Five voices on space and society

The vast domain of space is easy to ignore. It’s up there, invisible, while our headlines focus on billionaire rocket launches. But every single one of us has a vested interest. We need to act to protect space from becoming a site of warfare and commercial competition.

How do we develop our relationship with space so that it benefits all of humanity? We asked five diverse voices for their thoughts.

The industry brings riches to us all

By David Whitehouse

Astronomer and science writer

Our modern world would not function without space. It touches almost every aspect of our lives. You are connected to it from the moment you wake up and look at your smartphone – just as you are in the supermarket, the hospital, or using the satnav in your car. We need satellites for weather forecasts, but also to know about transport conditions, climate change and crop health. We need them for marine communications and navigation, as well as for the internet and hospital scanners.

Imagine taking all that away. Our lives would be poorer, our lifetimes shorter, our countries less secure. In tens of thousands of years, if human history is still being written, future historians will regard our world wars, international conflicts and economic systems as footnotes. What they will mark is the first human landing on the Moon.

Space is a trillion-dollar industry, and it’s growing. Ultimately, the money spent on space returns to our economy, spent on salaries and in companies that develop useful technology. Those involved in space often take their expertise, and technology, into non-space areas and fertilise the high-end economy from which we all benefit. President George Bush recognised this on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, praising the Apollo programme as the best return on an investment since Leonardo da Vinci purchased a sketchpad.

For example, studying people who have lived in space benefits us all. When you are weightless your body goes through what is essentially a rapid ageing process. Your bone density and muscles atrophy. In space your microbiome is altered, as well as your eyesight, and immune and endocrine systems. Scientists have developed counter-measures to combat this. Studying these effects on the fit individuals that go into space is giving us valuable insights into the ageing process, as well as degenerative disease.

Medicines can also be produced in weightless conditions that are of a much higher purity than can be achieved on Earth. It’s the same with metal alloys, optical fibres and semiconductors. It will be a long time before we have factories in space, but the information gathered improves manufacturing on our planet.

There are riches to be mined in space, especially the metals and minerals found in asteroids – chunks of rock ranging in size from centimetres to hundreds of miles. In just a small asteroid there is more platinum and rare earth elements than have ever been mined on Earth, and they are much closer to the surface than they are on our planet. Preparatory work is being carried out on mining concepts and technologies. This is a task that will take decades, but it’s possible that the coming century will see the asteroid barons becoming the richest people who have ever lived.

That’s not to say that space is only for the elite. Space inspires, too – especially the young who foster dreams, not only of travelling in space, but also being involved in sending probes to the planets, or in exploring the universe. In the next few years we will walk on the Moon again. Sometime in the next decade a schoolchild will be able to view a science lesson broadcast from the moonbase. They will hear how water-ice is being mined and will become the rocket fuel to drive humans further into outer space. I don’t know who they are, but I do know the first person to walk on Mars is probably in their teens now and has a passion for science.

The return to the Moon and the journey to Mars will focus our minds, but also expand our technologies in ways we cannot predict. The first footprint on the red planet will be a step forward for all.

Let’s protect our skies

By Aparna Venkatesan

Astronomer and co-founder of the Center for Space Environmentalism

Much of the world as our ancestors knew it seems to be ending, as a result of multiple crises impacting living ecosystems and the environments they rely on. With widespread crisis fatigue, it is difficult to draw attention to yet another existential challenge: the steady brightening of our night skies, as a result of human-generated light pollution and an orbital space above us that is increasingly overcrowded with reflective satellites. Recent studies have indicated a year-to-year rise in night-sky brightness of almost 10 per cent since 2011.

This shift in the continuum of the Earth-space environment has widespread implications for the planet and life as we know it. Dark and quiet skies free from damaging levels of human-made light pollution and spectrum interference are essential for professional astronomers and many other scientific disciplines, as well as for some military and commercial initiatives. They are also essential for human and ecological health, including the migratory and circadian rhythms of living ecosystems.

Beyond these tangible ways the planet relies on darkness, the skies and space represent our shared intangible heritage. Earlier this year, my colleagues Dana Zartner (University of San Francisco), John Barentine (Dark Sky Consulting) and I published an article in the journal Environs, sharing new legal strategies to protect the night sky, based on the rights of nature, individual rights and community rights. These include the right to health, freedom to engage in cultural traditions, the rights of Indigenous peoples and freedom of religion, as well as the rights of future generations. We also put forward a strategy to protect dark skies through established avenues for Indigenous rights – such as the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – as part of honouring diverse sky traditions worldwide.

