SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Index
Index .............................................................................................................................................................. 1
Crusoe Syndrome 1NC.................................................................................................................................. 2
Link: Militarization ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Link: Get off the rock.................................................................................................................................... 11
Link: Econ .................................................................................................................................................... 13
Link: Infinite Resources ............................................................................................................................... 14
Links- exploration ........................................................................................................................................ 15
Link: Colonizing ........................................................................................................................................... 17
Link: GPS/Positioning .................................................................................................................................. 18
Link- Resources........................................................................................................................................... 23
Link- Satellites ............................................................................................................................................. 24
Link: development = commercial use .......................................................................................................... 27
Link: Treaties ............................................................................................................................................... 29
Link: Mars .................................................................................................................................................... 30
Link: Mars (Zubrin specific).......................................................................................................................... 31
Impact: Genocide ........................................................................................................................................ 32
Impacts- Standing reserve ........................................................................................................................... 34
Impacts- Genocide....................................................................................................................................... 36
Impact- destruction of the commons ............................................................................................................ 37
Alt Solvency ................................................................................................................................................. 38
Case turn: Econ ........................................................................................................................................... 40
A2: Perm...................................................................................................................................................... 41
A2: Timeframe ............................................................................................................................................. 43
A2: Science first ........................................................................................................................................... 44
A2: Alt does nothing..................................................................................................................................... 45
Ethics first (Also A2 Perm) ........................................................................................................................... 47
Value to life O/W Extinction ......................................................................................................................... 49
Reps first ..................................................................................................................................................... 50
***AFF answers: commons turn ................................................................................................................... 52
AFF Answers: Onto bad .............................................................................................................................. 53
AFF answers: tech inevitable ....................................................................................................................... 54
AFF answers: Perm ..................................................................................................................................... 55
AFF answers: Alt fails .................................................................................................................................. 57
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SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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1NC (normal)
A) The 1AC inducts space into the open market- ready to be sold to the highest
bidder for its resources; where one sees an open commons corporate entrepreneurs
always see a new way to make money
Bollier ‘4 (Space as the final frontier of the Commons; David Bollier [activist and writer about the commons]; June 23, 2004;
http://onthecommons.org/space-final-frontier)
Space is apparently the “final frontier” for the free market. If most of us look up at the heavens in wonder, a scheming
corps of entrepreneurs are apparently seeing space and celestial bodies (planets, asteroids, solar energy) for their raw market
value…especially now that a private rocket has been successfully launched. Peter Montague alerted me to a recent essay by Bruce
Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, who writes about the coming privatization of space. One problem is the growing
“pollution” of space by orbiting trash; more than 100,000 identifiable bits of debris are monitored by NORAD. Another problem is what “law” shall govern claims to
“property” in space. The
U.S. refused to sign a United Nations “moon treaty” in 1979 lest it preclude military uses of the moon
and space. But the treaty, writes Gagnon, also outlaws any “ownership” claims on the moon. Gagnon writes: “As the privateers
move into space, in addition to building space hotels and the like, they also want to claim ownership of the planets
because they hope to mine the sky. Gold has been discovered on asteroids, helium-3 on the moon, and magnesium,
cobalt and uranium on Mars. It was recently reported that the Haliburton Corporation is now working with NASA to develop new drilling capabilities to
mine Mars.” A group called United Societies in Space (USIS) sees space as the “free market frontier,” and wants to
encourage private property rights and investment in space. Once again the same dynamic repeats itself: taxpayers spend billions upon
billions of dollars to develop a new technology or resource, and then the “private sector” (sic) marches in to privatize the profits.
B) Plan means that space will be privatized, falling prey to the same managerial
control that wrecked the earth environment
Collis & Graham 2009. (Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation Professor of Communication and Culture
Queensland University of Technology.) Political Geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management. Management and Organisation History, 4(3).
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21225
The general assumption of corporate lobbying in relation to Space law is that the future of Space is a corporate future, that Space
business entails significant risk, and that therefore, it is important that ‘the best course of action is for the spacefaring nations to enact legislation which provides
for property rights without territorial sovereignty’ (White 2009 cited in 4Frontiers Corporation 2009b). Along with 4Frontiers, corporate and government
agencies have turned their interests to mining the cosmos (see for instance Lucidian 2008–2009; Valentine 2002). Often such efforts
are framed by a concern for the environment (O’Neill 2000). In the tradition of managerial ‘technocratic discourse’ (McKenna
and Graham 2000), the threat of a catastrophic future is put forward as a reason for more of the same, and for why Space
cannot be profitably seen as terra communis. Valentine (2002), Director of the Space Studies Institute, exhorts the private sector to ‘mine the
sky, defend the Earth, [and] settle the Universe’. Free market managerialism naturally sees the private sector as central to such
efforts and, clearly, the terra communis view of Space is due an enclosures movement of its own, first in discourse
then in commercial and technical practice.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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1NC (Normal)
C) The affirmative results in a standing reserve which calculates, controls, and
obliterates any value to life and the environment
Mitchell 5 [Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at StanfordUniversity, "Heidegger and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology,
Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]/
Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the distance that would separate the supposedly opposed
parties. The analysis of technology in Heidegger's work is guided by the (phenomenological) insight that "All distances in time and space are shrinking" (GA 79:
3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165).13Airplanes, microwaves, e-mail, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure, but there is a
metaphysical distance that has likewise been reduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualism has been
surpassed by what Heidegger terms the standing-reserve(Bestand), the eerie companion of technological dominance and "enframing." Insofar as an
object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no longer be found. "What stands by in the sense of standingreserve, no longer stands over against us as object" (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another;
the standing-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and in this circulation it eludes the
modern determination of thinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance of
position, positing, and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything becomes an item for ordering
(bestellen) and delivering (zustellen); everything is "ready in place" (auf der StellezurStelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA
79: 28). The standing-reserve "exists" within this cycle of order and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not
merely a development external to modem objects, but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its
circulation along these supply channels, where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to
any other. Replaceability is the being of things today. "Today being is being-rephlceable"(VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in
1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle
of ordering and delivery does not operate serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead,there
is only a steady
circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there in storage. The standing-reserve
spreads itself throughout the entirety of its' replacement cycle, without being fully present at any point along the
circuit. But it is not merely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To complete Heidegger's view of the enframed standing reserve, we
have to take into consideration the global role of value, a complementary determination of being: "Being has become value"
(GA 5: 258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of value is so far
from preserving differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with its
replacement. When everything
has a value, an exchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents,
languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing effect. The standing-reserve collapses
opposition. The will that dominates the modem era is personal, even if, as is the case with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely known by the self
at any particular time. Nonetheless, the will still expresses the individuality of the person and one's perspective. In the era of technology, the will that comes to
the fore is no longer the will of an individual, but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the will in question no longer wills an object outside of itself, but
only wills itself; it is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself. This self-affirming character of the will allows the will an independence from the
human. Manifest in the very workings of technology is a will to power, which for Heidegger is always a will to will. Because the will to will has no goal outside of it,
its willing is goalless and endless.The human is just another piece of a standing-reserve that circulates without purpose. Actually,
things have not yet gone so far; the human still retains a distinction, however illusive, as "the most important raw material" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance
has nothing to do with the personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger immediately makes clear,"The human is the 'most important raw material' because
he remains the subject of all consumption, so much so that he lets his will go forth unconditionally in this process and simultaneously becomes the 'object' of the
abandonment of being" (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will, which satisfies itself with restricted goals and
accomplishments. Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent of the abandonment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The more the
world comes to stand at the will's disposal, the more that being retreats from it. The human will is allied with the technological will to will. For this reason-and the
following is something often overlooked in considering Heidegger's political position between the wars-Heidegger is critical of the very notion of aFR'hrer, or
leader, who would direct the circulation of the standing-reserve according to his own personal will. The leaders of today are merely the
necessary accompaniment of a standing-reserve that, in its abstraction, is susceptible to planning. The leaders'
seeming position of "subjectivity," that they are the ones who decide, is again another working of "objectification,"
where neither of these terms quite fits, given that beings are no longer objective. The willfulness of the leaders is not due to a
personal will: One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in
accordance with their own will [Eigensinn]. In truth, however, leaders are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have gone over to a way of errancy,
in which an emptiness expands that requires a single ordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tin) The leaders do not stand above or control the
proceedings, the proceedings in question affect beings as a whole, including the leaders. Leaders are simply points of convergence or conduits for the channels
of circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere outside of it. No leader is the sole authority; instead, there are numerous "sectors" to which each
leader is assigned. The demands of these sectors will be similar of course, organized around efficiency and productivity in distribution and circulation. In
short,leaders
serve the standing-reserve.
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Silent Nihilists.
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1NC (Normal)
D) Alternative: Reject the 1AC’s enclosure of space.
By shifting our paradigm from one of commodification to one which values the
commons we perform a mental excavation allowing for real change to occur
Ristau and Bradley 10 http://onthecommons.org/commons-meets-community; May 14, 2010; Julie Ristau and Alexa Bradley (community organizers.
Ristau is Managing Fellow of On The Commons and Bradley is Associate Director of the Grassroots Policy Project)
From many of us who lived in the communist world, waiting was often, if not always, close to an outer limit.
