Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of faith at Wesleyan College, presents a radical analysis of this actual pathology in her 2022 ebook Astrotopia: The Harmful Faith of the Company Area Race, which got here out in paperback final yr. All of it begins, appropriately sufficient, with the ebook of Genesis, the place God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Over time, this biblical mind worm has provided divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves because the spiritual rocket gasoline propelling people into the following frontier, Rubenstein argues.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2022 (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2024)
“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as a lot a mythological mission as it’s a political, financial, or scientific one,” she writes. “It’s a mythology, actually, that holds all these different efforts collectively, giving them an aura of responsibility, grandeur, and benevolence.”
Rubenstein makes a forceful case that malignant outgrowths of Christian concepts scaffold the desires of house settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded fans—even when these similar folks would possibly by no means describe themselves as spiritual. If Earth is man’s dominion, house is the following logical step. Earth is only a non permanent staging floor for a better future; we’ll discover our deliverance within the heavens.
“Fuck Earth,” Elon Musk stated in 2014. “Who cares about Earth? If we are able to set up a Mars colony, we are able to virtually actually colonize the entire photo voltaic system.”
Jeff Bezos, for one, claims to care about Earth; that’s amongst his greatest arguments for why people ought to transfer past it. If heavy industries and enormous civilian populations forged off into the orbital expanse, our house world might be, in his phrases, “zoned residential and lightweight trade,” permitting it to get well from anthropogenic pressures.
Bezos additionally believes that house settlements are important for the betterment of humanity, partly on the grounds that they’ll uncork our inhabitants progress. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled throughout the photo voltaic system, that would assist a collective inhabitants of a trillion folks. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that will be.”
It does sound cool. But it surely’s a simple layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers sport” strategy would additionally produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes.
And that’s the actual crux of the argument in opposition to pushing laborious torapidly broaden human civilization into house: We are going to nonetheless be people after we get there. We received’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—actually, we could exacerbate them.