Ship of Fools - Chapter 36
Pseudo-Literary Bullshit
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
[Go to the Table of Contents.]
Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more.
Having received Slim’s report on Luddington, Lonnie Ester takes a moment to ponder all the forces opposing him and his dreams of providing a backup home for humanity.
“YOU’VE done well, Slim,” Lonnie Ester said to the cowpoke seated across the desk from him. Slim had just reported on his exchange with Luddington. “You’re right, we don’t want him spooked, or we’ll never uncover the plot. I’ll trust you to keep an eye on him, and I’ll tell Roger to cancel the tail.”
“Thanks, Mr. Ester. But you reckon he’s still a threat?”
“I do, despite his protests to the contrary.”
“I’ll keep after him, and maybe we’ll flush some other plotters out of the bushes.”
After the cowboy left, Lonnie pondered the situation. Back when he’d sat in his college dorm room chewing over the world’s ills with a group of like-minded friends, he’d never imagined that the biggest obstacles to solving humanity’s problems wouldn’t be the restraints imposed by the second law of thermodynamics or the tyranny of the rocket equation, but the very irrationality of humans themselves and the impossibility of getting everyone, or even a majority, moving in one direction. The climate change deniers, largely responsible for the seas now advancing on coastlines around the globe, had been bad enough, but these space denialists were something else. It was almost as if they wanted humanity to go the way of the dinosaurs. Many cloaked their arguments in reasonable-sounding platitudes about the proper goals of space programs, with robots accomplishing every mission at a lower cost and without the technical challenges of human-centered space exploration. All well and good, they had a disagreement on tactical and strategic goals. But this CAOS group, aka the Committee to Abolish Outer Space, was an order of magnitude worse.
The group had apparently got its start with a manifesto published in 2015 by an obscure British writer1. The central idea being that humans had no place in space, and that the planets and stars and even Luna should remain “mysterious.” So it was better to imagine the moon was made of green cheese and the craters were holes chewed by mice? As if explaining the universe through math and science somehow removed the sense of awe and wonder! Maybe one day all the questions would be answered, but so far all the knowledge gained had only led to more questions and more mystery.
CAOS’s objections were really no different than a God of the gaps argument, only with an insistence that the gaps never be filled with knowledge. And from there it was only a short step to the young-Earth creationists and the flat-earthers, who denied much of the knowledge gained over two millennia.
The manifesto also attacked the idea that a new planetary frontier would provide an escape valve for humanity. That past frontiers had been genocidal for the indigenous peoples of the colonized lands was beyond doubt. But CAOS claimed that exploration and colonization had made things worse for the people in the Old World, that quality of life for the common people had been rising until the discovery of the Americas, at which point standards of living plummeted. It was an argument so absurd on its face that he’d never checked into it.
Reading the CAOS manifesto back when it came out, he hadn’t been sure whether the author was serious or it was just some tongue-in-cheek pseudo-literary bullshit. But a growing number of anarchists and ecoradicals had taken it seriously, their efforts directed at the kinds of small-scale pranks one might expect from a group whose manifesto proclaimed, “The Committee to Abolish Outer Space has existed for a long time — possibly forever. … We are few, and hunted, and scared, but in our weakness we will conquer.” One of the hypothetical group’s aims was to “overthrow the fascist institution of the sun, finally achieving the dream of all great revolutionary movements in history.” They were still hard to take seriously.
But when the group — or perhaps it was No Exit, no one was sure — managed to damage the nets used to catch SpaceOut’s returning first-stage rockets, putting a kink in the launch schedule that in turn endangered lives on the lunar transfer station, matters suddenly turned deadly earnest.
It was just one more proof of a truth that people had been learning over and over again this decade — that no matter how outlandish the conspiracy theory, no matter how foolishly harmless it sounded, it would eventually come back to bite you in the ass. One such theory had gotten him kidnapped just a few weeks back. He still needed to figure out a way to repay Liz Dare for getting him out of it, whenever she got done with this crazy expedition to Antarctica with Sarge Marshall. He’d been reading her online journalist’s notebook and viewing her video uploads on the Times’ news site with interest, but wondered how she had the patience to put up with Marshall’s irrationality and paranoia.
