Earthlessness

Earthlessness

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Earthlessness

The end of the world seems to be a never-exhausting topic in fictional cultural production, as Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) remind us in their discussions about the ends and beginnings of the world. In their book Is There Any World to Come? (2014), published in English in 2017, the authors explore, among other topics, fictional and real-life scenarios for both a "humanity without a world" and "us" after the world. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro observe that, in Western eschatological fiction, individuals without a world are often imagined either as miserable survivors clinging to a devastated planet or as triumphant beings who have transcended the limits of the Earth itself. One of their insightful arguments, drawn from the perspective of Indigenous Amerindian cosmologies, is that this explorative imagination of a "humanity without a world" is a distinctly modern, Western invention.

This tendency evidences that, particularly in a time of environmental collapse, western culture insists that even the apocalypse must be universal, "when in fact the world has already ended for many others, humans and nonhumans alike" (Neves, 2015). Thus, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro observe that for many Indigenous peoples, this phenomenon is not a future fantasy but a lived reality: they already constitute a "humanity without a world," forcibly displaced and living in a world that no longer resembles or feels like their own. This plausible presence of such narcissistic universalism is possibly the most distinguishing feature of Western culture. In the Anthropocene, however, this same feature is revealed as the determining force of its ecological failure. Moreover, as Viveiros de Castro (2015?) argues further, the Anthropocene represents precisely the point that marks the end of the West as the guardians of the universal.

These arguments also remind us of a recursive irony: the extractivist rationale that enabled modernity's technological sophistication is not only the primary catalyst for climate change but also, from within that same western, modern perspective, the unquestionable tool for ecological salvation. As a consequence, it seems only logical that those same tools—materially, advanced technology; ideologically, human exceptionalism—in the Anthropocene become the fuel propelling fantasies of escape from Earth. This flight from Earth is precisely what Bruno Latour (2017) identifies as the modern delusion, and different posthuman thinkers have also already pointed out: the modern rationality is fundamentally unable to deal with the problems brought about by the Anthropocene because it insists on using the same obsolete tools which have triggered them in the first place.

Arendt, in her essay "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" (1963), asks: "How can anyone doubt that a science enabling man to conquer space and go to the moon has increased his stature?" Yet, in a bitter twist, the very same mixture of collective technological ingenuity, oversimplification, greed, and arrogance that has driven climate change is now being repurposed to fuel fantasies of escaping it—by fleeing to outer space. In this perspective, regarding what technoscience can do and what it ought to do with its immense power, Arendt draws a brief critique of modern technoscience practices, one that is parallel to contemporary posthuman thinkers such as Latour and Isabelle Stengers (.....), in which scientists find themselves alienated from the developments they bring into existence by both an inability to control scientific outcomes and by surrendering their practices to technocapitalist production logic:

The simple fact that physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation, demonstrates that the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself (Arendt, 1963).

This observation is tied to Arendt's broader argument about how technoscientific power has distorted humanity's self-perception to the point of profound cognitive and material disruption. Such quests for mastery over both organicity and space through colonization -which become more pervasive in times of ecological collapse-, for Arendt (1958,) could signify a first irreversible triumph of a phenomenon she calls Earth alienation. For her, Earth alienation is understood as a technologically driven desire to escape the human natural condition as earthbound creatures. While Sputnik and the following Apollo missions have left human subjectivity and sense of scale undeniably shaken, Arendt wonders, however, whether modern science and space exploration elevate or diminish humanity's stature.

Human collective capacity to inhabit, care for, and create a common public reality, according to Arendt, is what brings worldliness into dynamic existence; Earthliness, on the other hand, represents for Arendt the essence of human bodily finitude and our being earthbound: "Earth is the very quintessence of the human condition," and "humans require both earthliness and worldliness," as they are necessary for human flourishing, while "our humanity is threatened by both earth and world alienation" (1958, p. 22). While Earth alienation could threaten severing humans from our direct material entanglement with the planet, with our Earthliness, it is pertinent to note what Danowski and Viveiros de Castro's (2014) have sustained, insofar as they would argue that the results of colonial violence and exploitation already represented the primary historical drivers of Earth alienation.

Turning from Sputnik's launch to today's reality, we can see how the space race today is no longer about reaching another star but rather over the lunar south pole, with plans from countries such as the United States and China aiming at establishing permanent moon bases and even commercializing space. Distinctly from the historical space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, today we see initiatives like N.A.S.A's Artemis program partnered with private aerospace manufacturers such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. Techno-utopian Elon Musk, SpaceX C.E.O and likely the most vocal multiplanetary colonization advocate today, has spoken proudly about his dreams of settling on Mars. Here, we witness another example of how boundaries of public and private control have become thoroughly blurred. We are no longer observing a government mission with commercial suppliers but rather a socio-technocratic system where state objectives, corporate profit, engineering exigencies, and even public consent and sentiments are manufactured together.

