The commodification of the cosmos is having a profound impact on humanity itself
On Monday March 3, 2024, at 2:05pm Pacific Time, a satellite built by small Sydney start-up Space Machines Company (SMC) hitched a ride out of Earth’s atmosphere on one of SpaceX’s 70 metre long, 550,000kg Falcon 9 rockets.
The Australian trade and Investment Commission (ASIC) heralded the launching of SMC’s vessel,‘Optimus’, as a “trailblazing satellite to clean up space junk”.
SMC lost contact with Optimus a month after launch, consigning her, ironically, to the status of space junk.
According to the European Space Agency, Optimus is now one of 35,000 large objects, including 26,000 pieces of debris and 9000 active satellites, pelting laps around Earth. Added to the traffic is another million pieces of debris under 10 centimetres in diameter.
By 2030, there will be 60,000 satellites in Earth’s orbit, more than six times as many as there were as of January 1, 2024.
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A relentless litany of forces have compelled us both as individuals and as a species to grow in all directions with religious fervour. We live longer than ever before. We are faster, stronger, taller and more prosperous than all our precursors, spreading our tendrils outwards, downwards and up. Driven by growth metrics and a mastery over the elements, we are abandoning awe for more.
I sit on the Ute tray by the Murrumbidgee River and stare upwards. The hum and rattle of road trains intermittently pave over the sounds of running water and the crackling of fire. What kind of a species is being produced by such an insatiable lust for domination over the heavens?
Having been born, we begin learning immediately. We learn how to turn food into energy, when to sleep, where to defecate, and what things do and what things don’t belong in our mouth. We learn how to count, how to read, the efficacy of condoms in both pregnancy and disease prevention, and how to absorb and regurgitate information for tests marked by either computers or humans impersonating computers.
During the final stages of childhood — if we’re lucky — we’ll usually begin conflating our sense of self with some future-flung projection of the kind of labour one feels most capable of selling. And when people ask, “What do you do?”, we’ll respond with the activity that best defines the way one manages to make rent and feed ones’ children.
I see Mars, Venus, Jupiter, three shooting stars, and the Saucepan. An achievement that I choose not to add to my CV.
The road trains rattle and hum.
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I watch you, too, like an alien through some incomprehensible periscope, rattling and humming with the road trains.
A Saturday morning breaks, and you sleep in. Having wasted 25% of your weekend conjuring a cloud of shame that only grows towards the end of the stack of pancakes you’ve inhaled for breakfast, you find yourself standing at the kitchen counter staring at the fork in your hand. Fish in a tank on a side-table lurk unblinking.
You’re still growing alright. But in the wrong direction.
Years pass, your energy levels wane, and that zeal you once so readily shared with those in your orbit ebbs out from your sides like sweat. Your wife suggests seeing a psychologist, who charges you $320 a session to discuss negative self-talk and the importance of seizing a ‘growth mindset’.
You’re excited, in principle, for her to help you become a man who is better equipped to recognise and seize opportunities. The psychologist is 26 and drives a BMW 1 series with a bumper sticker that says, ‘Broaden and Build Psychology’, followed by a phone number written in pink cursive. You put the business card she gives you for a local gym offering ‘cold plunges’ in your wallet and follow the ‘holistic fitness influencers’ she suggests you ‘engage mindfully with’ in a bid to bend your algorithm towards more ‘momentum-motivated modalities’.
You lie about having headaches for the opportunity to lie alone and stare into a screen; you sit in the car in the driveway for fifteen minutes before walking into the home you’re 35 years from paying off; your glasses prescription needs updating and you’re worried that your children sharing a room reflects poorly on your ability to provide as a parent.
Your neck has bent to accommodate your increasingly downward gaze, a small hump now visibly protruding from your upper back. The only stars left guiding you are performing dances on a screen in the palm of your hand while you shit.
Meanwhile, a billionaire whose children have unpronounceable names is sending more things into space, and six months later your son will insist on naming the puppy you bought for Christmas, ‘Elon the Astronaut’.
You feed the fish before going to bed, and glare into the black eyeball of the upside-down fantail with the bloated abdomen. He wriggles listlessly, the others having already begun to take chunks from his frayed fins.
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Whether you like it or not, competition defines our lives better than anything else.
Scientifically. Sociologically. Solipsistically. Soul-narrowingly.
We compete for everything. From jobs to housing to love. You and your fellows will compete against others and their fellows on the opposite side of the Earth over the production, sale, and extraction of resources. Because of this, one might be forgiven for weighing one’s security or self-worth with strict reference to only anthropocentric values or units of measurement. For to live in this world as it is — as we have built it — is to be pitted against a litany of counterparts human, collective, and systemic. And without some degree of wealth, a modicum of stability, and at least some small sense of control over our own security, life becomes very difficult very fast.