Irrationality — that’s what it all came down to, the one human failing that made running this project in a democratic fashion nearly impossible. He often wondered if Liu hadn’t been right, that more communally-oriented societies — not to say totalitarian ones — like China had an edge when it came to such grand humanity-scale projects. But he, for one, would never have made it under the Chinese system — individualism was just too baked into his identity. In fact, it was a struggle to remind himself that the burden of humanity didn’t rest on his shoulders alone, even if sometimes it felt that way.
Not that his own motives, when he examined them carefully, were really so rational. He was quite serious about the need to give humanity a second home in case its first fell to one cataclysm or another. And mining the moons and the asteroids, moving industrial production into space, these would help protect the home planet from toxic pollution, climate change, habitat loss, and a host of other environmental problems while ensuring a rising standard of living for the billions of people around the world who still needed to be fed and housed, much less enjoy the finer fruits of capitalism.
Serious goals, yes, but were they his most basic ones? No, if he had to admit it, he’d launched this whole project just because going into space was neat. A future with space exploration was exciting; one without, depressing, suicidally so. And this must be true, in some way, for most people.
This was the aspect of the space frontier’s “escape valve” that his critics didn’t understand. It wasn’t that a significant portion of Earth’s population could ever be housed in human habitat space stations, or even on Mars, at least not in this century. That wasn’t the kind of escape valve he was talking about. No, it was a psychological one, the idea that, however bad your lot in this place, there was another place you could go where things might be better, or at least different. Maybe you’d never make it there, but just knowing of its existence provided a sense of solace and hope.
For most of two centuries, that place had been America — when “the landlords and their regents, their bailiffs and their beagles” took away your land, as the old folk song had it, there was always “Amerikay.” That America’s streets weren’t actually paved with gold made little difference. It had proved a land of opportunity for generation after generation, at least until recent times.
Now space could offer that same sort of opportunity, with the added moral benefits of having no megafauna to wipe out and no indigenous population with prior claims to the land to displace and murder. Robots would provide the labor formerly carried out by serfs, slaves, indentured workers, tenant farmers, and migrant and prison laborers. It would be humanity’s first just and equitable expansion since the first peoples moved out of Africa.
If only everyone saw it that way!
But this brooding wasn’t solving anything practical. He had a meeting in half an hour with representatives from a prospective SpaceOut staff union — yet another bump on the road to his dreams. He had no problem with them banding together to present their demands and views — in fact, it was easier to deal with just a few of them — and no problem with paying them two or three times the going rate, with associated benefits. He only asked that they work as hard as he did to get a habitable space colony finished in the next five years, a date that had already been pushed back far longer than he’d expected. He’d have to watch out for any tendencies toward the make-work or free-riding he’d heard about with other unionized shops. That was no way to establish a home for humanity in space.
His preparation for the meeting was interrupted when his comms device emitted the special tone he’d assigned to alerts regarding Liz Dare. Maybe this one would feature Sarge Marshall receiving his comeuppance.
He opened the alert, expecting to see a chunk of text from her journal, or maybe a video log of icebergs and penguins. Instead, the face he saw on the video’s thumbnail was Marshall’s, and he was standing in some sort of ice cave.
He pressed play, wondering what had gone wrong with the expedition and hoping Liz was all right.
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Do you think Lonnie is sincere about his motives, or are these merely a façade for darker ambitions?
Next up: Chapter 37, “On the Path,” in which we’ll find out what happened to Liz after her plunge into the abyss.
Here’s the actual article: The Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space. I now notice it’s by Sam Kriss, who’s here on Substack. All his stuff seems satirical, but not this satirical. So far as I know, no one has taken up the call to abolish outer space, which the satirical narrator of this piece, like the flat-earthers, believes doesn’t exist. But who knows? CAOS cells could be working in secret right now.