Red Mars; Or, Progressive Astropolitics

Ricky Garner

For those of us more critically inclined in our affirmations, the space topic proposes something of a dilemma. As Derrida has argued, “no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth” (card below). In a world of such suffering, what possible justification can there be for spending billions upon billions of dollars on programs that have effects on the lives of the very few, and the very privileged.

The premise of this criticism extends across many schools of thought. From an ecological perspective, the astropolitics not only fetishizes technological mastery over the natural world, it also reaffirms the model of infinite economic growth, but on a scale infinitely more vast. From a feminist perspective, the narratives of penetrating hostile environments and the predominantly masculine culture of space exploration. Progressives in the United States can point toward poorly funded social welfare programs, poor schools, and racially stratified economic inequality as good examples of the concrete tradeoffs against which space funding must be judges. Critics of militarism will note that the overarching institutional architecture and goals of U.S. space policy are tied into the goals of global hegemony. And last but not least, the qualms of a Marxist analyst might look similar to that of Derrida’s assessment above, noting that in a capitalist system, space policy will benefit capitalism. Obviously, the list could go on. Space is fertile ground for critique.

But against this critical astropolitics, we can see the outlines of some new and potentially innovative ways of thinking about space. To begin with, let us take up one of the central tenets of a new school of philosophy, Speculative Realism: “Such a massive scientific output—concentrated in such a relatively short time-span—has had an enormous cultural impact outside laboratories and observatories, largely thanks to the increased resources dedicated to public outreach from the scientists’ side. Whether because of their eagerness to share the revolutionary discoveries of their discipline, or for the more pragmatic realization that general public interest aids the acquisition of governmental and private funding; natural scientists have come to represent intellectuals in close contact with the public” (card below). In other words, today, the grip of scientific themes on the public imagination is immense, whereas for a great number of people “philosophy has become boring.”

Science is not going away, and neither is space. Space policy cannot be reduced to its criticisms, however valid they are, because the desire to explore and develop space intersects with the everyday lives of millions of people across the globe. It may be exploited and coopted, but the desire for space is there, as it has been for the last century.

The choice, then, is not between space or no space, but for the vision of the future which will guide space policy, a vision for the future that for good or for ill will be heavily influence by the actions of the United States of America. With that realization in mind, let us look at some areas in dire need of a progressive astropolitics.

First, Neoliberalism in space: One of the most important developments in recent space policy is the increasing privatization of the space program. As noted in Business Insider, “The Obama administration wants to outsource whole swaths of the space program to the private sector.” Capitalism sees a lot of dollars going to government space programs, and it wants some of that money. Just as privatization is increasingly stripping collective economic wealth accumulated in government institutions over the last century from the energy sector, welfare, the internet, and entitlements, the final frontier for capitalism is outer space. If space exploration and/or development is an inevitable part of our future, then an affirmative that rolls back this wave of privatization and calls for space to be treated as a commons would seem to be extremely productive critical ground.

Second, militarism in space: In today’s world, it’s not really a question of space militarization at all, it’s a question of weaponization. The Air Force’s stated purpose today is “fly, fight, and win … in air, space, and cyberspace” (cite below). Indeed, Simon Huntley has argued that “space is already militarized (defined here as employment of space-based capabilities for terrestrial military purposes, including use of force) but not yet weaponized (defined as the projection of destructive mass or energy forces from, into, or through space)” (card below). The entire information architecture of U.S. militarism is heavily dependent space, from observation satellites to flaying unmanned drones from half a world away, the military is already occupying the ultimate high ground. This presents an opportunity for numerous affs which rollback the tide of space militarization. In particular, one good affirmative in this area could ratify and implement a new treaty to prevent this. Some have advocated a PAROS Treaty, or a treaty for the “prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS)” (card below). Such an aff could not only tackle one of the core issues in the future of space policy, but could also access the critical literature on the necessity of treaties as vehicles of universal human rights and multilateral constraints on sovereignty.