Surrounded, enclosed, colonized from within by the totalitarian system, individuals lost any expectation of finding a
way out. In a word, they lost hope. Yet they did not lose the need to hope, nor could they lose it, for without hope life
loses its meaning. ??“Playwright, philosopher, and politician Vacel Havel. Imagine what would happen if the commons paradigm
became the fundamental orientation for our lives. It requires a break in habitual thinking. A jolt. A leap. We step
through the looking glass. We look back at the earth from the moon. We cross over. Paradigm shifting. It will take some
imagination. It will take some excavation of memory and feeling. Working on the commons is in part, about cracking
open the constraints on our imaginations that keep us from even seeking a transformed reality. The commons has
power in the way that it has both a material basis and a history??“there are and have been many commons which people have observed
and benefited from??“and there is an idea of commons that has existed and evolved over time. We have found that people can identify
commons experiences in their own life , as well as the history of their families, communities and country. A commons
is an imaginable if largely forgotten reality, not just a theoretical idea. What reawakens our ability to think from the
perspective of a commons paradigm? We wonder, what is the role of memory in imagination and hope? Memory could
play a central character in the “naming” aspect of our work. When we exchange memories, even when we silently remember or
write down something from our past, then we notice that memory puts together the experiences which have been stored in our
mind in a new manner. Memory does not just recall, but rather it is a creative process, it builds new connections. It works
associatively, narratively like poetry. It is a matter of putting together the story anew. And in this form of remembering,
something very important happens: it’s not that we can return to the past, but rather we appropriate it, we recover
and use it for our present day life in a manner which is useful to us and our relationships with one another. We have been
focused on significance and meaning in the naming part of our workshop. The question we follow up with after we have named (what is one commons you can
think of) is one about meaning, when perhaps we should be more dwelling.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Crusoe Syndrome 1NC
A) Humans fear the unknown and thus attempt to control it. This is “Crusoe
Syndrome” -the ideology which encloses space so we can feel as if we are “in
control” when in fact we are in a state of chaotic relation to the unknown. This
paradox forces us to continually use space as a means to destroy it
Marzec 2002 (Robert P. Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, “A Genealogy of Land in a Global Context,” boundary 2,
Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2002, pp. 129-156 (Article), MUSE, JR2)
When Robinson Crusoe first sees the island that will eventually become his homeland for twenty-seven years, he is
so filled with anxiety that he codes the land as ‘‘more frightful than the Sea.’’1 Fearful of unknown space, he spends
his first night inhabiting the land not on its own terms but metaphysically above it in a tree (RC, 36).2 Uncontrollably
thrown into the space of uncultivated land, he is unable to immediately establish a frame of reference, which triggers
a response of dread: The land appears as an example of the Lacanian Real, a nonsymbolizable, meaningless
presence that bewilders Crusoe’s sensibility, and by extension the sociosymbolic order of the British Empire that he
carries on his back.3He broods over the potential for ‘‘God to spread a table in the Wilderness’’ (RC, 69, 107) and
gradually eases his dread by spending decades setting up a series of enclosures that slowly cover the landscape. It
is not only Crusoe who fears uncultivated land and achieves order by enclosing it; Daniel Defoe himself was a great
believer in the power of enclosures to establish a radically new mode of enlightened (imperial) existence that
transformed the land into an object to be mastered by humankind. In A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Defoe
surveys the domain of England’s immediate landscape, cataloging in some six hundred pages every quarter of
English soil. Throughout, he advocates the scientific and market-driven normalization of the land, valorizing enclosures
as ‘‘islands of improvement in a sea of open-field.’’4 In the fictional (but more widely read and thus more culturally significant) Robinson
Crusoe, this same enclosing of the land authorizes Crusoe to spread God’s table and allows him to climb down from
the tree (yet ‘‘remain’’ there in a metaphysical sense) to occupy the space of the Other. Only from within the pale of enclosures
does Crusoe establish a relation to the land, a relation that is at the same time paradoxically not of the land, for the land
must become English land before he can connect to it in any substantial fashion. After God’s table is spread, Crusoe says that he no longer
‘‘afflict[s] [his] self with Fruitless Wishes of being there,’’ for the island has come to radiate with the ‘‘Dispositions of
Providence,’’ which ‘‘quiet his Mind’’ and ‘‘order every Thing for the best’’ (RC, 79–80; my emphasis). Crusoe tames
the undifferentiated earth of the island by endowing the land with the positive and moral ‘‘seed’’ of ‘‘Providence.’’ In
order to cope with an entirely Other form of land than that to which he is accustomed, he introduces an ideological
apparatus to overcode the earth. In this fashion, he can ‘‘quiet’’ his mind, relieve his anxiety, and resist the nightmare
of actually ‘‘being there’’ on the island: the terror of inhabiting an Other space as Other. This ‘‘being in the tree,’’ a
resistance to ‘‘being there’’ until the land is enclosed and transformed, is the structure of what I call the Crusoe
syndrome.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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B) Imperialism shines true, the plan is the next novel of unexplored space attempting
to redefine “the commons of space” as dangerous but controllable. this allows us to
not only colonize it, but also to deem any part of space that is not economically up to
“par” with other parts as savage, unknown and dangerous—that’s an independent
link to imperialism and ongoing genocide
Marzec 2002 (Robert P. Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, “A Genealogy of Land in a Global Context,” boundary 2,
Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2002, pp. 129-156 (Article), MUSE, JR2)
Defoe’s handling of the land in his Tour and in Robinson Crusoe indicates, I claim, a more global structure of feeling
coming into existence during this preimperial historical occasion. It is a structure that stands as a formal diagram for
future colonial developments: Before England began to colonize open, wild, and uncultivated land and subjects
abroad, it created an apparatus for colonizing its open land and subjects at home—an apparatus that could readily be
transplanted to distant territories.5Enabling the British subject to establish a sovereign sense of identity, enclosures precipitate and prepare the way
for England’s relocation in the expanding circle of the colonial world map. It was in the enclosure act that the ideology of imperialism
became a material reality, with enclosures creating a new problematic that formed a nexus between the growing
colonial cultural order, the domestication of foreign lands and peoples, monopoly capital, and the novel. English novels from the
eighteenth to the twentieth century contain a surprising number of significant references to enclosures and to the chaotic nature of unenclosed savage common
lands. These references indicate the extent to which the
English novel itself is inscribed in the midst of a new imperial formation of
land. Throughout Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, Jones receives repeated warnings and punishments for transgress5. The British colonization of
America certainly predates Defoe’s novel. However, the enclosure movement itself (before the specifically ‘‘parliamentary’’ enclosure waves of the
eighteenth century) was well under way by the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the first enclosures date from the dissolution of the monasteries.
transgressing enclosed borders.6Before the truth of Jones’s blood relation to Allworthy is discovered, Jones cannot claim a legal and moral connection to the
land. He lives as a vagabond, without any right to English soil and, consequently, any legitimized form of identity. Escaping his label as a vagabond to eventually
become a legal landowner is synecdochic of a narrative imperative that buttresses the classical novel form: The novel’s hero reaches his or her maturation by
domesticating itinerant (false) tendencies. By connecting identity maturation to gaining a legal and moral right to the land,
Fielding replicates Defoe’s narrative and the development of Crusoe from a wayward traveler who has no identity to a
landowning governor. This relation between identity and the land appears repeatedly in the form of an anxiety that
overwhelms the (pre)imperial subject, an impatience marked by a certain nonfoundational nomadic movement that
must eventually be tamed and managed by being inserted into a colonial system of utility. Robinson Crusoe, in the early
stages of his identity formation, feels compelled time and again to escape from national borders by going to sea,
even at the risk of his own death. What becomes transparent is a nonsubjective ontological flow of desire, an irreducible
and founding concomitant of the act of constituting an imperial subjectivity. The colonialist/imperial opposition between a self who is
governed by an unruly nomadic impulse and one who has domesticated this impulse by becoming an agriculturalist
(settler) is a structural imperative of Western teleological narratives of identity formation: The movement of nomadic
desire must come under control through the commodification of that desire in a colonialist apparatus. The specific
form of that commodification is the enclosure act—the grounding of a previously open subjectivity in a fabricated
(colonized) land. Symptoms of this fear of uncolonized desire/land surface in other novels. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela states at one point that she
would go so far as to suffer the terrors of being stranded on some ‘‘wild common’’ rather than stay in confinement
with Mr. B. Yet when a chance to escape arises, she recoils from crossing this anarchic territory. In Tobias Smollet’s
Humphrey Clinker, Matthew Bramble travels extensively through England, Assiduously tallying the financial success and the‘‘civility’’of
those who have cultivated enclosures out of ‘‘uninhabitable’’ fields ‘‘lying [in] waste.’’ At the end of the novel, Bramble proudly
proclaims that everything within his field of vision has reached the point of being regulated to his satisfaction: The fields have been ‘‘improved,’’ the
economy of the farms are being ‘‘superintended,’’ and the general cultivation of enclosed country life gradually finds
the characters ‘‘perfectly at ease in both . . . mind and body.’’7In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the unenclosed
commons appear as a region of delinquency, an influence leading to a lack of mental discipline, to a ‘‘loitering’’ and
wild mind.8E.P.Thompson has shown that signifiers such as wild, barbarian, and wicked came to be part of one’s
daily vocabulary when referencing those who lived on the commons.9George Eliot deploys a similar metaphorics of enclosure in her
novels. In Adam Bede, the wealthy landowner Arthur Donnithorne dreams of applying the enclosing techniques of the famous agriculturalist Arthur Young. In
this manner, he can discipline himself and tame the ‘‘wild country’’ but also discipline his farmers to ‘‘a better
management of the land,’’ whereby he may ‘‘overlook’’ them from atop his horse.10In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Robert Moore
triumphs as the hero at the end of the novel, in part because of his promise to reterritorialize the landscape by securing an act to
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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enclose the open space of Nunnely Common. With an act of enclosure, the tensions of the novel disappear;
everything finds its ‘‘proper’’ place at the conclusion: Moore doubles the value of his mill property, expands his
manufacture and holdings, turns ‘‘wild ravines’’ into ‘‘smooth descents,’’ remakes the ‘‘rough pebbled track’’ into an
‘‘even, firm, broad, black, sooty road,’’ and parcels out the entire parish between himself and his brother.
