I predict that planners of new missions of the Moon and Mars will completely ignore the anti-colonial ethical analysis of this paper.
[Submitted on 15 Oct 2020]
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.
2 comments:
I'll fill in (for the readers) why this eight-page paper will be ignored: first, because the article is terrible. It makes a lot of a priori assumptions about "eugenics", some of them slander. Also much of it is irrelevant, given that the colonial experience will hardly deliver violence to indigenous peoples who do not exist on Mars or our Moon.
Second, because the paper will make absolutely no impact upon peoples not afflicted with Western pathological altruism. What are these guys going to do to Emperor Xi - call him a racist? Xi knows he's a racist. Xi is happy to do racism against his own minorities. Xi will laugh in our faces.
The exploration and colonisation of our planets will happen, and then Xi will turn around and colonise the rest of us.
Rather than be totally negative here I offer a buzzword-free critique / warning about the ethics of space exploration: Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies. Here is Bleddyn Bowen's review. Bowen wrote War In Space so has done the relevant research.
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