Third, other areas: Energy policy in space is another controversial area. Karl Grossman argues that the Obama administration is “seeking to revive the use of nuclear power in space” (card below). The use of plutonium raises the specter of a horrifying space accident spreading radioactive debris across the earth. Another potential area, which this post discussed above, is critical science studies. Whether from the perspective of Speculative Realism, or maybe a Deleuzian argument about how science breaks down destratifies social structures and cultural schemas of the body, science could become the newest terrain of critique. Finally, aliens.

Karl Grossman, 2010, Investigative reporter, Huffington Post, June 25, 2010, huff.to/ePG29m

Despite its huge dangers, the Obama administration is seeking to revive the use of nuclear power in space. It wants the U.S. to produce the plutonium isotope that has been used for electric generation in space and is also looking to build nuclear-propelled rockets for missions to Mars... Plutonium-238 has been used to generate electricity on space probes and rovers and also satellites. But in 1964 a satellite with a plutonium-fueled generator, after failing to achieve orbit, fell to Earth, breaking up as it hit the atmosphere and dispersing 2.1 pounds of Pu-238 from its SNAP -- (for Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power) 9A system. A study by a group of European health and radiation protection agencies reported that "a worldwide soil sampling program in 1970 showed SNAP-9A debris present at all continents and at all latitudes." Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked that fall-out to an increase of lung cancer on Earth. The accident caused NASA to pioneer the use of solar panels on satellites.

United States Air Force, accessed 3/18/2011, “Air Force Mission,” 1.usa.gov/fo1yxG

The mission of the United States Air Force is to fly, fight and win...in air, space and cyberspace. To achieve that mission, the Air Force has a vision: The United States Air Force will be a trusted and reliable joint partner with our sister services known for integrity in all of our activities, including supporting the joint mission first and foremost. We will provide compelling air, space, and cyber capabilities for use by the combatant commanders. We will excel as stewards of all Air Force resources in service to the American people, while providing precise and reliable Global Vigilance, Reach and Power for the nation. The Air Force has three core competencies: Developing Airmen, Technology-to-Warfighting and Integrating Operations. These core competencies make our six distinctive capabilities possible: Air and Space Superiority : With it, joint forces can dominate enemy operations in all dimensions -- land, sea, air and space. Global Attack: Because of technological advances, the Air Force can attack anywhere, anytime -- and do so quickly and with greater precision than ever before. Rapid Global Mobility: Being able to respond quickly and decisively anywhere we're needed is key to maintaining rapid global mobility. Precision Engagement: The essence lies in the ability to apply selective force against specific targets because the nature and variety of future contingencies demand both precise and reliable use of military power with minimal risk and collateral damage. Information Superiority: The ability of joint force commanders to keep pace with information and incorporate it into a campaign plan is crucial. Agile Combat Support: Deployment and sustainment are keys to successful operations and cannot be separated. Agile combat support applies to all forces, from those permanently based to contingency buildups to expeditionary forces. The Air Force bases these core competencies and distinctive capabilities on a shared commitment to three core values -- integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do.

Reaching Critical Will, No Date, accessed 3/18/2011, a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, bit.ly/ijM0f7