C) The alternative is to re-imagine space as a place of utter chaos with out any sense
of dictation that allows us to truly realize the imperial ontology that creates the
unknown as an adversary for freedom and an enemy of the Rhizome
Spanos in 2009 (Willam V.Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, “Disclosing Enclosure,” symploke,
Volume 17, Numbers 1-2, 2009, pp. 307-315 (Review), MUSE, JR2)
Following his genealogical examination of these early, canon-forming British novels that focus primarily on the way the
enclosure of the open land of
the Commons inaugurates the self as “free” individual and the nation as a unified space of privatized of property,
Marzec goes on to analyze a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novels that in increasing degree point both 1) to the fulfillment
of the logical economy of land enclosure in the establishment of the global enclosure movement that has come to be
called imperialism and 2) to its demise: the dis-closure in the very moment of arriving at its logical end (its closure) of
that ineffable (unrepresentable) force of being that this disciplinary logic of enclosure, which see it as “lack,” cannot
finally contain. In so doing, they also announce 3) an alternative—an-archic, non-representational—understanding of
the land, that is, the positive onto-eco-political possibilities inhering in precisely what the truth discourse of enclosure
demonized: the nothing, the earth, openness, agonic relationality (between human beings and the land), instability,
singularity, errancy, nomadic flow, the commons, and so forth. In the process, not incidentally, Marzec shows how
blinded to the crucial ontological register the canonical and even avant-garde commentators on these modernist
novels have been by their unexamined adherence to the very visualist/disciplinary perspective (the view from
above—what Althuser would call their capitalist “problematic”—that compartmentalizes being into (spatial) tables
(and disciplines) that constructed—and naturalized—the individual self, the nation as space of private property, and
the imperial world view. “The conclusions drawn from these liberal humanist approaches…to the question of finding a
‘truer’ relation to one’s territory,’’ Marzec writes, “all fail to break free from the economy of agricentrism, which can be
seen at play in the very terms deployed by these critics in the struggle to gain freedom: ‘middle ground,’ ‘unity,’ ‘organic
essence,’ ‘landscape,’ ‘order,’ ‘balance,’ ‘equilibrium,’ and so on.” As a result, this “search for a ‘truer’ relation based on an organically
inherent equilibrium occludes the resistant character of the land, and passes by the possibility of thinking humanity’s
proximity to the land from the dynamic of an exchange-limit structure” that wards off the apparatuses of capture
(126). Once this regulative logic of enclosure has been thematized, in other words, Marzec’s book goes on to infer an alternative
postcolonial strategy that thinks the alienation of the subject produced by the dynamics of enclosure primarily in terms Heidegger’s
essays on the relation between earth and world (the essays “The Question Concerning Technology,” “The Origins of the Work of Art,” “Building Dwelling,
Thinking,” for example ) and, above 312 all, Deleuze and Guattari’s “Treatise on Nomadology,” in their great book Milles plateaux (1980). This “nomadology,”
Marzec claims in the
process of a lucid and illuminating earlier reading of this difficult text, enables a return to the
(non)foundational imperatives that endows human being with an identityless self that relates to the resistant earth in
the form of the rhizomatic inhabitancy that the individuating and alienating logic of enclosure has disabled. Marzec
inaugurates this turn toward the question of a people’s integral/rhizomatic relation to the land and to the potential
resistance to acts of enclosure and colonization by way of extremely original deconstructive readings of Thomas Hardy’s
Return of the Native (1878), D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and, above all, E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924): the
fiction that the fulfillment of the “benign” logic of both domestic and global enclosure has compelled it to address by
way of disclosing at this end its predatory essence. All of these novels published in the interregnum between the
colonial and postcolonial ages, each in their own degree and way, disclose what the dominant and polyvalent
discourse of enclosure represent as “lack” (negatively) to be a positive “warding off”: the finally unaccommodatable
spectral force that haunts the structuralist discourse of enclosure that would transform “it” into “meaning.” I cite, for
economy, an exemplary passage from Marzec’s originary reading of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End and A Passage to
India, in which Forster pits the Hindu professor, Godbole’s non-presentational language, attuned to the earth’s
resistance to classified and fixed, against his English interrogators’ anxious will, grounded ultimately in the logic of
enclosure, to name the ineffable Marabar caves: As the conversation unfolds, each of the characters attempts to nail
down the correct description of the caves. They each attempt to name the precise nature of the caves, to unearth
their meaning. Godbole, however, is carrying on a different kind of communicatory act, which the others do not hear.
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The caves appear in a tendential emergence that cannot be traced. They are not an object to be given over to
mastery, but an opening that the characters cannot assail. And they cannot assail it for the very reason that they all
take the approach of “discovery.” It is, in fact, exactly the imperial logic of discovery that the novel travesties in this
passage. The conversation begins to exert pressure on the characters’ need to know, their need to explore, and
stake a claim for understanding. It is this same kind of withholding of positive knowledge that we see performed as well in the character of Ruth
Wilcox [in Howard’s End],who, when she is coerced by Margaret into giving a precise answer [in an earlier conversation], move’s “with uneasiness beneath the
clothes.” (147)
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Militarization
The militarization of space is an expansion of American imperialism which seeks to
privatize and commodify resources
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Visiting
Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 94-95,
The United States government is by far the dominant military force in outer space. And its aim in militarizing outer
space is to achieve what the US Joint Chiefs of Staff call ‘full-spectrum domination’, one in which the US government actively
enforces a monopoly over outer space as well as air, land and sea. The purpose of this monopoly is not simply to
control the use of force on Earth, but also to secure economic interests actually in space, present and future. As we go
on to argue in Chapter 4, satellites have become so crucial to the functioning of the world economy that there has been
increasing tension amongst the cosmic superpowers over their vulnerability to attack, either from Earth-based
weapons or from weapons mounted on other satellites. Star wars systems are conceived in part to protect space
assets from perceived threats. If more people are going to be encouraged to invest in space technology, they will need guarantees from their
governments that their investments will be protected. The US has historically been anxious about other nations attempting to control Earth orbit, and for that
reason an American Space Station was proposed, one that would ensure that access to space was vetoed by American interests. Fortunately, the US decided,
perhaps historically rather surprisingly, that in the post-Cold War climate cooperation with other countries in the project would be more beneficial than a unilateral
solution, and so the American Space Station became the International Space Station. In 1989 a congressional study, Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years
(Collins 1989), argued along similar lines that whoever held the Moon would control access to space. This echoed an older 1959 study, and appears to be a
possible motive for the recent initiative to establish an inhabited Moon base by 2024. With a system of property rights already being drawn up for space
resources, a military presence in space to ensure these rights is becoming an increasing priority. Historically, as many
pro-space advocates point out, colonization has been established through the military. Pro-space activists have generally been
divided over the issue of weapons in space (Michaud 1986). There are those who are against it per se, but even fewer see it as a positive use of space. There
are, however, some who see it as a necessary evil in order to protect space assets and operations, and as a possible step in the eventual settlement of space.
analysis of the new form of imperialism is again useful in understanding these military developments. It is
unlike that typically pursued until the late nineteenth century. It does not entail one society invading another with a
view to permanently occupying that society and using its resources. Rather, it entails societies (and particularly the
US with its enormous fusion of capital and political power) privatizing and commodifying resources previously owned
by the public sector or held in common in other ways. This process is developing within the ‘advanced’ societies,
such as the US. But, even more important, it is a strategy that is being spread throughout the cosmos.
