My book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, is now available in North America wherever you get your hardcovers, ebooks, and audiobooks. I encourage you to shop indie, use Bookshop for ebooks, and Libro for audiobooks. There are signed copies of the hardcover at Water Street Books, Loyalty Books, Lost City Books, Gibson’s Books, and Charis Books while supplies last. Loyalty and Charis also have signed paperback copies of my first book, The Disordered Cosmos. The UK/Europe edition debuts May 7. Tour details are here.

A few years ago, my friend Ben McKean wrote a neat book of political philosophy, Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom. I was so thrilled by the read that I interviewed Ben about it for Public Books, and you can read that interview to get a sense of his perspective. A central idea in the text is that we as individuals and communities are oriented toward our world and ideas by the political environment that we are in. Ben’s specific concern is with how we become oriented to neoliberalism, which Ben helpfully defined in our interview as “a way of looking at the world that says efficient markets are the best way to promote human well-being and offers a theory of state legitimacy as a part of that.” Part of Ben’s thesis is that we are taught, from our earliest moments, to be neoliberal actors, to imagine neoliberalism as a neutral way of being, and to even understand ourselves as not just neoliberal subjects but also neoliberal objects — things to be marketed.

The idea of orientation and Ben’s careful discussion about it in the introduction especially has really stayed with me, and it was a guiding thought in The Edge of Space-Time, to the point where I cite it in the book. At any moment, our political and economic leaders are hoping to orient us in some way or another. Maybe it’s toward the idea that immigrants are damaging to the United States but somehow colonialism of Indigenous lands here and in Iceland is good. Which is to say that some migration — by white Europeans — is the good kind and some migration — by everyone else — is the bad kind.

For the last two weeks, we have been going through a major collective orienting process with respect to the American space mission. Despite the fact that the Trump admin has gutted NASA, including aspects of the education and public outreach programs, the propaganda machine has been in full swing for the Artemis II mission. And the science media has been totally disinterested in anything but stenographic regurgitation of what NASA’s communications folks say. I wrote a bit about this last week. So we hear things about the importance of humanity’s journey into space, even though it’s four North Americans, all of them but one white. We don’t hear “Lockheed Martin built most of that spaceship” or “this is a militarization and commercialization mission.” To the extent that the commercialization is acknowledged, it’s framed as a building block toward Star Trek even though in that franchise, we get the utopian spacefaring future because a bunch of socialists decide to make it so (see the film Star Trek: First Contact). We don’t hear any critical interrogation of how the US military played a key role in the Artemis mission.

And that is an orientation process. The US military becomes a valorous organization, worthy of merit — even as it unceremoniously bombs civilians and civilian infrastructure in Iran. “But supporting space exploration is what the military should be doing,” you might say. Should it? What if we had a civilian infrastructure for this instead? What if the military wasn’t getting positive PR in the middle of an unjust war? What if you asked that question instead of uncritically assuming that Artemis is whatever the PR team tells you it is?

When we are oriented toward “Artemis = good,” then we don’t ask what the material plans are. Who will benefit from commercialization and who will not? Who gets to decide what future generations will see when they look at the moon through a telescope? Will there be a democratic process for deciding? Who will decide whose voices matter in that democratic process?

Right now a small number of powerful people from a very small number of countries and corporate entities are deciding for all of us what the moon will look like. They have lots of development plans, and they don’t really care if for example these negatively impact the religious and spiritual freedom of the Navajo Nation that have already had to ask the United States not to desecrate the moon. There are plans to build moon bases (this is actually a major goal of the Artemis program), to mine the moon, to build moon observatories, to make moon-based defense systems.

There is also a new Cold War afoot, this time between the U.S. and China. The U.S. is going to lose because it’s gutting the American scientific infrastructure that would make dominance possible; but the people in charge imagine that if they just orient the remaining scientific apparatus toward overt militarization, they can win, whatever that means.

When Apollo 11 left a plaque on the moon saying “For All Mankind,” they were helping to craft a perspective on space travel that would orient Americans back home: to the notion that Americans represented all mankind, that men represented all humankind, that the United States was the one true leader nation among nations and that capitalism was the best economic system. The PR machine behind the Artemis mission is designed to orient us again toward this narrative, when the reality of the situation is actually quite different.

The Brad Pitt film Ad Astra with the horrifying commercialism on the moon is a fantasy for a lot of the people involved. No lessons are being learned from the challenges we face with sustainability here on earth, as capitalists seek out unlimited growth via the solar system.

And right now, we are all being oriented toward it by propaganda — from NASA, from science journalists who uncritically repeat their PR, from science communicators who refuse to grapple with the way in which this new push toward the moon is a political endeavor. This propaganda insists that actually this a great scientific adventure, driven by curiosity. What a nice thought; if only it were true.

I am currently on the road promoting a book about how glorious the cosmos is, so I’m not here to tell people not to be curious and excited about space. In fact, one of the reasons talking about these issues from a critical perspective matters to me is because I am keenly aware of how important the moon — and the night sky more generally — is to our communal, ancestral heritage. It’s important to consider what it would mean for future generations if we don’t figure out sustainability here on earth. It’s important to consider what it will mean for future generations if we permanently alter the moon so that they are not able to experience our celestial neighbor the way humans have for generations. Our current governance systems orient us in quite problematic ways toward the future and well-being of the moon. That is not a change we should make lightly, undemocratically.

If we are not careful, while we are cheering on genuinely brave astronauts taking their chances in space, some crass shit like an Applebee’s logo on the moon is gonna happen. We can only prevent this by talking now about plans that are already afoot.

It may not be inhabited but the moon is, nonetheless, land that we should honor. Coming at it with an extractive mindset is a sign of our immaturity and lack of readiness to go out into the cosmos and seek out strange new worlds. We must be humble, to understand the cosmos as something greater than ourselves, rather than in service to our stupidest economic system.