The United Nations General Assembly is consensus-building body, where issues of international peace and security are collectively discussed among all UN member states. Its regular session convenes in September of each year, and after two weeks of General Debate, it breaks up into six specialized committees. Every member state is entitled to participate in each of the committees, where they consider proposals relevant to the substantive topics covered by the committee, and recommend resolutions for adoption by the General Assembly. While these resolutions are not legally binding, they can be normative—that is, they can indicate the establishment of customs, standards, and guidelines for appropriate behavior. Resolutions adopted by consensus also indicate substantive areas of agreement that are ripe for negotiation and can enable the creation of new treaties and the emergence of international legal norms. Furthermore, they demonstrate global governmental opinion, showing which governments support peace and security, and which choose to remain outside of or even impede the development of international cooperative security. The General Assembly's work on disarmament is conducted through one of its main committees, the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. Each year in the First Committee and then again in the General Assembly as a whole, a resolution on the prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS) is introduced and adopted by an overwhelming majority of UN member states. In fact, every country in the world votes in favor of negotiating a treaty on PAROS—except for the US, which has voted “NO” for the past three years, and Israel, which has abstained. The US administration argues that the existing multilateral arms control regime is sufficient, and that there is no need to address a non existent threat. As one US representative said in 2006, “there is no—repeat, no—problem in outer space for arms control to solve.” The PAROS resolution reaffirms the importance of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, saying that PAROS efforts are in conformity with that Treaty. However, the resolution also notes that the current outer space legal regime “does not in and of itself guarantee the prevention of an arms race in outer space.” The PAROS resolution calls for states, especially those with space capabilities, to refrain from actions contrary to the objective of PAROS and to “contribute actively” to that objective. It argues for consolidation and reinforcement of the outer space legal regime, and says the Conference on Disarmament (see below) is the place for a new treaty on PAROS to be negotiated.A PAROS treaty would complement the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which aims to preserve space for peaceful uses, if it prevented the use of space weapons and the development of space-weapon technology and technology related to so-called “missile defense.” A PAROS treaty would also prevent any nation from gaining a further military advantage in outer space and would hopefully reduce current military uses of outer space. In recent years, the UN General Assembly has started to move beyond merely calling on the Conference on Disarmament to commence negotiations on PAROS, to recommending measures on transparency and confidence-building in outer space. Many states have called on space-capable states to guarantee transparency in their outer space activities and to engage in confidence-building measures. In 2005, 2006, and 2007, Russia has introduced a resolution on transparency and confidence-building measures in outer space activities. As with the PAROS resolution, the overwhelming majority of member states vote in favour of this resolution, with only the US objecting and Israel abstaining.

Nicholas Carlson, 2009, Business Insider, Aug. 24, 2009, 12:01 PM, Obama Wants To Privatize Space Travel, read.bi/g9o9H6

The Obama administration wants to outsource whole swaths of the space program to the private sector, the Wall Street Journal reports. Mostly, these private firms would be tasked with transporting cargo and astronauts into space. NASA would stick around, but proponents of the plan see it turning into a "conduit" for tech developed outside the federal government. WSJ: Contract winners would use corporate funds to build and test rockets, provide compatible space capsules and then try to recoup those investments by offering commercial-style transportation services to the agency. Essentially, NASA would be paying a set fee for every pound or person transported to orbit. This is great news for a group of mostly West Coast-based space travel startups founded by already-rich enterprenuers like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and John Carmack. The Journal singles out PayPal and Tesla cofounder Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp -- known as SpaceX -- as a startup that stands to benefit from the shift in policy. But there are plenty of other private-sector firms set to take advantage of the new policy, including Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Wade L. Huntley, 2007, Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research, Univeristy of British Columbia, “Smaller State Perspectives on the Future of Space Governance,” Astropolitics 5.3, 237-271

Introduction The twenty-first century will see the human presence in space develop into an integral aspect of social and economic life. Today, military, commercial, exploratory, and even recreational space presence is advancing rapidly. Yet, the pace and direction of future development are highly uncertain. The security dimension of space is a focal issue for this future. By many accounts, space is already militarized (defined here as employment of space-based capabilities for terrestrial military purposes, including use of force) but not yet weaponized (defined as the projection of destructive mass or energy forces from, into, or through space).1 Technologically-specific definitions of "space weapons" are highly contested, and the difference in practice between "aggressive" and "peaceful" uses of space is hazy. But maintaining these conceptual distinctions is vital for analytical purposes.2 The factors that will shape the future evolution of the military security dimension of space are complex and opaque. Ongoing technological developments are creating genuine national security implications that are making today's international regimes dealing with space increasingly inadequate to cope with emerging challenges. The United States (U.S.) is increasingly reliant on space-based military assets, making threats to those assets a serious U.S. national security concern. Yet many of these capabilities support arms control verification and deterrence stability, promoting peace on Earth as well as in space. The vulnerability of these capabilities is therefore a global security concern as well.