Cultures across the world’s continents and seas rely on the interconnected web of stars and celestial objects for their millenia-old sky traditions, storytelling, timekeeping practices and their very origin story. This includes the wayfinders spanning the many islands and nations of Oceania who travel thousands of miles of ocean using traditional non-instrument navigation of the stars, and wind and ocean currents.

As we expand our presence away from Earth environments, we export not only material payloads but also our legal-policy systems. In a recent article in Nature Astronomy, myself and others called on Nasa to consult with Indigenous communities on how we interact with space environments – including the abandoning of waste on the Moon, and the export of cremated human remains there, which is viewed by many Indigenous nations as an act of cultural desecration. [The ashes of Eugene Shoemaker were interred on the Moon in 1999; a 2024 attempt to inter the ashes of 70 people failed because of a technical fault.]

Whether or not you view the stars as your spiritual ancestors or as the crucible for our very atoms, all humans have a timeless relationship with the skies above us. John Barentine and I recently coined the neologism “Noctalgia” to express “sky grief” for the accelerating loss of the home environment of our shared skies. To our amazement, the term has become the theme of numerous art exhibits worldwide, referenced in dozens of books and podcasts – even appearing in poetry, pop songs and black metal tracks. Many of us experience grief and numbness from numerous global crises, yet this collective peat bog of shared grief has led to renewed gratitude and creativity. Noctalgia is an interdisciplinary global example of this that expresses love of dark skies and humanity’s growing feelings of collective loss of our oldest home.

Physicists are familiar with the seemingly profound contradictions of nature’s laws: that elementary particles live in a rich integrative space of being waves and particles, with only an act of measurement forcing an outcome of either one; or that the physics of the very small (atomic and nuclear laws) determine the physics of the large (how stars shine, the fate of the universe). Paradoxes can apparently coexist while representing the scientific heart of reality; perhaps our relationship with and increasing occupation of the skies and space also contain paradoxes.

Dark skies invite our integrative, most ancient selves – as scientists, storytellers, practitioners of cultural sky traditions, artists and explorers. The experience of the sky is deeply humanising and a sacred aspect of being human. So, perhaps like the electron, we need not choose, but instead develop models of space exploration that honour all ways of knowing our shared, sacred skies: through science and culture, grief and creativity, and respect for the relational and economic potential of the space environment.

The Outer Space Treaty isn’t enough

By AC Grayling

Philosopher and author of Who Owns the Moon: In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space

You may have come across the idea of “the tragedy of the commons”. It refers to the way individual actors (a person, a country) can harm what is supposed to be a shared resource by appropriating far more than a fair portion of it. Traditional English villages offer a classic example: There is an area of land called a “common”, which all villagers have a right to use for recreation, to graze livestock, cut turf, and the like. If one of them overgrazes the land or takes all the turf, it harms not only the interests of others, but also inevitably the common itself, as the pasture becomes depleted. Both implicitly and explicitly, we hold assumptions about what humanity as a whole is entitled to regard as a common inheritance: implicitly, wildlife; explicitly, the open sea and Antarctica, which are covered by international treaties.

For millennia the inaccessibility of the Moon, asteroids and Mars meant that no question was raised as to whether any person or country owns or has exclusive rights to all or part of them. Instead by default they have been regarded, if anyone thought of the matter, as the common possession of humanity as a whole – if indeed “possession” is the right word; at the very least it is accurate to say that humanity has a commonly held interest in them. But that implicit agreement is increasingly under strain, with the rapid expansion into space of public and private interests.

Can the tragedy of the commons be averted in space? What if resources are found that might trigger new versions of gold rushes, new urgencies of occupation and possession? What will happen when the establishment of bases, and the commencement of commercial operations, mining and more detailed on-site exploration, take place? How important will the Moon and Mars become?

The Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967 in an effort to avoid conflict in space, and is one of the silver linings of the Cold War. One of its notable features is its constantly iterated focus on peace. By this of course was meant military peace, the absence of hot war, of actual violent conflict. Proponents and drafters of the treaty doubtless believed that observance of it would be a confidence-building measure. For example, if Soviet astronauts rescued endangered US astronauts in outer space, or vice versa, it would help to reduce tensions and foster more fraternal relations. The treaty encourages cooperation and open access to scientific exploration of space and celestial bodies. This is obviously good. And it prohibits putting military bases on the Moon and Mars, or testing weapon systems there. This is also obviously good – although there is no guarantee that one or more parties will not at some point violate the Treaty’s terms.

However, the Treaty does not take the possibilities of commercial conflict into proper consideration. It tries to make the governments of the private agencies’ home nations responsible for their actions. But this seems rather a vain hope in an age of mighty international corporations which, here on Earth, are practically a law unto themselves.

If anything of economic significance is found in space, it will trigger competition, followed by the risk of conflict. This is the nub of everything we know of the human story, almost to the point of being a law of history. Add the thought that it is more, rather than less, probable that there will be things found in space that profit-seekers and governments on Earth will want to claim – the minerals and water-ice already detected on the Moon support this expectation – and we have the ingredients of the anticipated toxic brew.

The task that faces the world is finding the “something” that will avoid this outcome – that will make treaties and agreements effective, and space and Earth itself thereby secure. Whatever it is, it will involve seeing that the self-interest of humanity as a whole requires that partisan self-interest – the self-interest of sections of humanity in opposition to other sections of humanity – has to end. This will take maturity and wisdom, neither of which has evolved to a sufficient degree so far, though the aspirations of the Outer Space Treaty encourage both.

Theodor Adorno memorably said that humankind has “grown cleverer but not wiser” over time, as demonstrated by its development of the spear into the guided missile, using increased technological cleverness to continue the lunacy of war. His remark identifies the key respect in which humanity’s self-management has to improve – to put it bluntly, by growing up. If we fail, the result will be the tragedy of the commons not just in space, but at home on Earth.

We mustn’t fear the unknown

By Tony Milligan

Philosopher and co-author of The Ethics of Space Exploration

Human attitudes towards space have included an element of fear for a very long time. Back in the 1970s, astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe even argued that viruses were unwelcome space visitors. Illness from above. Components of the (debunked) theory have since made it into Covid-19 scepticism. Meanwhile, one of few known prehistoric myths, from more than 10,000 years ago, concerns the cosmic hunt played out from the Big Dipper across to Orion. It warns that the world may end if the wrong things happen in the heavens.

Many people today believe that this has already happened. They think we are going into space too soon, or in the wrong way, as colonisers. Plus, our space programmes seem to be under the control of billionaire elites: Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, or Jeff Bezos – who caused such a stir recently by sending the singer Katy Perry up in one of his Blue Origin rockets. Back in 2021, the climate activist Greta Thunberg endorsed this brand of critique, helping to produce a satirical advert calling on the 1 per cent to abandon the Earth that they had ruined for a pristine and welcoming Mars.

Shortly after it appeared online, I was asked by an interviewer about the real-life prospects of such a cosmic escape. My first reaction was to think that they had lost the plot. I was wrong. What was emerging was not the belief that the elites were actually planning to leave us all behind. Rather, it was a modern myth, an idea that billionaires love space because they would happily abandon Earth for Mars, if only they could.

This marks an important socio-political shift: the fusion of space scepticism with a populist critique of elites, which has finally propelled the former from the margins. When India achieved its first landing on the Moon in 2023, critics argued that the money would have been better spent on the country’s poor. Sensible questions were asked. But there was also a sense of déjà vu as perennial critics shifted from one complaint to another, seemingly stuck on the idea that space programmes are simply a bad idea.

Anti-elite populism is now routinely used to rationalise a deeper and older human unease. The public have now watched decades of films in which some variant of “The Company” dominates space, while their control of advanced technologies allows them to subvert democracy on Earth – all while risking the lives of space miners off-world in the pursuit of mineral wealth. Often some kind of alien biology is also being weaponised.

The fear of control by The Company has recently been fuelled by real headlines – like President Trump threatening to cancel SpaceX contracts and Musk responding by threatening to cripple Nasa. But this public sound and fury bears little relation to the complex realities unfolding in space. Private companies such as SpaceX may talk up their independence, but in reality they are dependent upon state programmes. And commercially viable asteroid mining will require robotics, rather than a mass proletarian labour force.

