Why Space?
I’m more of an outer-space-may-as-well-not-exist kind of person. The clockwork heavens and the incredible reaches of the cosmos, the supernovas, the quasars, the moons of ice are all pretty to look at and rather mindboggling to think about, but what are they good for? The scale of our own small galaxy renders actually crossing these distances absurd. Sure astronauts orbit the earth all the time, and we put “whitey on the moon” (as Gil Scott-Heron liked to say), but such highly limited endeavors are like merely wading the tidal pools of the ocean. Any further distance and the difficulties and mortality of human space travel compound exponentially. Given that the biosphere is collapsing around our ears, it seems obvious—to this reader anyhow—that the desire for space-exploration is propelled by a certain kind of nihilism—not so different than the Christian dream of immortal life—and that reveals, in the heart of our society, a steady and unremitting hatred for the here and now. Why go to mars when we can turn earth into the surface of mars in a few short years? (converted into pure speculative finance, no doubt). The transcendent nihilism of the sky-cult—supreme mode of western man for the last 400 years (and all underwritten by capital)—is exactly what got us into our current ecological jackpot and so it is no surprise that these same assholes maintain the age-old dream of getting off the planet. Transcendence, that wonderful stuff, is not a place, but rather a faculty of mind, a fantasy inherent to language and that can be projected into the furthest reaches of cosmos, whether the fantasy be our insignificance, the “final frontier,” or Father God. So gods inhabit language, like mice inhabit my tenement building. How amusing (and how typical) that, of all the pantheon of Greece and Egypt, of Palestine, the men of antiquity chose a jealous old man to be their God. And no wonder science-fiction is always so familiar—every alien part insect or cephalopod; even our imagination can’t get off the planet. But no science-fiction, nor any theology, is more strange—nor more uncanny—than what is already here, in us and among us. All the chintzy modes of transcendence (all that $$$) are pale illusions before the impending reckoning of our immanence. As McKenna liked to say: we don’t need to seek the truth, we need to face the truth.
Space Trash
