Return to the Moon: Space Travel and Posthumanism in the 20th and 21st Centuries

• In Event: Searching for the Human: Technology, Democracy, and the Politics of Modernity

Abstract

Only fifty-five years after men first walked on the moon, nations states and corporations are racing to return. While one can frame this envisioned return to the moon as the inevitable march of scientific progress, it is worth asking: why return to the moon now? What is motivating this new moon rush, which at first blush seems to promise little financial or even scientific gains? The answer that many proponents give is related to a sincere belief in the possibility of post-humanism. That is, supporters of space exploration and colonization—beginning with travelling to and inhabiting the moon—argue that this is a necessary and beneficial step in the grand story of human evolution. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and scientists like Stephen Hawking and astrobiologist Charles S. Cockell argue that making humanity an “interplanetary species” is humanity’s “only hope for long-term survival” (Hawking 2013, 10). Unless humanity is to succumb to the fate of 99% of other Earth-born species, humans must evolve into creatures untethered from earth.

This connection between space travel and post-humanism is not itself new or surprising, but the lack of serious critical perspectives on this attitude in political theory is. Except for Alina Utrata’s (2023) recent article, few political theorists have considered the implications of this new space race on human life. This lacuna is surprising given the canonical status ascribed to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) in political theory, and the importance Arendt ascribes to the space race in her era. As noted in the oft-quoted prologue, the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik was the event Arendt deemed “second in importance to no other, not even the splitting of the atom,” precisely because it seemed to herald a fundamental change in human life—that we would not forever be earth-bound creatures (Arendt 1958, 1).

Arendt does not speak explicitly about human nature or the kind of changes in nature implied by post-humanism in The Human Condition. She begins with the understanding that human beings are conditioned beings, born into an already existing world built by other human beings. The fact of being conditioned beings is similarly what most interests her in her 1963 essay “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man.” Despite seeking to use modern science to understand the natural world as it truly is, the figure that modern science produces, as Arendt observes, is that of the astronaut locked in a human-made capsule, their experience of the natural world totally mediated by artificial tools and technology. Ultimately, Arendt paints skeptical picture of the kind of transcendence of human nature imagined by post-humanism, suggesting instead even the conquest of space will result in human beings simply becoming more deeply—and constrainingly—conditioned by human-made structures.

Following Arendt’s call to think what we are doing, this essay revisits her concerns about the space race in the 1960s in light of renewed interest in returning to the moon. I consider what contemporary fascination with voyages to the moon demonstrates about the possibility and limits of seeking to overcome the human condition. These questions ought to resonate generally outside the academy, as they are some of the most pressing political questions of our era. Contemplating the moon and the stars has, since time immemorial, served to remind humanity of how small we are in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Likewise, I intend for this project in some way to be intellectually humbling, for the writer and reader.

Author

• Abbie LeBlanc, Harvard University