But science-fiction-derived ideas still shape public narratives – including the disturbing rise of belief in alien visitation. Around a fifth of UK adults now believe that the Earth has probably been visited. The figures rise to a third in the US, where there is greater proximity to space programmes, up from about a fifth in the 1990s. The recurring theme of recent Congressional inquiries into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (previously “UFOs”) is that secretive government, commercial and scientific elites know about alien sightings, technology and recovered bodies, but have kept the people in the dark.

There are perfectly sensible criticisms that we can make about space programs. The Space Shuttle was over-engineered and unnecessarily dangerous. Launch sites tend to be slapped down in politically sensitive Indigenous areas. And nobody knows how to set up fair systems for infrastructure and eventual resource extraction at the same time as protecting the unique environments of the Moon and Mars. These are real problems, but they are being marginalised by misplaced scepticisms and political fictions.

There may always be fear-driven narratives about space, just as there may always be populist conspiracy theories about the powerful. Humankind is geared, by evolution, to worry about the unknown. But we have also evolved to extend our reach – and, in doing so, improve human lives in countless and often unanticipated ways. Reaching modestly into space is a way of exercising that capacity. It is not a trap set by anyone. And it is not something that we should fear.

Space tech can save lives

By Danielle Wood

Director of the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab

In April, I joined leaders from across Africa in Cairo, Egypt, to celebrate the inauguration of the African Space Agency. The agency is the result of over a decade of policy formulation and continent-wide coordination, convened under the African Union. At the celebratory conference, over 20 representatives from African countries shared updates about their national initiatives in the space sector. I was there as an aerospace engineer and professor at MIT. I design and implement practical projects, in collaboration with leaders from the African space sector, that apply satellite technology to sustainable development.

When people hear the term “space technology”, they tend to picture rocket launches, or maybe missions to the Moon. As a result, some may believe that activity in space is expensive and potentially wasteful.

Other types of space activity with strong social impact tend to get less attention – including communication, positioning and Earth observation (through satellites), microgravity research and human space flight (where researchers on space stations study how the human body, plants and animals change when experiencing freefall while orbiting the Earth), as well as fundamental scientific research and technology transfer (where inventions developed for space exploration, such as water filtration systems, are adapted for use on Earth).

These space activities enable the infrastructure of our society: global communications, energy, transportation, banking, water management, agriculture and disaster response systems. And they are not only used by wealthier countries, but by nations around the world.

There are barriers to the adoption of space technology for countries that have less experience operating and designing it. But as these technologies develop and expand, the space community is becoming increasingly global. In 2010, I visited eight countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to find out why they started national space programmes and how they trained new engineers to design satellites. For many countries, their space programmes are an integral part of their plans to achieve sustainable development, and specifically in more recent years their strategy to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of commitments launched by the United Nations in 2015.

The SDGs aimed to create a global vision for caring for people, advancing prosperity and protecting the planet. I have recently collaborated with the governments of Ghana and Angola on projects that illustrate practical ways that space technology can be used by leaders to support a local vision of sustainability. In both projects, the national space agency worked with the national statistical service, one of the key government offices curating data on SDG progress, to both track and advance elements of the SDGs.

In Angola, I worked with the National Space Programme and the National Institute of Statistics, among other agencies, to design and build a Drought Decision Support System that provides updates every eight days on locations in the country that experience drought. The system uses Nasa satellite data that measures soil moisture, alongside local data about socioeconomic vulnerability. National and local leaders can quickly ask, where is drought happening today? Is it similar to past years? And is it happening in a location that is vulnerable due to economic activity, demographics or other social variables?

In Ghana, I worked on a project with the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute and the Ghana Statistical Service to build a system to make satellite-based maps that focus on conserving biodiversity. The maps answer key questions for Ghana, including how much land is being used for agriculture, mining, urban expansion and forest conservation. They also allow Ghana to produce satellite-based estimates for several of the SDG reports requested by the United Nations, showing how much land is forested and to what extent biodiversity areas are being protected and conserved.

These are just two examples of the many efforts across Africa and beyond that are bringing the benefits of space technology to the everyday work of governments, companies, nonprofits and universities to support sustainable development. Over the past 20 years, I have seen the global space community expand in geographic participation and the focus on societal impact.

Despite this progress, many people are not aware of these developments. It is time that we dispel the myth that space activity must be expensive, wasteful and led by a few countries, and increase awareness of the innovative uses of space technology in every corner of the world.

This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.