Harvey’s
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
10
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Get off the rock
Getting off the rock is a band-aid solution. The earthly problems that put us at this
point will simply replicate themselves
Lin, 06. Patrick, Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State Univeristy. “Viewpoint: Look Before Taking Another Leap For Mankind- Ethical and Social
Considerationa in Rebuilding Society in Space” Astropolitics. < http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14777620601039701.>
If not for adventure or knowledge, there are other, more pragmatic reasons to consider. For example, notable
scientists, like the late Carl Sagan and
‘‘backing up the biosphere’’ in case our world becomes uninhabitable. Of course, if that ever
happened, it may be our own fault, given our weapons of mass destruction, freely-distributed recipes for the 1918 killer virus,
predicted misapplications of biotechnology and nanotech nology, and other possible man-made catastrophes. So is it a
good enough reason to inhabit another planet, because we want a ‘‘do over’’ if we destroy our own? And if so, again, what
are we doing to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes and lay waste to another biosphere? If we have put
ourselves in a position where we need a back-up plan, it is unclear how settling space will improve our selfdestructive tendencies until we address those root issues. Less metaphysically, does having a safety net, such as a back up planet, make it
Stephen Hawking, discuss
more likely that we take more chances and treat our home planet less carefully? This would seem to be consistent with human behavior: as risks decrease, we
are more likely to engage in that activity. However, an argument might be made that people who engage in possibly catastrophic acts are not the kind of people
worried about our future and would proceed ahead regard less of a back-up biosphere. Further, perhaps having a ‘‘Plan B’’ does make sense, if we think that a
natural apocalypse may occur, such as an asteroid collision. Another related reason for space development is that inhabit ing other planets is the ‘‘social release
valve’’ we need to alleviate overcrowding and diminishing resources here on our home planet. But is this an argument for space exploration, or
for population control and more intelligent use of our natural resources? Once again, if we need to escape our own planet
for societal, political, or economic reasons, what is our plan for doing it right on another planet, or will we be bringing
the same baggage into space to create more of the same? Another reason, and one that is perhaps too straightforward, was recently
articulated by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and founder of SpaceX: ‘‘My goal is to make humans the first interplan etary species.’’5 Although similar remarks
have been made else where, by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Robert Zubrin to name a few, Musk is actually in a unique position to realize this goal, so it is
important to look at his particular motivations. Musk’s reason seems to speak either to our biological drive to propagate our own genetic lines, which incidentally
serves to continue the species, or to a more narcissistic desire to literally take over that which is within our reach. Either case should give us pause: what
are
the ethics of introducing new species to environments where they are not normally found, and is the fact that we can
send the average citizen into space and extend the human species on other planets or moons reason enough to do
it? And why humans—would we have a moral issue with populating the Moon with monkeys or dandelions instead? This may seem to be a ridiculous question,
until we recognize various compelling arguments in philosophy that there is nothing intrinsically special about being human or that some animals should have the
same moral status as people do.6 At any rate,
without invoking God or some metaphysical right, it is very difficult to explain why
human interests are more valuable than non-human interests, making our space quest seem much less noble and
much more selfish. Even if a more defensible reason is that space exploration pushes human limits, that drive to break past existing boundary surely must
be subject to reasonable limitations. For instance, we are able to clone human beings, yet we refrain from that practice for ethical reasons. We are physically able
to build homes inside national parks and other uninhabited areas, but we refrain from doing so, at least to comply with laws designed to preserve that
environment.
Issues like space debris prove that even if we do get off the rock, there is no way to
secure humanity. The 1AC’s description of problem solving cannot be trusted. We
will carry our current problems into space
Lin, 06. Patrick, Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State Univeristy. “Viewpoint: Look Before Taking Another Leap For Mankind- Ethical and Social
Considerationa in Rebuilding Society in Space” Astropolitics. < http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14777620601039701.>
One of the first and natural reactions of many is to ask: should
we be encouraging private space exploration, given what we have
done to our own planet? What is to prevent problems on Earth from following us into outer space, if we have not
evolved the attitudes, and ethics, which have contributed to those problems? As examples, an over-developed sense
of nationalism may again lead to war with other humans in space, and ignoring the cumulative effects of small acts
may again lead to such things as the over- commercialization of space and space pollution. Have we learned enough about
ourselves and our history to avoid the same mistakes as we have made on Earth? Preserving the pristine, unspoiled expanses of space is a recurring theme,
much as it is important to preserve wetlands,rainforests, and other natural wonders here on Earth. We
have already littered the orbital
environment in space with floating deb ris that we need to track so that spacecraft and satellites navigate around, not
to mention abandoned equipment on the Moon and Mars. So what safeguards are in place to ensure we do not
exacer bate this problem, especially if we propose to increase space traf fic? Furthermore, are we prepared to risk
accidents in space from the technologies we might use, such as nuclear power?
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
11
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
The “rock” is not going anywhere. The 1AC disaster scenario is an example of how
politicians use doomsday claims to exploit outer space. The only people who would
leave would be the elite.
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Brighton (Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 156-157, dml)
On the other hand, some sociologists have started mirroring the arguments of pro-space advocates and are considering the development of space resources as
a permanent resolution of the second contradiction, and working this into a fundamental critique of Marx’s political economy (Thomas-Pellicer 2004). This raises
some of the debates surrounding the second contradiction thesis. Like the proponents of capitalism’s infinite expansion into an infinite
outer space, the second contradiction thesis can be seen as depending on a form of catastrophism: the idea that society
and nature are doomed. But, first, it is not clear that this is an accurate account of the Left version of the second contradiction. O’Connor (1996) is the
leading contemporary Marxist proponent of the second contradiction and he argues that it is most likely to be addressed by state intervention and limited state
ownership of the means of production. But the picture of catastrophism, whether propounded by Left or Right, is quite misleading. Whatever
happens to the Earth and the cosmos there will still be some form of a nature there (Harvey 1996). Certainly some
people, specifically the poor, may come off much worse than others as a result of such humanization. But this is a long way
from saying that capitalism and nature will come to an end as a result of commodification and environmental degradation. As pro-space activists show, the
pessimism of the second contradiction thesis can easily be adopted not just by socialists but by the promoters of capitalism
who would use the possibility of the Earth’s ‘demise’ as an excuse to continue privatizing the cosmos. One example is the
revenue generated by Earth-imaging satellites, used largely to monitor climatic and environmental change. Harris and Olby (2000) projected a market of $6.5
billion in 2007 for Earth observation data and services. Developing the rest of the cosmos entails what Enzensberger (1996) might call the next stage of the ecoindustrial complex: providing economic opportunities for those in the business of rectifying the degradation caused by capitalism in the first instance.
Humanizing nature on Earth or in the cosmos need be neither a complete disaster nor a complete triumph. The
priority for historical materialism is to consider the implications of outer space humanization for particular societies ,
particular sectors of the population and particular species and ecological systems.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
12
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Econ
Using the economy as a justification for exploration and development is simply the
commodification of space
Gouge, 02.Catherine, West Virginia University. “The Great Storefront of American Nationalism: Narratives of Mars and the Outerspatial Frontier”
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/gouge.htm
From the perspective of those moving in to explore and colonize, prospective
frontiers are, on the other hand, a space of unfulfilled hopes
and dreams, a fantasy space of unlimited socioeconomic potential. And it is this potential which marketers of frontier
technologies and proponents of frontier exploration often exploit to secure public support. Accordingly, the twentiethcentury American public was encouraged to associate a desire to explore outer space, in which media
representations and science fiction invested so deeply, with two things: citizenship and products they could buy . In the
1920s, American market specialists learned that by altering the packaging and appearance of a product, they could increase public desire for it (McCurdy 209).
Consequently, especially in the years following the Great Depression, product designers manipulated product sizes, shapes, and colors to mimic the sleek,
aerodynamic lines and polished finishes of various "frontier technologies": trains, airplanes, and, eventually, rockets. The average American citizen,
or so the logic went, could participate in the frontier, the great storefront of American nationalism, by buying things.
Owning Teflon frying pans and consuming products like Tang were markers of good citizenship. And planned obsolescence, primarily in technology markets,
became a strategy for smart business, a strategy further fueled by the pattern of the early space program, which frequently substituted rockets and spacecraft
with newer models. The official website for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory continues the project of conveying an intimacy between the development of outerspatial frontier technologies and the United States economy. In fact, one section of the site devoted to NASA's official "U.S. Commercial Technology Policy,"
formulated in 1995, includes portions of Bill Clinton's 1993 U.S. Technology Policy that ask NASA to foster its involvement in the "progress of the nation" by
developing "new ways of doing business." 1 3 . "Since 1958," the policy reads, "NASA has been an important source of much of the nation's new technology."
The site proceeds to explain that in "today's increasingly competitive global economic climate, the U.S. must ensure that its technological resources are fully
utilized throughout the economy." And this means, according to the site, that NASA must accept a "new, broader role" in the future of this nation: "While
meeting its unique mission goals, NASA Research and Development must also enhance overall U.S. economic
security." The site imagines this dynamic as one in which NASA essentially feeds its "technological assets and knowhow" into U.S. economic growth. This should be done, the site maintains, by "quickly and effectively translat[ing]" NASA's
assets and know-how "into improved production processes and marketable, innovative products." In order to accomplish this, the agency must find "new ways of
doing business and new ways of measuring progress." Indeed, as this NASA policy makes clear, there is no such thing as a purely
scientific project. NASA's current official technology policy is, thus, on one level, a utopian projection or science
fiction that imagines the productive power of NASA technologies to "enhance overall U.S. economic security."
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
13
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Infinite Resources
The idea that space has “infinite” resources is indicative of the need to exploit and
colonize space. This is rooted in American imperialism.