And even as I write these lines, a discarded piece of that very machinery—a SpaceX rocket—is on course to collide with the Moon and create a new 20-to-30-meter crater on the lunar surface tonight. While scientists estimate the collision will pose no danger to Earth, it can still be seen as a reminder that our expanded reach has its echoes in both immediate and deep time, and will nevertheless continuously bear the gravitational pull of our own debris.

While the issues that could arise from human emancipation from Earth are many, it remains necessary—especially within the context of the Anthropocene, when the situation radically needs our collective concern—to ask ourselves what it could even mean to be human without Earth, and whether such a condition could ever be possible. Arendt warns that the same reasoning that inspires space colonization, for all its veneration of rationality, nevertheless operates through "categories and ideas of human reason that have their ultimate source in human sense experience." In other words, in a culture that defines humanity through a brain-centric lens—a lens that has nourished reveries of space conquest—Arendt insists that we forget one essential fact: our very brain remains irremediably terrestrial, earthbound, "as any other part of the human body."

Edward O. Wilson (1984), for instance, would add to this conversation by claiming that human life thriving on another planet is simply impossible. Through his concept of biophilia, he argues that humans cannot truly overcome their Earthliness since our biology, psychology, and evolutionary history are thoroughly intertwined with our home planet. Wilson's theory does not directly address this factor, but we could, for the sake of speculation, reflect on a concrete manifestation of this biophilic entanglement, the human microbiome.

We could question what happens to the communication system of the brain–gut axis if our relationship with more-than-human microorganisms were severed or severely reduced in space. Some radical techno-utopians might say that, even though non-human microbes (bacteria, fungi, and archaea) make up about 53% to 57% of the total cells in and on the human body, this complex dynamic system could nevertheless be controlled, perhaps reproduced, or even replaced—making it suitable for sustaining life in underground colonies on Mars or similar environments. For their part, techno-utopians and astrobiologists who argue for space colonization suggest that, in order to balance the microbiome amid the infinite variables that make each of us unique, we need to move from passive health monitoring to active cybernetic management. In other words, rather than allowing human variables to fluctuate organically, a Martian habitat would ask for the human to be reframed, and microbiome systems would be engineered and managed through continuous feedback loops.

While engineering complex microbiomes could sound plausible for some, we should still consider that this degree of control and predictability is something that remains virtually impossible today. This impossibility is not merely technical—it is ontological, echoing Latour's (1998) insistence that humans are never fully in command of the networks they assemble, as action and effects are always distributed across heterogeneous networks of human and more-than-human realms. The human-microbiome relation is a complex actor-network unfolding system where bacteria, fungi, and archaea are active mediators, not passive instruments to be engineered at will.

Consider the broader example of Bryan Johnson, the venture capitalist and biohacker pursuing radical longevity: despite arguably being the most measured individual in modern history—surrounded by a dense actor-network of sensors, clinicians, and data streams—he still could not foresee his auto-immune disease before it arrived. Johnson's failure to achieve biological mastery on Earth, despite unprecedented technological achievements, foreshadows the even greater impossibility of such mastery in the radically hostile environment of Mars. His example of failed mastery over organic processes offers, therefore, an insight into a fundamental weakness that can be applied to the analysis of space techno-utopian dreams: optimization is not the same as achieving absolute biological control.

Among possible health implications that could emerge in a space colony, the psychological toll of living in a hyper-controlled, artificial bubble—isolated from Earth's natural forests, oceans, and chaotic biomes—also presents a massive challenge to human sanity in space. In Wilson's biophilia perspective, our Earth-evolved biology—and the ancient symbiotic relationships that keep us alive—proves that not only humans simply cannot thrive anywhere else, but also that humans' psychology cannot thrive outside Earth (Wilson, 1984, p. 115). Thus, as our entanglement with the organic world and terrestrial systems are constitutive conditions of our human existence, the severance from Earth could produce a radical, fundamental unraveling of not only human health, but of the human subject itself. This brings us back to Arendt, who argued that Earth alienation would represent a brutal disruption of our very human condition, a dissolution of our Earth-bound form. In her defense of our earthly and mortal existence, to be human is to be born, to live a finite life on this earth, and to create meaning and a home in a world that outlasts us—not to deny or escape these fundamental conditions. Losing this entanglement could bring an incredible loss of meaning, which we will keep reflecting on in the following section about the nostalgia for the Earth that this loss could implicate.

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