The Consolations of Outer Space
The human excellence on display in our return to the moon and the deep humanism embedded in Project Hail Mary are profoundly moving in a moment marked by some of humanity’s most malign capacities.
A quick internet query or flip through the dictionary will tell you that the difference between a missile and a rocket is that one is guided and the other not.
Otherwise, they are really just the same thing. Everyone is familiar with the story of Werner von Braun, the Nazi scientist who designed the German war machine’s V2 rocket (confusingly also described as the world’s first ballistic missile), and how he is also the aerospace engineer who oversaw the program that launched America’s first satellites and the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon more than a half century ago.
There exist critics of space exploration who draw attention to this identity of the rockets of science and missiles of war, who do not tire of reminding us of the dark, militarist origin story of the American space program. They argue that this link never truly went away, noting that the companies who built rockets for the Apollo missions also manufactured weapons to bomb Vietnam. You cannot have rockets without missiles, they say. The Guardian tells us that the Artemis program, returning humanity to the moon after more than five decades away, is a “dangerous distraction” from the Earth’s myriad environmental crises, and that most of the discoveries from space-faring “seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other.” Plus, “there is nothing to see” anyway, the paper’s columnist-curmudgeon Zoe Williams concludes. “Let’s stop going to space.”
Beyond the straightforward rebuttal that space science is earth science; beyond the fact that the development of our understanding of climate change depended in no small part upon our scientific investigations of Venus; beyond how we are able to track forest loss and glacier melt and the scale of so many other environmental challenges thanks largely to the decades-old Landsat satellite program, this technological determinism gets things thoroughly backwards. The science and engineering of rockets do not necessarily produce missiles. Instead, it is the pathologies of our political economy that necessarily produces far more spending on one rather than the other. Space doesn’t come cheap, but still, recent budget proposals for the 2026 US military budget hit $1.5 trillion; meanwhile the Artemis II launch cost an estimated $4 billion, or a quarter of one percent of the former.
Imagine what we could do as a species, not just here on Earth, but in space as well, with those military trillions spent differently, if only we could liberate ourselves from these pathologies!
Since its launch on March 27th and return to Earth on April 10th, millions of people around the world found themselves profoundly moved by the Artemis II mission, not merely entertained. Atop this, there has been an uncanny synchronicity between this humanist “moon joy” people have described as having experienced and the rich, warm, humanist feeling audiences experienced watching the Hollywood space drama Project Hail Mary. These two mass events seem to have resonated deeply with our being.
But why? What happened here that so affected so many? I think perhaps, contra Williams’s assertion, there has been in fact everything to see.
What We Are For
With the Artemis crew, we saw humans operating at the very limit of our capability—of courage, endurance, intellect, athleticism, curiosity, cooperation, and even love. A crew of staggering competence and accomplishment, trained for years, held up by some one thousand support staff, from engineers and mission controllers to janitors, drivers and secretaries.
Mission specialist, electrical engineer and astrophysicist Christina Koch, for example, has been a firefighter and glacier search-and-rescue operator in Antarctica, a field researcher in northern Alaska and Greenland, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric station chief on American Samoa, and spent 328 days without interruption on the International Space Station—the longest single spaceflight by a woman. A rock climber and triathlete on her days off, Koch also managed to find time to learn Russian just for her ISS mission.
So many of us here on Earth were deeply inspired at such practical achievement because we recognized instinctively, viscerally, that this is the fullest expression of what humans can be. Put another way, we were watching human nature thoroughly realized. This is what we are for.
This mission back to the moon, mounted by NASA, a public-sector agency, is a robust confirmation of Neil Armstrong’s humanist warning against the privatization of space research. A private company can only ever do what is profitable. Returning to the moon may one day result in profitable activities downstream, but the mission itself could only ever be undertaken by the public sector because it is not possible for the mission to be profitable. Elon Musk’s SpaceX can radically reduce the cost of escaping the Earth’s gravity well, but the company can only ever be a contractor to a public-sector mission (as it will be on future steps in the Artemis program).
Armstrong, the first man on the moon, was a Democratic Party moderate and no socialist, but in his critique of the commercialization of space, he intuited the core critique that socialism mounts regarding human unfreedom under capitalism. A crude but common reading of this argument is that socialists see feudalism’s authoritarian rule by kings and lords and bishops as being replaced by authoritarian rule by bosses and shareholders. But in truth, the argument drives deeper than that: under capitalism, humanity is not ruled by bosses but instead by an unconscious, amoral abstraction, one that is—to steal a term from artificial intelligence discourse—unaligned with human values: the profit motive. In this way, even the bosses are beholden to what the market demands of them. Humans thus do not truly govern ourselves; we remain instruments of some other design.
However, when we do decide for ourselves what to do, which can only be done through democratic government—and it must be fully democratic for this to be the case—we achieve self-mastery. Anything SpaceX does can only be done using humans as instruments in the service of profit. Public-sector space exploration, meanwhile, is the expression of humans acting as genuine ends, not means; we do this not because it is profitable, but because it is worth doing.
And all this human excellence has occurred at the very moment, back on the ground, that we are witnessing an expression of humanity’s most malign capacities: what seemed dangerously close to the opening guns of a new World War, with all three sides murderous, religiously dogmatist, authoritarian regimes that gleefully massacre civilians, that target elementary schools, hospitals, the water supply and power grids. Surely few can escape the contrast. On Earth, it is not as it is in the heavens. Perhaps most diabolical of all, in the middle of this glorious human Aretê high above us, President Donald Trump warned, perhaps hinting of a nuclear strike on Tehran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
“Mom, take a picture of me!”
There are two images from the last few weeks that I cannot get out of my head.
These are not the images of the far side of the moon taken by the joint American-Canadian crew of the Orion (dependent on a service module designed by the European Space Agency), as staggering as these are.
No, the first image that sticks in my mind instead is that of eleven-year-old Hilt Boling waiting for the Artemis II lift-off in Florida, his shoulders strapped into a red backpack surely filled with all the essential provisions of a trip to a space launch (candy, chips, and books about space, obviously), and his still plump adolescent-baby cheeks framed by a black NASA ballcap with a GoPro camera clamped to the brim. When CNN asked this little space dork why he was excited about the launch, he replied bluntly: “Because we’re going back to the fucking moon!” The Kennedy Space Center then took understandable public-relations advantage of the virality of Hilt’s cute-vulgar outburst to offer his family a special tour, which then produced yet more images, this time of Hilt’s gob-smacked wonder at the center’s historic space-faring artifacts.
Boling’s adventure reminded me of when I was six years old, and my family emigrated from the UK to Canada. On the way to our new home in the Toronto suburbs, my parents stopped off in Florida to take my little brother and me on a side-trip to Walt Disney World and that same Kennedy Space Center as something of a bribe or recompense for uprooting us. I was a baby-faced little space dork once too, obsessed with space Lego and, very Britishly, Doctor Who. I wasn’t too different from Hilt, a child besotted with the mysteries of the universe and the technological triumphs of humanity. And as an adult, there is something beyond mere nostalgia when beholding a child’s awe in the face of these splendors. With the experience of age and an education of the past, we are able to recognize their experience of joyful amazement as a continuation of the grand chain of exploration and understanding unique to our species. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, we are the universe becoming aware of itself, and through our works, we come to know the universe ever better.
The second image—of the last few weeks of rockets and missiles, of space and of Earth, of the better world we could have and the injustices of the actual world that we are burdened with—that I have been unable to shake from my consciousness is a photograph of an Iranian child not much younger than Hilt Boling.
No less viral than the footage and photos of Hilt’s charming impudence, this image is of third grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi in Minab, Iran, similarly baby-faced, equally backpacked, and from his comportment—I am almost certain—comparably nerdy, waving to his mother as he heads down the steps of his apartment building and off to school. “Mom, take a picture of me,” he said, according to his mother, who never saw him again. Shortly after, Mikaeil was killed either by a rocket or a missile, that was either American or Israeli, that landed on, perhaps targeted with the help of artificial intelligence, his elementary school, like so many other schools and hospitals.
Why does one child win the thrill of a lifetime watching a rocket take off, while the other loses his life when a rocket lands on his school? Hilt did not do anything to deserve his day of awe and wonder, and Mikaeil did not deserve his death. There is no way to rationalize this: instead, the vagaries of fate with regard to both boys simply call upon us to strive toward a better world where all children are free of war, free to dream of being astronauts (or whatever else they want to be).
Greater Love Hath No Man Than This
Audiences’ response to Project Hail Mary, a Hollywood blockbuster, may seem—and indeed is—of far less moment than the majesty of a real-world mission to the moon. But the stories we tell ourselves and, crucially, about ourselves are nevertheless extremely important. And here, once again, we encounter the uniqueness of the human: we are, after all, the only species that tells stories.
The author of the book upon which Project Hail Mary is based, Andy Weir, has complained that science fiction has been taken over by a bleak dystopian misery. In place of this, Weir says, “I write stories of hope where human nature is positive and uplifting. At least, that’s what I’m shooting for.”
Project Hail Mary’s main character, middle-school teacher and failed microbiologist Ryland Grace, finds himself alone aboard a starship struggling with amnesia. Over time, he begins to remember how he got there: he was sent by an international consortium of governments (another respite from the real world’s international antagonism and war) and scientists that built and sent his ship on a one-way journey—unable to return, and thus a suicide mission—to a distant star system to try to learn about a space-faring microbe. The life-cycle of these bacteria, which they name astrophage, causes a rapid dimming of the light from our sun and that from other stars. Within a few decades, Earth will be reduced to a sort of permanent nuclear winter, and most of the planet’s food web, including us humans who depend upon it, will go extinct. But in one system many light years away, the astrophage exist but mysteriously do not dim its star. Grace and his crew, of which it turns out he is now the last surviving member, had been dispatched to find out why, in the hope that what they learn will be sufficient to figure out how to save everyone back home.
At his destination, Grace encounters an alien spacecraft from a planet in yet another star system, 40 Eridani A, that also suffers from the astrophage star-disease. The craft, similar to his own ship, is home to just one surviving Eridian astronaut, after the rest of the crew were killed by radiation poisoning. The alien is a rock-encrusted, five-legged creature with no face or eyes that Grace befriends and names Rocky. They devise a way to communicate despite radically different evolutionary histories, and together, using the formidable powers of science and engineering and friendship, they ultimately succeed in learning enough about the astrophage—including discovering its natural predator, an amoeba-like organism that Grace names Taumoeba—to save both Earth and Erid.
At one point in the gravitationally fraught, high-risk process of these two buddies’ “science-ing”, Rocky almost dies trying to save Grace’s life. Moreover, as Grace’s amnesia slowly wears off, he realizes that he did not in fact volunteer for the mission as he had been too scared of dying. He only ended up on the ship because the mission’s director drugged him and placed him aboard against his will, knowing he was the only human with the knowledge and experience sufficient to pull it off. Grace had been a coward, perhaps the worst coward in all history, for he was frightened to join a one-way trip to save all mankind. At the story’s climax, in return, Grace risks his own life for his Eridean friend. The film is not a religious work, but one of its elements that touched so many viewers was surely this echo of Jesus’s maxim of John 15:13, one that no atheist could gainsay: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Grace comes to realize this imperative thanks to Rocky’s own act of sacrifice. He has undergone a grand moral progression—an arc common to so many of our best stories (the infamous “hero’s journey”), but Weir has infused this time-honored storytelling structure with an urgently necessary celebration of humanity.
Trees Make No Progress in Wisdom
Project Hail Mary recognizes that to be a person is no mere phylogenetic category; it does not require belonging to the species Homo sapiens. To be a person is instead to have the full set of attributes that have supreme moral value: things like consciousness, reason, self-awareness, to seek purpose and meaning-making, and above all, the ability to make moral choices, to be capable of virtue, and therefore the capacity to undergo moral progress. Rocky is certainly no member of our species, and it’s not even close! Earth bacteria would be more closely related to us than his species. But Rocky is absolutely a person, for he has all these qualities. He is closely related to us in moral value, not in genes. Grace instinctively recognizes this within minutes of meeting him, and vice versa.
Compare this to how the microbial lifeforms of the astrophage bacteria and Taumoeba are treated in the story: to save humanity back on Earth and Rocky’s species on Erid, the two main characters’ goal is to deliberately drive astrophage to extinction on their worlds. And the way they do this is by genetically engineering a version of the Taumoeba to be a radically different, far more hardy species. In other words, extinguishing one species and transforming the “way of being” of another have no negative moral consequence.
Audiences might respond: “But of course microbes are less important than humans or Eridians; they’re just microbes! We don’t need to be told this!” And this is indeed an unassailable position. What is noteworthy is how this instinctive response rubs up against critiques of anthropocentrism—the belief that some species have greater moral value than others, and that humans enjoy the greatest moral worth—popular in some corners of academia and the animal rights and environmental movements. But the Hollywood audience instinct, in this case, is the correct one. It is the fashionable rejection of human exceptionalism that is incoherent.
The North African philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine is perhaps most well known for wrestling with the crooked nature of Man, illustrated most famously by his one-liner of a youthful prayer, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet!” But his less well-known arguments on the nature of human exceptionalism are worth revisiting in an age of commonplace human self-loathing. Core to what he regarded as the attributes that suggest our superior worth is our ability to morally reason—even as our powers of reason are fragile. This capacity for morality enables us to recognize a kinship with any other rational beings and form a community of rights and law. Other organisms cannot do this, as they are governed by instinct rather than reason: “The wolf will as long as it lives be a wolf, and will not listen to any preachers and give up killing sheep.”
Cruelty to animals must still be prevented, but we remain at the apex of this chain of being above all, Augustine argued, because we are the only creature capable of moral progress. And there would be no need for moral progress if there were no moral frailty. “Trees make no progress in wisdom,” he writes.
But Ryland Grace can make progress, moving from cowardice to self-sacrifice, just as American society can move from acceptance of slavery to its abolition. Women can keep being denied the vote until they win it. And one very fine day indeed, the whole world will move from war to peace.
Radically Different
Project Hail Mary is not the first time that Weir has put on his hard-sci-fi humanist show. In his breakthrough hit, The Martian, the main character Mark Watney, a botanist and engineer who finds himself stranded on Mars, must use his scientific wits to find a way to survive long enough until a new mission can be mounted to return to the red planet and rescue him many months later. The book and subsequent film version from director Ridley Scott show just how well Weir’s shot has hit that humanist mark. The entire enterprise of the rescue mission, posing not inconsiderable danger to the many lives of the rescuers and costing presumptive billions in treasure, plows, well, a rocket straight through the idea that humans can be used as an instrument in other designs.
Beyond the fact that Weir’s stories are unputdownable, ripping yarns, it’s his recognition of how special humans are that resonates with what most readers and movie-goers already feel deeply. I say “most” because we live at a time of widespread and growing misanthropy. Many of the environmentally minded declared during the Covid-19 pandemic that “We are the virus.” Anti-humanist philosophers argue in the pages of the New York Times that the world would be better without us. The billionaires of the Tech Right lend even greater power to such ideas: Peter Thiel struggles to say whether he wants the human race to endure, while Elon Musk reckons the most important thing is the spread of intelligence throughout the universe, regardless of whether that intelligence is human—though it would be nice if AI superintelligences let us humans come “along for the ride.” There is even a growing fringe of Silicon Valley thought leaders who argue that we should strive for AI superintelligences to replace us, for they would be a “worthy successor” superior to us in all capabilities.
What is remarkable about the synchronicity of Weir’s celebration of humans alongside audiences’ instinctive embrace of this celebration, and the humanist “moon joy” experienced by so many watching the Artemis II mission, is how robustly these two mass events counter an otherwise widespread ambient misanthropy from the green Left and the tech Right. They have performed important work reminding humans of how precious we are, reviving—at least in an emotional register—recognition of how radically different we are compared to the rest of nature.
But it is not enough to leave this question of human exceptionalism and moral hierarchy in nature at the level of instinct and emotion. We need to formally clarify what these attributes of moral value are, or put another way, rigorously define what it means to be a human as distinct from other species, and in so doing, ask what humans are for.