Gouge, 01 Catherine, Doctor of Philosophy in English at West Virginia University. “The American Frontier: History, Rhetoric, Concept” Americana: The
Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Spring 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2007/gouge.htm
Indeed, in the service of resolving the contradictions between the economic and political imperatives of liberal democracy in the United States, many latetwentieth century frontierist American narratives commodify and reify citizenship and progress as if they could be separated from a history of exclusion and
disenfranchisement. Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991), for example, works within a frontierist structure to redefine Chinese-American men as powerful and
significant members of American culture because of their participation in building the transcontinental railroad both to “open” and, in some respects, “close” the
originary frontier West6. Consequently, some contemporary narratives of identity formation reinvest frontier spaces and
technologies with the power to validate one as a productive citizen. The rhetoric of the exploration of outer space
participates in a frontierist discourse which emphasizes the economic 6 This is because the railroad brought people and commerce to
the West and connected the West to eastern commerce which led to the 1890 Census’ declaration I cite at the start of this introduction. 9promise of
colonizing space and redefines the productive citizen to include one who consumes products said to be of the
frontier. Similarly, the rhetoric of figuratively exploring and “homesteading” cyberspace in advertisements for
computer technology emphasizes the power and control afforded to Americans who purchase the latest technology
and invests in a notion of an American citizen-consumer who can participate in frontiers by purchasing cyberspatial
frontier-related technologies. My dissertation is a critique of notions of American exceptionalism, such as these,
which are founded on the frontierist logic at work in contemporary narratives of the technologies of literal and
figurative frontier ventures. The first chapter discusses the wide-spread influences of Turner’s ideas about the value of the originary frontier to
consolidate the boundaries of American citizenship. It surveys twentieth-century histories of the frontier to consider the language that has been used to define the
originary frontier West. The chapter draws the conclusion that, in
spite of the many and varied perspectives provided by revisionist and
new historians, Turner’s romanticized concept of the frontier, especially a logic of equal opportunity, is frequently
unselfconsciously transposed onto other, twentieth-century “frontiers.”Lewis Corey argued in The Decline of American Capitalism
(1934) that the “‘expansion of the frontier’ had ensured the growth of capitalism in America, and the industrial boom of the
1920s had sustained its growth” (qtd. in Wrobel 139). Indeed, supporting the expansion of capitalism, a great many twentieth-century texts (artistic,
historical, political, etc.) have further defined and named frontiers for the American public in consumerist terms. The American media have sold
everything from outer space to cyberspace to Velcro to pizza delivery services as vehicles for participating in a
national, collective frontier venture, a way of allegedly increasing our power both as individuals and as citizens of an
increasing powerful and wealthy, capitalist American nation-state. These pronouncements of literal and figurative frontier ventures,
as my project seeks to demonstrate, work in the service of an ideology of frontierism which insists that we must continue to be consumerist
frontier subjects--and we therefore must continue to name and pursue various frontiers in science, technology,
physical spaces, and bodily spaces--or cease to be “American.” Indeed, late-twentieth century narratives of travel
through outer and cyberspaces thus use the discourse of exploration and empire building to invoke romantic
Turnerian associations of exploring and settling the American frontier West and, ultimately, rewrite what exploration
and empire-building are; and some narratives which work to expand the boundaries of American citizenship to create
a space for excluded minority groups do so by anchoring the identity category to a frontierist fiction. Such narratives
emphasize, as Turner’s did over a century before, the displacement of the “American dream” of unlimited resources
to a space that is always just beyond, emphasizing the ways in which frontiers regulate a psychic national identity which structures itself through a
frontierist episteme. Feeding this national self-regard, Ronald Reagan proclaimed at an Independence Day celebration in 1982 that the “conquest of new frontiers
is a crucial part of our national character” (qtd. in Limerick 84). To put it simply, as inheritors of this investment in the power of the frontier, to be “American” in the
late- twentieth century, or so the logic goes, we need frontiers. Consequently, even the rhetoric of twentieth-century American narratives of
“new” frontier spaces imports an ideology of the originary American frontier which is predicated on the assumption
that exploring and colonizing frontier spaces has been integral to the formation of a distinctly American national
identity.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
14
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Links- exploration
Using exploration as means to solve problems on earth is rooted in the false
assumption that capitalism can be fixed. Conquering the cosmos is not the solution
but will only create more capitalist problems
Dickens 10 Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, “The Humanization of the Cosmos – To What End?”, Monthly Review Vol 62,
No 6, November 2010, dml)
Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we
should take a longer, harder, and more critical look at what is
happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of space humanization,
and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to the deeper, underlying processes which
are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which are generating this demand for expansion into outer
space. Although the humanization of the cosmos is clearly a new and exotic development, the social relationships and
mechanisms underlying space-humanization are very familiar. In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an “outside” to
capitalism is important for two main reasons. First, it is needed as a means of creating massive numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the
capitalist countries.7 As outlined earlier, space technology has extended and deepened this process, allowing an increasing number of people to become integral
to the further expansion of global capitalism. Luxemburg’s second reason for imperial expansion is the search for cheap supplies of labor and raw materials.
Clearly, space fiction fantasies about aliens aside, expansion into the cosmos offers no benefits to capital in the form of fresh sources of labor power.8 But
expansion into the cosmos does offer prospects for exploiting new materials such as those in asteroids, the moon,
and perhaps other cosmic entities such as Mars. Neil Smith’s characterization of capital’s relations to nature is useful at this point. The
reproduction of material life is wholly dependent on the production and reproduction of surplus value. To this end , capital stalks the Earth in search
of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects and
instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process…no part of the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the
geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.9 Capital is now also “stalking” outer space in
the search for new resources and raw materials. Nature on a cosmic scale now seems likely to be incorporated into
production processes, these being located mainly on earth. Since Luxemburg wrote, an increasing number of political economists have argued that the
importance of a capitalist “outside” is not so much that of creating a new pool of customers or of finding new resources.10 Rather, an outside is needed as a
zone into which surplus capital can be invested. Economic and social crisis stems less from the problem of finding new consumers, and
more from that of finding, making, and exploiting zones of profitability for surplus capital. Developing “outsides” in this way
is also a product of recurring crises, particularly those of declining economic profitability. These crises are followed by attempted
“fixes” in distinct geographic regions. The word “fix” is used here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, capital is being physically invested in new
regions. On the other hand, the attempt is to fix capitalism’s crises. Regarding the latter, however, there are, of course, no absolute guarantees that such fixes
will really correct an essentially unstable social and economic system. At best, they are short-term solutions. The kind of theory mentioned above also has clear
implications for the humanization of the cosmos. Projects for the colonization of outer space should be seen as the attempt to
make new types of “spatial fix,” again in response to economic, social, and environmental crises on earth. Outer
space will be “globalized,” i.e., appended to Earth, with new parts of the cosmos being invested in by competing nations and
companies. Military power will inevitably be made an integral part of this process, governments protecting the zones for which they
are responsible. Some influential commentators argue that the current problem for capitalism is that there is now no “outside.”11
Capitalism is everywhere. Similarly, resistance to capitalism is either everywhere or nowhere. But, as suggested
above, the humanization of the cosmos seriously questions these assertions. New “spatial fixes” are due to be
opened up in the cosmos, capitalism’s emergent outside. At first, these will include artificial fixes such as satellites,
space stations, and space hotels. But during the next twenty years or so, existing outsides, such as the moon and Mars, will begin
attracting investments. The stage would then be set for wars in outer space between nations and companies
attempting to make their own cosmic “fixes.”
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
15
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
The harms outlined in the 1AC are symptoms of capitalism. Development and
exploration cannot solve
Dickens 10 Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex (Peter, “The Humanization of the Cosmos – To What End?”, Monthly Review Vol 62,
No 6, November 2010, dml
The imminent conquest of outer space raises the question of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ yet again. Capitalism now has the
cosmos in its sights, an outside which can be privately or publicly owned, made into a commodity, an entity for which nations
and private companies can compete. As such the cosmos is a possible site of armed hostilities. This means, contra Hardt and Negri, that there
is an outside after all, one into which the competitive market can now expand indefinitely. A new kind of imperialism is therefore underway,
albeit not one attempting to conquer and exploit people ‘outside’ since there are no consumers or labour power to exploit in other parts of the solar system.
Ferrying wealthy tourists into the cosmos is a first and perhaps most spectacular part of this process of capital's cosmic expansion. Especially
important
in the longer term is making outer space into a source of resources and materials. These will in due course be
incorporated into production-processes, most of which will be still firmly lodged on earth. Access to outer space is, potentially at least,
access to an infinite outside array of resources. These apparently have the distinct advantage of not being owned or used by any pre-existing
society and not requiring military force by an imperializing power gaining access to these resources. Bringing this outside zone into capitalism
may at first seem beneficial to everyone. But this scenario is almost certainly not so trouble-free as may at first seem. On the
one hand, the investment of capital into outer space would be a huge diversion from the investments needed to address
many urgent inequalities and crises on Earth. On the other hand, this same access is in practice likely to be conducted by a range of competing
imperial powers. Hardt and Negri (2000) tell us that the history of imperializing wars is over. This may or may not be the case as regards imperialism on earth.
But old-style imperialist, more particularly inter-imperialist, wars seem more likely than ever, as growing and competing power-blocs (the USA and China are
currently amongst the most likely protagonists) compete for resources on earth and outer space. Such, in rather general terms, is the prospect for a future,
galactic, imperialism between competing powers. But what are the relations, processes and mechanisms underlying this new phenomenon? How should we
understand the regional rivalries and ideologies involved and the likely implications of competing empires attempting to incorporate not only their share of
resources on earth but on global society's ‘outside’? Social crises, outer spatial fixes and galactic imperialism Explanatory primacy is given here to economic
mechanisms driving this humanization of the universe. In the same way that they have driven imperializing societies in the past to expand their economic bases
into their ‘outsides’, the
social relations of capitalism and the processes of capital-accumulation are driving the new kind of
outer space imperialisms. Such is the starting-point of this paper (See alsoDickens and Ormrod, 2007). It is a position based on the work of the
contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey (2003) and his notion of ‘spatial fixes’. Capitalism continually constructs what he calls ‘outer transformations.’ In
the context of the over-accumulation of capital in the primary circuit of industrial capital, fresh geographic zones are constantly sought out
which have not yet been fully invested in or, in the case of outer space, not yet been invested in at all. ‘Outer spatial fixes’ are
investments in outer space intended to solve capitalism's many crises. At one level they may be simply described as crises of
economic profitability. But ‘economic’ can cover a wide array of issues such as crises of resource-availability and potential social and political upheavals resulting
from resource-shortages. Furthermore, there is certainly no guarantee that these investments will actually ‘fix’ these underlying
economic, political and social crises. The ‘fix’ may well be of a temporary, sticking-plaster, variety.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
16
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Colonizing
The idea of colonizing is inherently capitalist because it determines which lands are
the “unknown” and turns them into “safe”, “productive lands” that can then be used
to gain more capital and used to exploit the people living there.
Spanos 2009 (Willam V.Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, “Disclosing Enclosure,” symploke,
Volume 17, Numbers 1-2, 2009, pp. 307-315 (Review), MUSE, JR2)
Following the lead offered by Michel Foucault’s critical genealogy of (Western) modernity, which, among other related instruments of knowledge production such
as panoptics (viewing the differential phenomena of being from above, i.e., metaphysically), appropriated the classificatory table on behalf of reforming and
domesticating the errant multitude and establishing the disciplinary society, Marzec shows, very persuasively indeed, that the
massive movement to
enclose the open —and thus “unproductive” and “threatening”—Commons culminating in the eighteenth century was a
fundamentally related, indeed, inaugural aspect of this history of “improvement.” It was a symptom of an emergent
and indissolubly related ontological/cultural logic—a “technology” of challenge, in Heidegger’s terms, or, in the more nuanced terms
of Deleuze and Guattari, an “apparatus of capture”—that separated and alienated humans, both materially and ideologically,
from the land which they inhabited, reducing it to a utilitarian means of producing “standing reserve” (Bestand: Heidegger)
or of “stockpiling” (Deleuze and Guattari) and those who worked it (Georgoi: ge-ourgoi: earth workers) to “docile bodies” at the disposal of
the disciplinary society. Under this metaphysical regime of deterritorializing territorialization and the disciplinary
compartmentalization of the be-ing of being, an epochal metamorphosis of the relation being human beings and the
land takes place. On the one hand, the “inhabitants” of the open Commons—a key word in this study, the meaning of which
ultimately derives from Heidegger’s understanding of “dwelling” as a relationality incumbent on being-in-the midst (inter
esse), a non-essentialist, as opposed to a quantitative and essentialist matter—come to be represented as nomadic
aliens or predatory vagabonds— sylvestres (Roman: forest dwellers/savages), though Marzec does not invoke this etymology—to be settled,
domesticated, and exploited or exterminated. On the other hand, the land becomes a wilderness, an unproductive national and global
space to be objectified, enclosed, gridded, and “improved”: the space of “stockpiling.” This epochal panoptic/disciplinary initiative
of the British Enlightenment vis-à-vis the coding of the land, Marzec shows, especially in his reading of Defoe’s Tour, not only produced the “free”
capitalistic individual and the “truth” of private property. It also produced the idea of the British nation understood as a circuitry
of enclosed and “colonized” land emanating from and serving the authority of the metropolitan center (London). Equally
important, as the binarist language of domination disclosed by Marzec’s genealogy of the benign truth discourse of
individualist, democratic capitalism (Enlightenment modernity) suggests, it also inaugurated the British imperial/colonial project.
In establishing a (hegemonic) truth discourse informed by a white metaphorics privileging vision (“prospect,” “oversight,”
“supervision,” “survey,” “surveillance”) in the production of knowledge, specifically the circle in which every singular thing and
event takes it proper place according to the imperatives of the fixed center elsewhere—the center that measures—
this metaphysical comportment toward the earth that produced the nation state also gave rise to the imperial
metropolis. And this onto-cultural-political relation constitutes his most important contribution to postcolonial literary
studies.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
17
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Link: GPS/Positioning
Distribution of technology retrenches us in the identity of consumerism, constantly
attempting to move to the periphery in order to observe acts of violence, this
shouldn’t be dismissed easily it’s what create the “patriotic” articulations of security
prosperity and freedom
Kaplan 2006 (Caren, director of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and associate professor in women and gender studies at the University of California,
Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 693-713, MUSE, JR2)
For most people in the United States, war is almost always elsewhere. Since the Civil War, declared wars have been
engaged on terrains at a distance from the continental space of the nation. Until the attacks on the World Trade towers and the
Pentagon in September 2001, many people in the United States perceived war to be conflicts between the standing armies of
nation-states conducted at least a border—if not oceans and continents—away. Even the attacks of September 11 were localized in
such a way as to feel as remote as they were immediate—watching cable news from elsewhere in the country, most U.S. residents were brought close to scenes
of destruction and death by the media rather than by direct experience. Thus, in
the United States, we could be said to be "consumers" of
war, since our gaze is almost always fixed on representations of war that come from places perceived to be remote
from the heartland. Digital communications and transnational corporate practices are transforming the modes,
locations, and perceptions of nationalized identities as well as the operations of contemporary warfare. Certainly, war
is consumed worldwide by global, as well as national, audiences. Indeed, if the conflicts of the present age cannot be
described as between nation-states but as between the extra- or transnational symbols of political, religious, and
cultural philosophies or ideologies, drawing on national identity becomes a more challenging task. Yet, conditions specific to
the United States need to be explored in relation to the network of discourses, subjects, and practices that make up our nation and its government. The
United States still signifies a coherent identity, if only as the enemy or perpetrator of attacks against people outside
its national borders or as the defender of borders that are perceived by many of its residents as too porous and
insecure. Situating the cultural, political, and economic workings [End Page 693] of the United States within
transnational conditions aids our understanding of the ways in which national identity operates as a powerful
enhancement to contemporary globalization. The issue is not the difference between national and international
subjects of study but the mystification of the national such that its identifications with global capital disappear from
view, leaving behind patriotic articulations of security, prosperity, and freedom.
Our obsession with location creates a drive towards the use of borders to distinguish
where and when you are at any given time this proliferation of information is what
made the war through information possible
Kaplan 2006 (Caren, director of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and associate professor in women and gender studies at the University of California,
Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 693-713, MUSE, JR2)
Commercial and civilian GPS publications tend to characterize GPS as an advance in human society on the order of
the discovery of fire or the antibacterial [End Page 696] properties of soap. An introductory GPS textbook from 1996 tells
us that GPS is the "ultimate achievement of humankind's urge to know where [one is], at extraordinarily high levels of
precision." 12 At the heart of this overheated assertion is the belief that human beings are urgently concerned with
where they are and where they are going. Most important, technological assistance in the direction and interpretation of
these processes is required. From "the clay tablets of the Mesopotamians some 5,000 years ago" to the GPS-enhanced watch or cell phone of the
corporate executive in contemporary U.S. society, the truism of the desire to know where you are is presented as absolute and
unquestioned. 13 Regardless of political perspective, U.S. discourse on GPS throughout the 1990s and into the next
century assumes that "maps hold some primal attraction to the human animal." 14 The "lure" of maps, presented as
timeless and cross-cultural, is presented as a foundational attitude of civil society—access to mapping (especially
technologically enhanced mapping) is a hallmark of democracy. From the end of the first Persian Gulf war and throughout the 1990s, as GPS
increasingly became part of the popular imaginary of location and navigation in the United States, enthusiastic
endorsements of "GPS for Everyone" offered precise positioning for the masses. 15 As a 1994 article in the Wall Street Journal put
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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it, GPS is "An Answer to the Age-Old Cry: Where on Earth Am I?" 16 A piece in Rolling Stone in 1992 trumpeted, "Lost in America—Not!" 17 The
proliferation of ads, press releases, and media spots (such as coverage in tabloid TV and print media on celebrity use of GPS)
throughout the 1990s and into the next century focused on location—where you are—but linked closely to that
designation was almost always something existential: where you are reveals who you are. For example, a 1995
article on in-car navigation systems in Popular Science boasted: "Real Men Don't Ask Directions." 18 A software review in
1993 advised: "Find Yourself with GPS MapKit SV." 19 For North Americans, the marketing of this novel technology emphasized
personal empowerment and self-knowledge linked to speed and precision (save time, increase efficiency, avoid getting lost).
Buried in the promotional hype of the emerging technology was the kind of conventional paradox of hegemony with
which middle-class consumers of digital electronics are now quite familiar in the new millennium: the digitalization of
information about yourself that you provide voluntarily to enhance your "lifestyle" also brings you into networks of
surveillance. Who you are, geographically, is a target—of marketers, governments, identity thieves, hackers, and so
on. 20 When civilians use commercial digitalized navigational assistance based on GPS, then, they are participating
in the expansion of mapping into more [End Page 697] extreme relational contexts, which has the effect of
intensifying unequal social relations. The digital mingling of position and identity into target subjects underscores the
martial and territorial aspect of mapping throughout the modern period. Maps are always subjective representations;
their parameters and spatialized views reflect the needs and interests of those who intend to use them. While the
history of maps stretches back into the earliest recorded representations, the rise of print culture, the spread of
capitalism, and the desire to chart the mobile circulations of modern culture created a specific practice of mapping.
21 New nation-states required maps of redrawn borders. Maps became indispensable to track armies in war. By the
turn of the nineteenth century, the convergence of aerial perspectives made possible by aviation and the relatively
new technology and art of photography intensified the visual logic of mapping to the degree that it became possible,
and even an advantage, to conduct war from the air. 22 Thus, the legacy of geography, war, and aerial perspective
are writ large in GPS. When people turn to satellites to tell them where they are, they mobilize these histories. At the
same time, these technologies of location situate consumers within the mythologies of individual empowerment and
precision that advertisers employ to market the idea that one must always be locatable.