Jacques Derrida, 1994, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Specters of Marx, p. 84-85

Let us return now to the immediate vicinity of the subject of our conference. My subtitle, "the New International," refers to a profound transformation, projected over a long term, of international law, of its concepts, and its field of intervention. Just as the concept of human rights has slowly been determined over the course of centuries through many socio-political upheavals (whether it be a matter of the right to work or economic rights, of the rights of women and children, and so forth), likewise international law should extend and diversify its field to include, if at least it is to be consistent with the idea of democracy and of human rights it proclaims, the worldwide economic and social field, beyond the sovereignty of States and of the phantom-States we mentioned a moment ago. Despite appearances, what we are saying here is not simply anti-statist: in given and limited conditions, the super-State, which might be an international institution, may always be able to limit the appropriations and the violence of certain private socio-economic forces. But without necessarily subscribing to the whole Marxist discourse (which, moreover, is complex, evolving, heterogeneous) on the State and its appropriation by a dominant class, on the distinction between State power and State apparatus, on the end of the political, on "the end of politics," or on the withering away of the State, and, on the other hand, without suspecting the juridical idea in itself, one may still find inspiration in the Marxist "spirit" to criticize the presumed autonomy of the juridical and to denounce endlessly the de facto take-over of international authorities by powerful Nation-States, by concentrations of techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital, and financial capital, of State capital and private capital. A "new international" is being sought through these crises of international law ; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the law of the market, the "foreign debt," the inequality of techno-scientific, military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (And provisionally, but with regret, we must leave aside here the nevertheless indissociable question of what is becoming of so-called "animal" life, the life and existence of "animals" in this history-This-question-has always been a serious one, but it will become massively unavoidable.

Fabio Gironi, 2010, AHRC funded PhD student in the department of Study of Religions in SOAS, University of London, “Science-Laden Theory: Outlines of an Unsettled Alliance,” Speculations volume 1, bit.ly/gsYuQL