Need it take any further explaining as to why we hoard all that we can to feel safe, ad infinitum? There is no enough in this world, and in our quest for more, we strap ourselves to rockets and hold on, as if the sky no longer represents the limit, but a type of limitlessness that one is spiritually anchored to testing. It is no surprise that humanity’s disregard for its cosmic insignificance — or perhaps better put, its smallness — manifests as an uncaring attitude toward its own preservation.
It is my belief that in losing our smallness, we destroy our capacity to revel in the divine. That in forgetting our smallness, we lose all capacity to dream or to see beyond what we know. That having lost our capacity to see ourselves as only a small part of an unfathomably expansive whole, we find ourselves blotting out the sky with space junk and measuring success in the stock price of satellite manufacturers.
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There is no experience better equipped to deliver a reminder of our smallness than a minute spent staring into the night sky; no better salve for a bent neck, headache, and loss of perspective than some time spent with the everything else.
For hundreds of thousands of years man has shrunk himself into narratives of unfathomable scale, painting lines that straddle the lightyears of space between stars and planets to create pictures of the familiar. Bulls, scorpions, eagles, chariots, and gods.
And for hundreds of thousands of years, too, man has used these narratives as scaffolding in our everlasting and insatiable desire to understand ourselves and our place in the universe.
From ancient cave paintings to the birth of Christ, and from man’s first forays into space exploration to zodiac-informed life advice, we use the stars to paint ourselves into a greater story. We are a species whose every development — be it spiritual, artistic, or scientific — has been spurred in response to our relationship with the cosmos.
While I may suffer from a very human inclination to vie for control and relevance and certainty, it only takes a moment pondering my cosmic significance—or lack thereof—to be reminded that these inclinations are, in the grand scheme of things, aberrations.
Beneath a star-lit sky there is scant space for hubris. The ant cannot un-see how small he is after meeting the shadow cast by the sole of a moving boot, how pathetic his plans and how meagre his ideas after reckoning with scale and time and the inconceivably larger other.
Among the stars, and dwarfed by the immensity of the great unknown that they demarcate, we are humbled into our very humanity.
I am an ant. No, I am a bacterium on an ant’s mandible. Primordial ooze, purposelessly evolving limbs and teeth, or just a flickering moment in some inconceivable being’s dream, soon to be forgotten.
And at end of every day we are all reminded — should we look up — of our smallness.
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It is 2024 and the air between Newtown and the stratosphere is quickly being turned into a monument to humanity’s malnourished soul. I walk up King Street, doing my best to prevent Lacey from licking the pavement clean, which on a Friday night becomes a buffet of kebab drippings and melted ice cream. When we get to Camperdown park I let her off the lead, walking a few laps before sitting on a rainbow-coloured bench while Lacey sniffs around in the grass.
The light and air pollution have me glancing up at one of not-many stars visible to the naked eye, only to notice that it’s moving in a slow, mechanical line across the sky. The blue and red lights of a cop car flash along the edge of the park, and the distant pop of fireworks spooks Lacey back from the grass and to my side.
Ten-odd metres to my left, a woman on a picnic rug balances a fair-haired toddler in denim overalls on her knee. She scrolls on a smartphone with her left hand, her right arm fastening the toddler to her lap. The toddler stares into an iPad, which plays a cartoon I don’t recognise, and I watch the satellite disappear behind haze.
This morning I read that Elon Musk has been tasked with the role of leading Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). I wonder how many more satellites — soon-to-be-space-junk — we’ll have to hurl into the sky before the only visible celestial bodies left are mere testaments to our own short-sightedness.
I consider Optimus, the “trailblazing satellite”, who has become an example of the very space junk it was intended to “clean up”, while my dog waddles up and down the median strip out the front of our house having King Street Buffet inspired diarrhoea.
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We speak at length of the age we now know as the Anthropocene, often with reference to our species’ physical effect on the planet. But what of the Anthropocene’s effect on us? On who we are, how we think, and how we relate to the universe beyond? How might we be altering the environment in ways that ultimately alter us?
What kind of a mind is produced in a post-Anthropocentric world? A world where a human must trawl through photographs and history and poetic musings for a whiff of humility or awe?
What kind of human is born of a planet surrounded not by the unfathomable and unknowable, but by conquest? Can we eat away at the heavens, can we obscure our vision into the cosmos from sea level, without eating ourselves?
I worry for generations to come. Generations whose access to skyward wonderment and cosmic perspective may dwindle in congruence with man’s techno-hubris. We talk a lot about the physical degradation of the planet, lamenting how our careless pollution of the land, water, and atmosphere will affect our children.
But what of the space between ourselves and the rest of the universe? This space, if nothing more, is a shared lens that has facilitated man’s relationship both with himself and to the wider world since he first looked up.
We all need reminding of our smallness.
What might replace the perspective-inspiring effect of cosmic wonder come the day that our night skies are replaced by smog, satellites, and space junk? Can this shared lens be decluttered and repaired, or are we slowly committing ourselves to an existence severed off from the pre-Anthropocene; amputated from the everything else?
Joshua Dabelstein is a freelance writer based in Sydney, Australia. You can find more from Joshua at his Substack, Essays For Normal People.