by Maurizio Ferraris *
The new economy billionaires are interested in offering other billionaires an escape route to the moon, which is no longer the land of lovers or philosophers, but a paradoxical safe haven to escape to after environmental destruction. But is it really like that?
Below we publish the Italian version of the essay that was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Monday, January 9, 2023
I watched the moon landing on TV in the bar of a ship named after the state it belonged to that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. I wanted to go to the sea with my parents in Croatia. For me, thirteen years old and brought up in the myth of space exploration and the moon as the first stage of the new frontier, it was the most normal thing in the world, that is, if I had known anything about philosophy, the result of a historical development that inevitably led there or rather led up there. This may seem absurd today, and it seems so to me, but back then every girl and boy my age grew up imagining that there was going to be something extraordinarily new, the conquest of the universe, in which the first step was that, what I watched on TV.
A few years earlier, when we were children, we had been told about space adventures first by the dog Laika, then by Gagarin, and they were both Russians. As adolescents we had witnessed the American advance, which found fulfillment in the very conquest I was watching on television in a non-aligned country. Besides so many things, I did not know that Martin Heidegger had arrived in Greece three years earlier with his wife on the same ship to give substance to very different and older spirits, Greece as the origin of thought. This did not prevent him, together with many intellectuals of his generation, from seeing something unprecedented, epochal and profane in the triumph of technology guaranteed by the conquest of space.
In fact, from a philosophical point of view, it was more of a Copernican revolution. Traditionally, philosophers had observed the moon from Earth, perhaps at the cost of falling down a well while observing. Now everything changed and it was the earth as seen from the moon. Also three years before the moon landing, Heidegger commented on the photos of the earth from the moon in the famous Spiegel interview with the words: “We don’t need the atomic bomb; human beings are already being uprooted.” Previously, the mere fact that a human being was in orbit had not shaken Hannah Arendt, who began The Human Condition with these words: “In 1957, a man-made object was released into the universe shot and orbited for a few weeks towards the earth according to the same gravitational laws that govern the motion of the celestial bodies – the sun, the moon and the stars». And he added: “The immediate reaction that was spontaneously expressed was one of relief at the ‘first step in the liberation of the people from the earthly prison.’ And this strange statement, far from being the accidental invention of an American reporter, involuntarily recalled the extraordinary inscription carved on the tombstone of a great Russian scientist more than twenty years earlier: “Humanity will not end forever they remain bound to the earth'”.
Despite these premises, the moon returned a few years later, only to attract the tides, and Star Wars became both a film and the argument with which Ronald Reagan successfully attempted to convince Mikhail Gorbachev of the need for surrender. Also this era ended, after 1989 many other things unrelated to the moon were imposed. At most a sociologist who states that history did not end with the moon landing but with the fall of the Berlin Wall; and then, since the story wasn’t over yet, new events are added that aren’t outstanding at all: a plane crashes into a skyscraper, a terrorist blows himself up in a supermarket.
Stiller began the new hope of the internet and the new fear of the ecological crisis. It is interesting to note a certain form of blindness that forms an indispensable part of the story. Apocalypse’s helicopters have now thought of everything except that the napalm thrown by the bombers to make the Valkyries’ ride more effective was environmental devastation. Just to be clear, not even the Ho Chi Minh Army soldiers thought so. Nobody thought, and certainly the least thought of those who bombed Dresden or Hiroshima, that this act would have ecological consequences.
Everything is different now. Billionaires in the internet-enabled new economy (which is now not only hope but also fear) have an interest in offering other billionaires an escape route to the moon, which is no longer the land of lovers or philosophers, but a paradoxical haven after the destruction of the environment of the earth. As tourism has its rights, it is not a good idea if this proposal is to do more than offer a funky holiday. If you aspire to the exclusivity of lunar travel, you quickly have to understand that they meet the same fate as tropical travel: a package that is being offered to more and more people and as such, i.e. as a status symbol, appears less and less prestigious and more and more dangerous, the Flights increasingly consist of a slalom between intergalactic debris. The argument that these flights would represent a further step “to free the people from the earthly prison” is a different matter.
Yes, but why flee? Assuming that tax evasion is possible in climates much more temperate than the moon, one wonders what could lead a reasonable person concerned about rising temperatures at home to attempt environmental evasion and to leave on purpose (and pay even higher sums). than it requires a more superstitious idea of mummification, namely cryopreservation) to a desolate land where it is not even possible to move around without an oxygen tank and where temperatures oscillate between sidereal cold and ultratropical heat. If the phrase “from the frying pan to the fire” ever made sense, it is more so to the imagination of those hoping to find the moon as an alternative to Earth’s environmental crisis.
And since being worse off on the moon doesn’t seem like an acceptable remedy compared to having a bad time on earth, one wonders what the rationale for such an irrational decision might be. The first is quite obvious, and it is the instinct to flee, the hope that a providential lifeboat can save oneself from the last days of mankind. But let’s not forget that those final days are far ahead, while the environment of the lifeboat would not be transit to a welcoming island, but deportation to a place infinitely worse than the one we left behind.
The second reason is perhaps less obvious, but I think it has a high probability. If there’s something truly exclusive that never puts us in a position to argue with noisy and maybe even needy neighbors, it’s the moon. It is possible that Mars is also aiming for a similar status, and certainly the ninth planet we are now talking about, very distant from Pluto, seems a preferred address for Mayfair. This could transform the main appeal of a sheltered residence, a sort of Superman metropolis, to something more or less exclusive, at a time when garden fallout bunkers seem to have gone out of fashion and no longer constitute an element of social distinction Planets, notwithstanding the possibility of absolute isolation on a proprietary asteroid.
Safe from viruses, neighbors and, if not vaxes, even vaccines, lunar billionaires will spend happier years watching the earth implode under the weight of global warming. And when they realize that the place they fled to is infinitely worse than the one they left, and that no matter how severe global warming continues, it will take hundreds of thousands of years for Earth to become so inhospitable For lunar-like conditions, let alone other places even more remote, the only consolation is that time passes more slowly in orbit and a few more days of desperately dull life are assured.
* Department of Philosophy and Education, University of Turin. New science director
January 9, 2023 (change January 9, 2023 | 18:27)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED