Shannon Green

I originally wrote this as part of my Masters programme for a law module opinion piece assignment in early 2024.

In 2020 the Perseverance Rover landed on Mars for its three-year mission. Perseverance was the 32^nd human-made object to land on another planet, the 15^th to land on Mars specifically (there have since been more landings). In the same year over 65 thousand kilotons of aluminium, the material that makes up the bulk of the rover, was produced from bauxite mined from the Earth, releasing over one thousand million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. The technological advances that have granted humanity access to the stars has come at a heavy cost to our own planet. There are arguments about whether such exploration is a waste of money given the rampant inequality in our world today and whether burning 250 tonnes of fossil fuels per launch to escape Earth’s atmosphere is really the best use of scientific minds that could be turned to significant issues on the Earth’s surface.

However, these arguments, valid though they are, are unlikely to stop countries investing in their space programmes. In 2020 less than 1% of global GDP was spent on space exploration and accomplishments in space continue to be sources of great national pride. When India became the first country to successfully land a craft on the Moon’s tricky southern pole national (and international) papers made a point of stamping the Indian flag all over edited images of the rover on their front pages proclaiming ‘The Moon is Indian’.

The gateway to space is firmly open and it is highly unlikely to close any time soon. A bold new frontier awaits humanity, unfortunately not many people have stopped to ask that bold new frontier whether it minds us rocketing through it at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, blasting radio waves left, right and centre or allowing our exploration vehicles to slowly die and decay on its soil without any plans to retrieve them. It’s quite a classic approach for humans of a certain metaphysical persuasion, unfortunately it has a bloody and violent history of dehumanisation, exploitation, eradication and extraction. Even today assumptions of value based on a primarily Western philosophy of nature desecrate sights of human connection to nature, as in the case of Two Women Sitting Down, a dreaming site for the Booto Creek Aboriginal people that was destroyed by mining company OM Holdings in 2013.

Although as far as we know there are no living creatures, let alone humanoids living on our neighbouring worlds a prioritisation of life over non-life or even a reliance on our current conceptions of life and non-life should give us serious pause for thought when dealing with literal alien worlds. In her work Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism Povinelli draws on Indigenous Australian metaphysics in which our ‘modern scientific’ divide between life and non-life is not so clear. For the communities Povinelli has worked with life includes certain weather patterns and rock formations. She challenges us to consider whether the division is really as clear as we think it is. When we breathe in our lungs exchange life and non-life, we interact with non-life and importantly non-life interacts with us.

Collingwood explains that the dominant conception of nature within our globalised worldview is historical rather than scientific. The idea that humans are at the pinnacle of some sort of pyramid of life with animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses below us and non-life as in rocks, water, weather etc below them is not a given, nor is it based on scientific truths. It is a contestable worldview, and one that currently threatens to reinforce the continuation of catastrophic climate change. This is the same worldview that only recently rejected a similar hierarchy of man that gave racist logic to mass killings and genocide through colonisation and slavery.

Should we not then pause and question how our assumptions about life and non-life carry the potential to do irreparable harm to our neighbouring planets? NASA is already in the midst of establishing a commercial payload service to the Moon for private corporations to expand off-Earth, and one of Space X’s core pillars is “The Road to Making Humanity Multiplanetary.” While it might seem too far in the future or too far removed from most people’s day to day lives by not tackling this challenge now, we risk repeating our mistakes on a multi-planetary scale, or making even worse mistakes when encountering the unknown. Danielle Wood calls this the Colonial Mindset in an excellent article arguing for an anti-colonial approach to space exploration. Without active and intentional efforts to overturn this ideology and codify it through a rights framework we will continue to subordinate the unknown or misunderstood to flawed logic and economics.

I therefore argue we must urgently establish extra-terrestrial bodies as legal-persons endowed with specific rights that protect them from exploitation and provide mechanisms for dialogue. As in Christopher Stone’s argument that natural objects should have legal standing, I argue that a representative group of legal guardians be appointed to participate in legal proceedings on behalf of the extra-terrestrial bodies. Among this guardian group should be planetary scientists as well as cultural representatives from communities that hold particular connections to the planets and who have alternative conceptions of nature, life and non-life. The specific rights of the planets need not be totally alien to current legal systems. Under current international agreements planets are already free from becoming the specific territory of an Earth nation. There could be a recognition of the right to self-determination, and the right to maintain ownership over their own resources all of which exist as rights for various communities on Earth already. In a more novel vein planets should have the right to be free from human colonisation (either by humans or by other organisms or objects introduced by humans) and the right to exist with inherent meaning separate from the values and impressions generated by humans.

What is most important from this exercise in developing planetary rights is the questioning of the dominant assumptions on space exploration and colonisation, history has shown us time and time again, just because something can be done, it does not mean it should be. And in the face of such a vast unknown we need to be much, much more careful and a little less bold in our assumptions of who or what is there.