I would like to elaborate on my previous contribution to your Perspectives section by including the following extract written by Richard B. Lee, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and included in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience edited by Ben Finney and Eric Jones. (1985; pages 192-3) "Space Colonization: Sybaris or Greenland? Before leaving the matter of human colonization, I would like to report some observations on a recently discovered culture-that of the space scientists who were at the Interstellar Migration Conference. As an anthropologist studying this culture, I find it at least as exotic as the cultures of the !Kung, the Greeks and the Vikings; in some ways more so. Their view of space gives me an interesting insight into their view of the world. They seem to have a tremendous commitment to and faith in science and technology and their ability to solve our problems. I have the feeling that their visions of space are really a projection of the American free enterprise system into the cosmos. For example, something about these wonderful colonizing wave models stuck in my mind. In a way it is the American utopia and manifest destiny all over again: an unlimited frontier, vast resources- like winning the west with no Indians. Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier makes this symbolism explicite. Implicite in the ethos of these space scientists is an interesting view of women contained in the models of rapid population growth. The wave front model, for example, appears to assume a doubling of the population every generation or so. How is the doubling to be achieved? Are they really casting women in the role of reproductive machines? We have focused almost exclusively on the geometric progression of numbers involved in founding colonies and have largely ignored the human implications of such numbers. Some of them argue that no, we are not casting women in that role at all, that everything will be done in a test tube. But that seems to entail an equally grim view of our future. If the future in space is a choice between women as baby-making machines or machines as baby-making machines, you will have to count me out on both scenarios. The upshot of all this is to inject a somber note in an otherwise optimistic proceeding. We need to learn a little humility and at least to become aware of our own unexplained assumptions. These scientists aspire to the stars and yet their vision is profoundly limited by the blinds of one culture at one point in history. History is messy, and the human material we are working with is messy. Let us at least try to be aware of the triumphalism that I hear again and again: "We're going to space, it's our destiny." Such sloganeering strikes a hollow note for those of us who are far from sure that technology will solve all of our problems. There are two big unknowns in this whole business of colonizing space, and we have looked at only one. The first, of course, is the extraterrestrial unknown: What is out there? But the second big unknown is the search for terrestrial intelligence: What is down here? If we are as smart as we claim to be and can go to the stars, why can't we use our considerable intelligence to solve the problems on Earth before we export them to space?" |
© Copyright 1985 Richard B. Lee / © Copyright 1997 Tom Tulien
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