One might expect reading about astronomy and space exploration to provide a certain escapism from the headlines of the day. But sooner or later space topics bring one back to the troubles and conflicts of Earth. As humans venture into space, physically or remotely, we bring our problems with us.
Astronomer Caleb Scharf, author of The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life, talked with Scientific American about what he calls “The Dispersal,” which is “what might happen to us, and all life, when it encounters scales of space and of resources that are unimaginably large.” In his view, life will spread out into the solar system, with diverse new species forming. “It can seem kind of terrifying and awful that we might not fully recognize or identify with future ‘dispersed’ versions of us, but those transformations aren’t necessarily bad things,” said Scharf. He thinks it’s all-but-inevitable.
I’ve become skeptical of near-term visions of space colonization, but if the timescale’s in centuries or beyond, little can be ruled out. One wonders, though, what sort of relations, if any, far-flung future societies might have with each other. Freeman Dyson once speculated that humans branching into separate species might avoid conflict by virtue of distance; that people might not be concerned what someone else’s evolving into if they’re doing it, say, “beyond Jupiter” (as I recall him saying). I could imagine the opposite: extreme fear of what’s going on out there. Will right-wingers of the future issue “humans-only” or “Earth-first” declarations, pretending humanity and Earth are heritages they’ve defended?
Cold War history is replete with ambitious projects in space and on remote parts of the Earth, carrying echoes into the present. Do those lusting for Greenland today know of Project Iceworm? As environmental historian Dagomar DeGroot writes in Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System, “Efforts to extract ice cores in the 1950s culminated, in 1960, with a project by the US Army to drill down to the bedrock at the bottom of Greenland’s ice sheet. Detailed study of the core suggested that Greenland’s glaciers moved too quickly for the Army to implement Iceworm, a top-secret project that would have hollowed out a four-thousand-kilometer network of nuclear missile silos in the ice sheet.”
Around the same time, the US Army and Air Force both took a strong interest in the moon, with competing proposals for bases on the lunar surface. As DeGroot notes, the Army emphasized the importance of “controlling lunar territory and resources,” while the Air Force, “which managed most of the US nuclear arsenal, proposed building missile silos” there. The thought was that “a Lunar Based Earth Bombardment System would survive any first strike” from the Soviet Union. There was, however, the danger that the Soviets would also put missiles on the moon. Instead, the superpowers signed agreements not to place nukes in space or military bases on celestial bodies. Meanwhile, the US Navy worked on building a nuclear fleet for surface and submarine warfare, a project that succeeded.
In Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity, science journalist James Riordon absorbingly recounts an early, unsuccessful, effort that purported to detect gravitational waves from an apparatus, designed by physicist James Weber, that was placed on the lunar surface during Apollo 17, to date the last crewed mission to the moon. Weber, a visionary and maverick also responsible for an early terrestrial effort to detect gravitational waves, was hindered by errors in calculation, along with limitations of the technology available. After later instruments enabled detection of such waves, the aging scientist believed his observation was real but had been covered up by the science establishment.
Science writer Jonas Enander, in Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth, notes that in 1953 “Danish authorities arrived at the village of Dundas on the west coast of Greenland. They told the villagers, members of the Inughuit Indigenous people, that they had to move. The village was to be the site for a new military base the US Air Force was building to expand the nearby Thule Air Base at Pituffik.” The villagers had to leave their homes within a few days, traveling by dogsled to Qaanaag, some 130 kilometers away.
As Enander discusses, Thule Air Base was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023 “to celebrate and acknowledge the rich cultural heritage of Greenland and its people.” However, the families that were forced out haven’t been allowed to return to the area, despite taking their lawsuit to the European Court of Human Rights. Pituffik Space Base, run by US Space Force, also serves as an astronomy site. The Greenland Telescope became operational there in 2017 and has participated in the imaging of black holes as part of the Event Horizon Telescope network, an international collaboration that, like much else, can be expected to collapse if the US commits aggression against Greenland and Denmark that plunges the planet into chaos.