Religion

As the era of “NewSpace” takes hold, corporations and private capital are increasingly involved in space science, exploration, and conquest. Billionaires promise infinite wealth and even eternal life on extraterrestrial colonies while trashing the earth they seek to escape. This lecture explains the escalating NewSpace race as a mythological project. Grounded in God’s gift of the Promised Land (Canaan), this mythology goes on to justify Spain’s seizure of the New World, the US seizure of the American West, and now, the corporate-military seizure of the solar system—justifying genocide and ecocide as “necessary means” toward utopian ends. The question, then, is whether there might be a different approach to exploring outer space. Is there a way to visit or even to live on multiple planets without ransacking them? And might we find ways to heal our ravaged Earth in the process?

Biography: Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago, 2023), and numerous other books on cosmology, ecology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of science and religion.