Did you see it?
Where were you when Mechazilla succeeded? When its hundred-foot mechanical arms grabbed the rocket out of the air?
What it meant to the engineers: project success.
What it meant to us all: one step closer to a humanity in the stars.
Humanity in the stars
Can you see how much room there is to grow up there? The men in charge talk about cities in space, population centers high above the sky. A future with a trillion humans and, “at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” one of them says; “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations.” Ironically, hidden in this vision is, finally, the implicit acknowledgement of the limits to growth on earth, which many of our currently leaders continue to ignore, as we unsustainably consume more than five time’s earth’s production.
Why do you want to leave? we ask.
Leave? We’ve already left.
Do you think that by living in modern London, Manhattan, or Las Vegas, that we are living on Earth? No, we’re living in a machine.
They continue:
Our cities, machines for living, could only benefit from a new design—the permanent, uninterrupted solar power you get in space. Imagine a 3D rotating Manhattan1 with zero-gravity zero-friction transport connecting every part of the city. Even the humblest apartment in Spacehattan has better views than the tallest skyscrapers on Earth.
And don’t they have a point? If your home is just the air-conditioned place where you watch Netflix, how wouldn’t it improved by being in space? Where there are no nuisances like weather or termites? Where each person can expand as they will, and own their own palace? And crucially: where the solar winds will push all their trash and pollution out into the inter-stellar void.
How will you live without Pachamama?
Pacha-who?
The Earth Mother?
Our connection to the Earth Mother was cut over a thousand years ago when the Christian missionaries cut down our trees. When the pagan gods—the ones that spanned the full range of the dualities of human experience—were denied.
We already don’t care about ecosystems. We pollute. We exploit. We consume. We’re the ones who won’t live in balance with the Earth.
What is this Pachamama? Do you think we care about a goddess?
It is 2024 A.D.—Anno Domini, the Year of the Lord. That translates, don’t you know, to the Year of the Masculine Master.
They go on, quoting scripture:
Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Theirs is a dominion theology: the divine endorsement of control, mastery, and subjugation. A worldview that dismisses reciprocity with nature in favor of command over it. From this perspective, Pachamama is irrelevant—because Earth was never meant to be loved; it was meant to be ruled.
Their connection is to the Heavenly Father alone, not to the Earth Mother. They are building ships to fly to the heavens. Isn’t to be with their Father? They yearn for the infinite quiet of space and stars.
Their Dream
This is the Shivan ideal. The Platonic ideal. The achievement of the ancient greek dream of logos over eros.
Boys are obsessed with astronauts. This begs investigation: is this dream tied to boy psychology? Prioritize reason over emotion, and you will finally merge with Father God—with Zeus, whose prononciation changed over time to give us the Latin word Deus — the Christian God thinly veiled.
They dream of merging with the Heavenly Father. Clearly that’s misguided, for those of us who already see God all around us. But why stop them? Spiritual paths are personal; let them walk theirs.
Consider their perspective: if you saw your environment only as a machine to be improved, how frustrating would life on earth be? A sterlie cylinder spinning in space is more appealing. Ironically enough, the rising carbon content caused by their unconscious masculine dream of control is making earth more chaotic. The feminine is rising in the hermaphroditic plane2t due to an out of control masculine human force.
Should we yuck their yum? This is what they want, and imagine if these cities in space become real? Where each person could get a nano-engineered diamond palace, with more room than the most kingly home on earth, and where all pollution drifts on solar winds past the edge of the solar system. Many of them dream of having the biggest house, with the largest view, and the fastest vehicle. Outer space is where their dream will take them.
SPace, the Final Frontier
Manifest Destiny ended when the U.S. hit the Pacific Ocean. It did not defuse; it has been only bottled-up since. The social malaise of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could be viewed as a frontier, colonial culture running out of places to colonize. With space: finally they get it! After a century of waiting, they get their frontier back! Maybe getting those desires met will make them attuned to more ancient desires. Maybe they’ll miss the soil, and the sunset. They might reawaken to the desire of having trillions of living organisms in the soil in the palms of their hands and the palms of their feet. Or maybe not, maybe they’ll try to change themselves to adapt to space3
The Mirror
Let’s imagine that they do go, and the earth becomes free of those that wish to cut themselves off from her. The earth can speak then, in the silence provided by the departure of the loud. What will she say?
Aren’t there already people who can hear her, who are listening to her? She might become audible to the rest of us who have been straining to hear her. Their great migration to the sky might trigger our great migration to simpler ways of being, in tune with her rhythms. Cities in outer orbit strangely leading to a new culture of permaculture and eco-villages on Earth. Let their migration mirror ours. As long as their departure, written into the sky by plumes of burning fuel, doesn’t kill her.
Crossing the Line
Where do we draw the line? If even after achieving their dream of moving their empire to the sky, they try to dominate her more? That’s when we say no. Until then, if they want to leave, let them go.
- Described by Neal Stephenson in SevenEves ↩︎
- The earth as both feminine and masculine, a hermaphroditic planet, is something I heard from KamalaDevi McClure ↩︎
- “cyborg” – short for cybernetic organism – was coined in a 1960 paper that described using technology to adapt the human body for space exploration https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cyborgs-and-space ↩︎
Beyond Mountains, More Mountains 