneously singing their praises, I had to interrogate why I found those images so viscerally distasteful. I experienced just how I position the profane in relation to the sacred. Space—the night sky—exists as a sacred place to me. It is both external and internal to me.

I ascribe space a certain significance with regard to death. It’s as if I’ve buried loved ones there. I can’t touch these stars but can they now? And somehow I understand that everyone is always ever together, because I don’t feel the distance that their deaths would imply. They are in me, and we are all ever in space. I am not the only person to experience the night sky in this way. We’ve all looked up and felt that sense of awe.

We are capable of imagining better futures

Here are some small drawings I made by pushing graphite powder around in search of an image. I’m trying to capture something of what I admire in sci-fi in general, but of the works of Frank Herbert, Ridley Scott, Ursula Le Guin, and Ben Marcus specifically. I masked off their edges, and distressed areas of the page. I did this to give the impression that they might be photographs or daguerrotypes brought back from distant, unreachable, times and places–an activity that is perhaps indistinguishable from excavating images out of the imagination.