There are two causes for urgency in this endeavor. First, amidst the current and all too real ecological crisis of a warming Earth system, a misanthropic approach to climate change, biodiversity loss, and other challenges misunderstands what the project is about: the conservation of optimal ecological conditions for humans, rather than “saving the planet.” The misunderstanding often produces counterproductive policies based on restoring some unscientific balance of nature. Organic agriculture, for example, founded on the belief that “natural” fertilizer and pesticides are good for the planet and synthetic ones harmful, represents not merely an unscientific fear of chemicals, but can also exacerbate biodiversity loss as organic food’s land footprint is often greater than that of conventional agriculture.
The second cause of urgency arises from the explosion of investment into artificial intelligence. Some potential applications of AI go beyond enhancing productivity and reducing drudgery and would eliminate human-meaning making itself. It is one thing for robots to replace humans down mines, but what will it still mean to be human if all our art, science, and math are performed by an algorithm?
In Defense of Planetary Defense
Our return to the Moon offers at least the start of this new but also ancient task of defining the human, of asking what humans are for. Contra the Guardian’s Zoe Williams’s assertion that there is nothing to see up there, one of Artemis’s primary scientific objectives acts in service of the most important undertaking ever mounted.
Our current best theory of how the Moon formed suggests that some 4.5 billion years ago, a gargantuan rock the size of Mars—which scientists call “Theia”, after the Greek Titan and daughter of Uranus and Gaia—smashed into the early Earth. Its impact ejected a tremendous volume of debris into orbit, which in perhaps as little as a few years coalesced to form the Moon.
Were a Theia-sized body to hit Earth today, the likely result would be a complete sterilization of the planet. Even extremophile microbes living deep in the Earth’s crust would perish, as the shockwaves and heat conduction raised the temperature of the entire planetary interior far beyond the limits of protein stability. Thankfully, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office reckons it has identified almost all of what it calls “planet-killer” asteroids, and has cheerfully reported that nothing larger than 140 meters is likely to hit the Earth in the next 100 years.
Our evidence for the lunar “Giant Impact Hypothesis” comes from Moon rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s, which showed a composition almost identical to the Earth’s mantle, suggesting in turn a deeply linked origin story.
Those manned Apollo missions were essential to our coming to this understanding. Comparisons of manned and unmanned space missions have demonstrated how much more scientific discovery results from the former. An astronaut trained in geology can accomplish in one week what it would take a robotic rover a year to perform. Current AI capabilities cannot (yet) match humans’ superb capacity for situational awareness. And we can walk freely through loose sand or scattered rocks that are pure grief for wheeled rovers, and perform complex drilling tasks that (again, current) robotic hands cannot manage. Robots and other machines are fantastic, and we can send them to many places humans cannot go—such as the visit to the surface of Venus by the USSR’s unmanned Venera program. But most capable of all is a combination of human and robotic capabilities, each helping out with what the other cannot do.
The fact that the US and its allies are in a new space race against China does not undo the need for such science. The first space race between America and the USSR did not undermine the value of the research delivered from those Venera missions. One can only strive to build a democratic world where all nations cooperate to better and more rapidly achieve such goals.
One of the primary objectives of the Artemis program as a whole is to better understand the origin of the Earth-Moon system. Artemis II astronauts undertook extensive geological training across lunar analogs in Labrador and Iceland. But future missions aim for even more hands-on geological research from a surface landing and ultimately a lunar base in the 2030s. Such studies would offer a unique field laboratory where we can better understand the physics of such catastrophic collisions, which in turn is essential for defending the Earth against any potential future strikes.
It is possible over the next few decades, or even just the next few years, that we are able to detect the chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets, or perhaps Mars missions will discover bacterial life on that world. The discovery of life elsewhere does not diminish our need to maintain the flame of life and consciousness alive on Earth, not least by avoiding nuclear war that an increasing volume of scientific evidence suggests humanity could not survive. But it is also possible that in our search of the heavens, we continue to find nothing. If life does not exist anywhere else, or even if it is incredibly rare, this increases the burden on humanity’s shoulders to be a good shepherd to this world.
Capybaras cannot build asteroid deflector technology. Whales and octopuses and redwoods, and other species that we love, cannot staff a planetary defense office. And an AI aligned to human values can certainly offer great help in this task, but why would an unaligned AI even be interested in it?
Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman said upon his return, “It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”
Leigh Phillips is a science writer and geologist. He is the coauthor of The People’s Republic of Walmart.