Extension of broadcasting and communication in space makes the viewing of
modern weapons inveitable which forces us to rely on “smart” weapons which kill
more civilians than not
Kaplan 2006 (Caren, director of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and associate professor in women and gender studies at the University of
California, Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 693-713, MUSE, JR2)
Precision returns as a popular discourse in military-industrial society when positioning technologies made possible by the satellite systems that were launched in
the 1970s and '80s offered new standards of accuracy. 39 Most
histories of the Persian Gulf War make the point that this was the
first war to make extensive use of satellite technology. Not even fully operational when the war began in 1990, GPS
quickly took pride of place in the pantheon of satellite-assisted technologies that the U.S. military and its allies used
in the conflict. Combining multispectral imagery from US LANDSAT remote sensing and GPS, commanders had
access to detailed maps that could be updated quickly and accurately. Approximately 4,500 GPS receivers were used in the war,
winning over troops on the ground and pilots in the air. 40 Shifting the scale of airpower to "space power," GPS and other satellite
systems aided both air and ground forces, enhancing conventional aerial surveillance to offer a network of imagebased mapping and navigation. The twenty-four NAVSTAR GPS satellites and their military and governmental counterparts were not the only orbital
technologies that affected the perception and outcome of the war. The conflict in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s has been characterized as the first televisual
war (in contrast to the film-based information broadcast during the war in Vietnam). 41 The speed,
immediacy, and accuracy of the real-time
images broadcast by twenty-four-hour cable news services such as CNN depended on satellite telecommunications
to an unprecedented degree. If during WWII newsreels reached movie theater audiences no less than a month after the occurrence of events
depicted, that time lag had been reduced to approximately twenty-four to forty-eight hours between filming on-site and broadcast by TV during the Vietnam war.
42 During
the first Persian Gulf war, the seemingly real-time television coverage of Patriot missiles and Scud attacks
generated what Robert Stam has called the "pleasures of war spectatorship"; 43 CNN's five telecommunications
satellites fed simulated [End Page 702] "live" accounts twenty-four hours a day, offering greater identification with the
military apparatus for many of the viewers glued to their sets during the relatively short-lived conflict. The truth effect
of digital immediacy and the mystique of satellite-aided precision presented a view of the war that built upon the
realist documentary tradition. 44 Although most of the visual material that was transmitted was heavily censored by the
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Pentagon, it was presented as live and unmediated. Many commentators point to the contrast between the Vietnam
War, where reporters were able to roam mostly at will (which brought the complexity and atrocities of the conflict into the living rooms of the
general U.S. public via TV), and the managed "pool" approach mandated by the Pentagon during the first Persian Gulf war
(establishing the approach for succeeding wars). The media image of the conflict in the Gulf, as Stig Nohrstedt explains, was
"ruled by restrictions on journalists' freedom to visit front areas, troops, damaged buildings, and so on without military
escorts." 45 Reporters, desperate for footage and for any kind of story line, relied on whatever technology could
provide. Thus, the "you are there" effect of reporters describing tracer fire from their Baghdad hotel room windows
was reinforced by the seeming speed of the transmissions. As many commentators have argued over the years since
the war, the media, in general, played technological handmaiden to the U.S. military in its effort to manage the
representation of the conflict. As Douglas Kellner relates in his history of the television coverage of the war, "the
initial strategy of the war managers was to present an image of the war that was clean, precise, and effective." 46
Since the military was engaged in a public relations campaign as well as a military engagement, the mystique of
precision bombing helped to allay concerns about civilian casualties and damage to nonmilitary and religiously
significant sites. 47 The airpower doctrine of precision bombing, here aided by GPS and other GIS-related mapping
technologies, combined with the seemingly instantaneous media coverage that was enabled by telecommunications
satellites to reassure the U.S. population that the heroic project of saving Kuwait from Iraqi invaders was not going to
be messy, wasteful in terms of lives and money, or boring. Thus, in the early 1990s, the governmental-industrialmilitary-complex linked once and for all with the media-entertainment complex—forming new subjects of a militarized
visual culture. 48 If the Norden bombsight captured the imagination of the military and public alike during WWII to
assuage concerns about the morality of bombing, engendering discourses of precision and aerial mastery, GPS
played a significant role in the public relations war as it was spun in the "military-industrial-media-entertainment
network" of the Persian Gulf war. As Daniel Hallin has [End Page 703] put it, "overwhelmingly the dominant images
of Persian Gulf coverage were the images of triumphant technology." 49 Since the media were barred from battlefield
coverage, they resorted to iconographic images that played to the nationalist sentiments of TV watchers at home and
kept them tuning in: "the Patriot streaking up to hit a Scud in the night sky; the cruise missiles arching gracefully
toward their targets; the jet fighters landing at sunrise or sunset (a favorite TV visual) with soldiers watching and
giving the thumbs-up sign; and most characteristically, the smart bomb video." 50 The visual elements of the "smart"
weapons entranced many Persian Gulf war spectators. An editorial published in the Nation during the war in February 1991 relates the
example of liberal viewers who enthused, "we hate the war . . . but we are into the planes." 51 Or, as reporter Fred Kaplan recalled in the late 1990s, "seven
years have passed since the last time the United States bombed Iraq, but one gripping image lingers—video footage shot on Jan. 17, 1991, the first night of the
air war, of a laser-guided bomb plunking straight down the chimney of an Iraqi Air Force building and blowing the place off the map." 52 These "gripping"
images were produced by video cameras in the "smart" bombs that were designed to record the strike. In the
absence of other visual records, the "smart bomb" footage took on a privileged percentage of the display of
technological prowess for which the war is known. The "objective eye" of the smart bomb linked the values of
realism, action, and precision that many spectators came to regard as a guilty or not-so-guilty pleasure—watching
the U.S. blow stuff to bits in an urban or desert landscape that appeared to be devoid of human beings. The
explosions were represented as precise strikes "through windows" or "down chimneys" of selected targets. Thus, the
guiltless pleasure of viewership was as much due to the belief in the power of precision and the thrill of knowing that
the armaments were moving through space and time at enormous speeds to strike a target with exceptional
accuracy. The overwhelming impression conveyed by the military-industrial-media-entertainment network was that
the United States and its allies were undertaking precision attacks on military targets, thereby conducting war on a
higher moral plane and avoiding unnecessary "collateral damage" and, not incidentally, offering good visual
entertainment. 53 However, as numerous commentators have pointed out in the years since the war, although most
of the bombs dropped in Iraq (approximately 90 percent) were regular "gravity" or "dumb" bombs without laser or
satellite guidance and while a high percentage of those bombs missed their targets (some estimates go as high as 70
percent), what most Americans probably remember about the war is the discourse of precision linked to the imagery
produced by the so-called smart bombs. Yet, [End Page 704] the precision-guided bombs were also likely to miss
their marks. Weather, human error, poor intelligence, and any number of other problems plagued the laser- and
GPS-guided missiles and bombs. And, despite the hype, more of the "smart" weapons in the first Gulf war were
guided by laser systems than by GPS (which has gained proportionate majority in precision-guided weapons programs in subsequent wars).