The Copernican Revolution, in Colour The most obvious place to look, when seeking a condition7 for this new philosophy, is to direct our attention to the developments of the natural sciences in the last forty years, both in terms of their dramatic internal growth (the elaboration of successful new theories or promising new research projects) and external public engagement (the increased interest amongst broader society in the results of science). My contention is that these two elements, by shaping the last decades of western intellectual history, have indirectly contributed to the re-emergence of realism as a philosophical trope. Within speculative realism, a science-friendly attitude is explicitly associated with the rejection of a certain kind of (post-critical, human-centred, phenomenological—in a word—correlationist) philosophy: see for example Ray Brassier’s demand that science be taken seriously, since [t]aking as a given the empirical fact that all philosophical attempts to define conditions of possibility for scientific thought have proved to be dismally unsuccessful, we conclude that these failures are a matter of principle rather than empirical circumstance, and that it is the presumption that philosophy is in a position to provide a transcendental footing for science which must be abandoned. There is no first philosophy. Consequently, although relatively autonomous vis a vis science, philosophical ontology can neither ground nor disregard the ultimately physical description of the universe provided by the natural sciences.8 Or, take Graham Harman’s claims about the dullness of philosophical literature, as opposed to the speculative range of scientific texts: pick up a random book of recent physics and you will find dazzling speculation on all manner of things: the creation and destruction of the universe, the existence of parallel worlds, chance and necessity, hidden spatial dimensions, time travel, and two-dimensional holograms that delude us into believing in three….We have reached a point where I, a passionate reader of philosophy, prefer any section in bookstores except philosophy…[P]hilosophy has become boring.9 And, of course, the entire argument against correlationist thought in Meillassoux’s After Finitude is another such example, which hinges upon a precise dating of ‘ancestral phenomena’ such as the origin of the universe, something which has only been possible through (relatively recent) scientific techniques. So, rather than a contemporary philosophy flat-lined by the phenomenological climate, it was science that made it meaningful to disagree about what there might have been when we did not exist, and what there might be when we no longer exist—just as it is science that provides us with the means to rationally favour one hypothesis over another concerning the nature of the world without us.10 The authority of contemporary science is fuelled by its achievements. The extraordinary experimental success of the Standard Model of particle physics and of the description of quantum mechanical interactions between those particles, the observational data confirming the Big Bang theory and the age of the universe, as well as the discovery of its accelerating expansion (not to mention more speculative hypotheses/research programs such as those linked to the Multiverse and String Theory), are momentous results that have been achieved in less than half a century. Such a massive scientific output11—concentrated in such a relatively short time-span—has had an enormous cultural impact outside laboratories and observatories, largely thanks to the increased resources dedicated to public outreach from the scientists’ side. Whether because of their eagerness to share the revolutionary discoveries of their discipline, or for the more pragmatic realization that general public interest aids the acquisition of governmental and private funding; natural scientists have come to represent intellectuals in close contact with the public. Following this increase in public engagement with science in the last decades we have witnessed pieces of scientific equipment raise, possibly for the first time,12 to the status of cultural icons and sources for entertainment and awe. A solid example of this is the Hubble Space Telescope (hst), whose huge impact on physical astronomy since the early 1990s is matched by its impact on the ‘general public’, providing us with an unprecedented peek into the far universe via a dazzling series of images of distant galaxies and nebulae making their way onto the front covers of hundreds of magazines. Pictures of these astronomical objects, immensely far in both space and in time, have offered us a whole new understanding and visual grasp of the term ‘things in themselves’.13 By opening up a space beyond ‘the moon, the outer planets, and the icy Oort Cloud with its stagnant mist of dim future comets’ the Space Telescope14 has allowed us to probe deeper into the fabric of the universe while at the same time imposing upon us the humbling acknowledgement of our myopia, since ‘beyond the gaze of these instruments are sites more distant than these, some of them grimmer than the plains of Hell’.15 So strong has the cultural impact of the hst been, that the 20th anniversary of its commissioning (24th of April 2010) has been celebrated with full-page articles in several major newspapers around the globe, commemorating its ‘birthday’ with a selection of its most iconic images accompanied by words of praise for this overworked piece of technology. And the hst is only the most iconic of an army of such instruments: we have enjoyed the sunset on Mars thanks to the images from the Mars Exploration Rover, we have peered at the distant Earth through the rings of Saturn when receiving the images from the Cassini probe and we have observed the aeons-old first light of the universe thanks to the wmap satellite. Moreover, it is thanks to the discoveries granted by the data received from less iconic but equally successful probes, that our vocabulary has extended to include terms like ‘expanding universe’, ‘black hole’, ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’ and ‘exoplanets’, concepts that soon proved fertile new metaphors for philosophers—and speculative realists.16 It is well known how speculative realists call for a return to the true meaning of the Copernican Revolution, against the Kantian hijacking of this term. If, according to Meillassoux it is due to ‘a sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instils in humanity’s conception of itself and of the cosmos’17 that we are forced to face the contingency of thought and therefore to rethink the priority of human access, it appears that no cultural force has managed to present more powerfully to humankind as a whole the disconcerting vastness of the ‘great outdoors’ than the last forty years of physical sciences, particularly