Seeker: Co-Creating Diversified Futures

“If you say, when would we reach that million-person threshold, from the point at which the first ship goes to Mars, it’s probably between 20 to 50 total Mars rendezvous. So it’s [...] between maybe 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars.” On September 27, 2016 Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk presented his formidable vision for Mars colonization during the IAC conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. Against the backdrop of a spinning terraforming Mars globe, he explained in detail how over the next few decades people could be ferried to Mars to bootstrap the construction of the first off-planet city. During his presentation, he positioned this plan as a logical extension of mankind’s history of exploration and colonization. Musk’s SpaceX is one of the relatively new space companies that are developing technology for commercial human spaceflight. Others include Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. In response to the Musk’s Mars colonization plans, scientist and social activist Danielle Lee had written the year before: “The assumption that colonizing Mars is inherently good and that American narratives are universal, or at least the most paramount, is narrow and exclusive.” And back in 2007, Linda Billings, NASA space communicator and space policy analyst, wrote “Examining the history of spaceflight advocacy reveals an ideology of spaceflight that draws deeply on a durable American cultural narrative a national mythology of frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, [and] rugged individualism.” This points to some crucial issues: the current development of mankind’s future in outer space is indeed not a culturally inclusive effort, and justifies itself using a historical white colonialist narrative (Columbus’ discovery of the Americas is often employed). In this vision, alien worlds are to be subjugated and transformed into a mirror image of the conqueror. Terraforming is a perfect example of this: Mars gets physically and biologically transformed into a copy of planet Earth, violently erasing its otherness.