astronomy. To substantiate this claim, I would like to take a brief historical excursus. In his Earthrise, historian Robert Poole explains how the famous Earthrise picture taken in 1968 by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission (showing the planet rising from the lunar horizon), and its even more popular ‘Blue Marble’ successor, taken in 1972 by the astronauts of the Apollo 17 (showing the planet in its full spherical appearance) were appropriated and diffused in popular culture by the dominant ideologies of the time. In a complex network linking such different forces as the technical constraints of the Apollo missions, cold-war era political interests, the amazement of the first astronauts seeing the planet from above, and the lsd-fuelled rise of 1970s hippie counterculture, the first images of planet Earth ended up as bearing an unprecedented meaning. In particular, Poole argues that [t]he famous Apollo 17 ‘Blue Marble’ photograph appeared in December 1972, just in time to supply the environmental movement with its most powerful icon. It was, however, the Apollo 8 image of December 1968 that had started it all off. Both images owed much of their instant power to the way they tapped into a ready-made agenda: in the case of the ‘Blue Marble’ it was the eco-renaissance; in the case of Earthrise it was ‘Spaceship Earth’. What happened over the years in between was that natural metaphors for the planet began to take over from technological ones.18 Hence ‘Blue marble’, according to Poole ‘the single most reproduced image in human history’,19 was fruitfully assimilated by contemporary culture, and at the same time produced a feedback effect, fuelling the amazement for a living planet, and shaping a holistic attitude which subsequently appropriated the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis as a scientific proof of the life-cycles of the global organism that Earth was. The picture from outer space, even if showing the fragile beauty of Earth, effectively increased the intrinsic value of the planet, so that the focus of the environmental movement (and of the emergent New Age spirituality) which adopted the photograph as a graphic reminder of the wonders of our planet, ‘was not “wilderness” or “nature” but “the environment”, with humankind very much in the picture’,20 a humankind now seen as never before as the lucky inhabitants and custodians of a natural marvel, strikingly alive in an empty, dark, and colourless space. Let us try to compare the ‘Blue Marble’ picture, and its effect on the cultural unconscious, with another, more recent picture of our planet. On the 14th February 1990, the Voyager probe, having completed, the main part of its mission in its first 13 years of interplanetary flight, was instructed to turn its camera around, and to take a picture of Earth from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometres. The alive, dynamic planet that in the early 70s was shown in its blue marble glory was now, in the famous words of Carl Sagan (the man responsible for convincing nasa to take the picture and for its successive popularization),21 a ‘pale blue dot’, a handful of pixels on a background of black nothingness. The Earth, which thirty years earlier had been a glorious ‘Blue Marble’ was now shown as a ‘pale blue dot’. If this picture did not directly slide so glamorously into the popular media and in popular culture it is not only because of its inferior intrinsic aesthetic value, but also because of the radically different social climate of the early 90s. And yet, I believe that we can fruitfully look at the ‘pale blue dot’ picture as having as strong a cultural significance as its predecessor. Indeed, where to find a better, more powerful representation of the true meaning of the Copernican Revolution—as we are reminded by Meillassoux—than in this ‘pale blue dot’ picture, sent as a faint electromagnetic signal by an unmanned probe, from a distance where no human had ever, or has since, reached? If humanity could previously be seen as the privileged custodian of a sacred cosmic gem, it was now merely dwelling on a infinitesimal speck of dust, a planet whose awe-inspiring face was now irresolvable, irrelevant, disfigured. If the coloured face of the planet dominated the ‘Blue Marble’ picture, it is the featureless cosmic space which dominates this second picture, a space where the Earth, and the environment it hosts, is but a mere point floating across an arbitrary set of coordinates.22 Science delivered the photographic evidence of the—at best—provincial placement of our planet, a graphic memento that there is much more to the universe than our ‘world’ (both in the sense of a correlationally defined existential space and in the sense of our material planet), a picture that indeed in its coarse immediacy strikes a powerful blow to the ‘pathetic twinge of human self-esteem’.23 The philosophical trope of ‘otherness’ itself was now to be revised: from the otherness of a human neighbour to that of a nonhuman, utterly alien,24 external reality. Eight years after the ‘pale blue dot’ picture, physical cosmology delivered some even more stunning results: the empty, cosmic space, through which our planet, our solar system and our whole galaxy is wandering, is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion.25 The discovery of this increasing rate of expansion effectively sanctioned the fate of the universe to be one of cold dissipation, and thus created the possibility for a passage like the following to appear in a philosophy book not merely as a thought experiment, but as a factual truth to be philosophically appraised and exploited: sooner or later both life and mind will have to reckon with the disintegration of the ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience—irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call ‘asymptopia’, the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called ‘dark energy’, which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.26 If, to quote this important passage once again, contemporary philosophical thought needs to engage with ‘the sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instils in humanity’s conception of itself and of the cosmos’,27 it is because of such scientific narrations of the fate of our universe, holding today such a powerful social and cognitive authority and offering us a ‘speculative opportunity’.28 By exposing the cosmic irrelevance of humankind and its dwelling place and by denouncing the contingency of its existence as subordinate to random cosmic caprices, science has set the scene for the development of a new metaphysical revolution consisting in a new ‘blow to human narcissism, where man is dethroned from his position of centrality in the order of being and situated in his proper place as one being among others, no more or less important than these others’.29