Significantly, the well-documented imprecision of the bombing campaign just never gained any traction, since the
evidence runs so counter to the discourse of precision and technological mastery that dominated the airwaves during
the conflict itself. The most notorious mishap occurred on February 13, 1991, when, based on intelligence identifying the site as a military hard target, a
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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guided missile hit the Ameriya civil-defense shelter at 4:30 a.m., killing between 200 and 300 civilians. In a 402-page published report, Middle East Watch
chronicled "needless deaths" during the war due to innumerable violations of the official U.S. military and allied policies, such as daytime bomb and missile
attacks on targets in populated areas, lack of warning, strafing attacks on civilian vehicles on highways, attacks on Bedouin tents, and so on. The report
concluded that approximately 3,000 civilian Iraqis died from direct attacks, while a "substantially larger" number died or
suffered greatly from malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care caused by "a combination of the U.N.-mandated
embargo and the allies' destruction of Iraq's electrical system." 54 "Space power" and the vast resources of the
military-industrial-media-entertainment network generated discourses of precision that obscured information about
civilian deaths or rendered them inconsequential. The representation of the war was less embodied than previous
representations of wars, with U.S. military casualties going undercover or under the radar, as it were, as well. If the
"witnessing" of the war came from the missiles themselves, the point of view was singular, unidirectional, and heavily
censored in favor of orchestrated displays of precision. Thus, much of what took place on the ground during the war
was never a matter of public record in the globalized televisual experience of the "real." In effect, in the coverage of
the Persian Gulf war the U.S. public watched an extended commercial for GPS.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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GPS gives us false distinctions of choice that make militarism and consumption
inevitable because they allow the integration of the military industrial complex into
everyday life,
Kaplan 2006(Caren, director of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and associate professor in women and gender studies at the University of California,
Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 693-713, MUSE, JR2)
The first Persian Gulf war was not anomalous. If it was the first war to be "driven" by satellite technologies, the logics
of those weapons and communications systems built on the practices and problem-solving techniques of previous
wars. The amplified opportunities for research, development, and profit making that marked the emergence of the
military-industrial complex in the 1960s and its expanded transnational formation, the "military-industrial-mediaentertainment network" at the close of the twentieth century, provided fertile ground for the discursive fields of
"technoscience," that "world-building" set of alliances that Donna Haraway has identified as "military needs, academic
research, commercial development, democracy, access to knowledge, standardization, globalization, and wealth." 56
At the turn of the century, technoscience and its networks produce target subjects through discourses of precise scales and
sites of identity. Yet even as these modes of identification promise greater flexibility and pleasure through the
proliferation of "choices" among myriad specificities, they also militarize and thus habituate citizen/consumers to a
continual state of war understood as virtual engagement. As Jordan Crandall argues, operational media such as GPSenhanced devices and their ancillary discourses aim to "increase productivity, agility and awareness, yet they vastly
increase the tracking capabilities of marketing and management regimes," thereby facilitating the integration of
military, corporate, and leisure interests. 57 Lured by "individually tailored enticements," the subjects of
technoscience, dedicated to "choice" and to "democracy" as the twin bulwarks of the U.S. "lifestyle," become targets
of the information systems they use to satisfy their desires. As Crandall writes, "tracked, the user becomes a target within the
operational interfaces of the marketing worlds, into whose technologies state surveillance is outsourced." 58 Most
people who search for driving directions on Web sites or who check out "Google Earth" and other services that offer
free satellite photography of specific locations are largely unaware of the military infrastructure that supports such
activities. Similarly, most people are not aware of their identification for target marketing through computer databases
linked to the use of credit cards, supermarket cards, and driver's licenses. GIS is not a subject of informed discussion among most
consumers in the United States even if they may be able to debate the virtues of a GPS-enabled automobile when faced with a [End Page 706] choice of rental
cars. Thus, as DeLanda and other theorists of militarization have pointed out, the ways in which military institutions, resources, and
discourses structure facets of nonmilitary life are mystified in the energetic "forgetting" of the military sources of
technologies that many people enjoy or feel required to use in everyday life. Yet, a deterministic approach to military
"R&D" can oversimplify the ways in which technoscience and its networks, including media and entertainment,
produce hegemonic consent among the citizen/consumers of the present age.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
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Link- Resources
The 1AC desire to consume space resources justifies earthly degradation and
ensures that capitalism continues- going to space does not solve!
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Visiting
Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the
universe, pg 54-55, )
Importantly for Harvey and other Marxist geographers, these
fixes commonly take on a ‘spatial’ nature. They involve the geographic
expansion of the circuits of capital as new territories, raw materials, workforces and markets are drawn into the
capitalist system. For purposes of exposition, Harvey (2007) initially assumes a single and closed region in which production and realization of surplus
values take place. But, he argues, ‘the frontiers of the region can be rolled back or relief gained by exports of money capital, commodities or productive
capacities of fresh labour powers from other regions’ (ibid.: 427). The tendency towards overaccumulation within the original region remains unchecked, but
‘devaluation is avoided by successive and ever grander ‘outer transformations’. This
process can presumably continue until all external
possibilities are exhausted or because other regions resist being treated as mere convenient appendages’ (ibid.: 427).
But even Earthly spatial fixes may now be proving relatively ‘exhausted’, unprofitable or containing people resisting their
appendage status. We therefore argue that Earthly fixes may be expanded to incorporate even more ‘outer transformations’. This
time the fixes are in the cosmos. We therefore term them ‘outer spatial fixes’. Clearly there is no question of importing labour power from outer space to
help out a failing region on Earth but, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, the raw materials of outer space are increasingly envisaged as a
means of developing Earthly production processes. And, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, outer space is being used to
manage flows of capital and information and to regulate social relations (including the social relations of production)
on Earth. Once made, however, a spatial ‘fix’ is likely to be destroyed or devalued in order to make way for a new spatial fix, one offering new possibilities for
capital accumulation. Spatial fixes are only ever provisional and therefore offer only short-term resolutions to the
contradictions inherent in capitalism. Whether these fixes are (at least temporarily) effective depends on whether they are seen as profitable or, in
the case of state and social expenditures, whether they fulfil their purpose of, for example, reproducing labour power or successfully managing social relations.
We cannot overexaggerate the fact that success for Earthly or cosmic spatial fixes is by no means guaranteed. The two
further circuits of capital are involved in the making of these new outer spatial fixes.
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Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link- Satellites
The images captured by satellites are a literal commodification of earth meant to
dominate.
Kato 93. Masahide, “Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,” Department of Political Science, University
of Hawaii, p. 342
As I have argued, the
objectification of Earth from the absolute point of the strategic gaze leads to a rearrangement of
each locality into an order organized according to the late capitalist strategy. Such rearrangement finds its expression
in an iconographic image of the globe representing the order of the world. The emergence and propagation of this image have crucial
relevance to Jameson's second thesis, capital's penetration into the unconscious. Significantly, the commercialization of the unconscious
consolidates the First World way of seeing by disseminating images through the mass media. One such manifestation
of the First World way of seeing is the fiction of the earth as a finite, unified and integrated whole. The representation of the
globe as a unified whole, however, is not a new concept: it has been the cognitive basis of world- wide expansion of capital since the Renaissance.
"Nevertheless, the significance of the image of the globe in the late capitalist phase differs from that of earlier phases on three accounts. First, unlike in earlier
phases, the image of the globe is based on a photo image which is mechanically reproducible and transmittable. The dissemination of images, which is
ideological reproduction sui generis, proceeds extensively with the commercialization of the unconscious. In otherwords, the photo image of the globe needs to
be situated in the historical context where in mechanically reproducible images are the very materiality of the reproduction of the social order. Second, the
notion of the globe is no longer anchored in a cartographic abstraction of the surface of the earth, but is now a figure
perceived by the camera's eye. Thus the image ineluctably involves the problematic of technosubjectivity in the
construction of the social totality. Third, the image (ultimately the technosubject) serves as a principle of equivalence between
self (First World self) and matter in general (earth, humanity, environment, and soon). In other words,
technosubjectivity renders the First World self capable of attaining an unprecedented mode of domination over the
rest of the world. I will defer my ideological analysis on the last two points to the next section. Let us first focus on the emergence of the global discourse
facilitated by the dissemination of the image of the globe.
Satellites reduce the world to an image, allowing for capitalist control and human
exploitation.
Kato 93. Masahide, “Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,” Department of Political Science, University
of Hawaii, p. 339
As mentioned earlier, the
absolute point of the strategic gaze abolishes the historical contestation over perspectives, giving
way to a total monopoly of interpretative media. The camera's eye from outer space produced what had been long
sought since the invention of camera and the rocket: a historical or transcendental "rectitude. "An aerial photographer
captures the emergence of such rectitude very succinctly: The advantage of hyperaltitude space photographs is that
each one shows vast terrains in correct perspective, from one perspective and at one moment of time. Thus they are far
more accurate than mosaics of the same area pieced together from photographs taken from the constantly shifting points of view of conventional aircraft at
random periods of time, extending from dawn to sunset or even over weeks and months, depending upon clear weather? The
pursuit of rectitude in
the field of aerial photography has been none other than a constant battle against the three-dimensional existence of
forms and volumes that allow more than a single point of view. With the vantage point of hyperaltitude from outer space,"threedimensional forms are reduced to texture, line and color."1° Rendering the totality of Earth a two-dimensional surface
serves no purpose other than for technostrategic interpretation of the earth as data and maps, thereby disqualifying
"other" points of view (i.e., spatiolocality). In this way, with the back-up of technoscientific reason, the "absolute" point of
the strategic gaze manifests uncontestable control as far as the interpretation of surface of the earth is concerned.
Flattening the surface of the earth has also brought about a radical change in the regime of temporality. As the words of
the aerial photographer quoted earlier reveal, the notion of rectitude also depends on the construction of the single privileged moment. The image of every
part of the earth is now displaced onto that "absolute" moment. In other words, the "absolute" point of the strategic
gaze produces a homogeneous temporal field (i.e.,an a-temporal field, or to use common vocabulary, "real time") in which "juxtaposition
of every locality, all matter" becomes viable. "The so-called" real time" is therefore the very temporality of the
strategic gaze, that is, the absolute temporality that presides over other forms of constructing time (i.e., chronolocality). Such
construction of temporality did not suddenly emerge with the advent of the new mode .of communication. It is a historical tendency of capitalism to
displace geographical distance on to temporal distance. As Karl Marx pointed out, development of transportation and communication
displaces spatial distance onto temporal distance, which is arranged and hierarchized in relation to the metropoles. "Therefore, to borrow Paul Virilio's term, the
development of transportation and communication transforms geopolitics into "chronopolitics." The "instantaneous transmission" produced by
satellite communication has rendered metropolitan centers capable of pushing chronopolitics further to the absolute
level in which temporal distance reflects nothing but the strategic networking of capital.
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Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Satellites are a super-panoticon, used to serve government interest by watching
anyone at any time
WARF 2007 (Barney, prof of geography @ KU) GEOPOLITICS OF THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY
Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie (Dutch Journal of ecnonmic and social geography) Volume 98, Issue 3, pages 385–397, July 2007
First, the political
economy of information and communication technology (Morley & Robins 1995; Warf 1995; Graham & Marvin 1996;
Hugill 1999) points to the ways in which satellites are wrapped up with changing relations of power and legitimation . In
addition to national governments, satellites are used by telecommunications companies, multinational corporations, and the global media for data transmission,
telephone traffic and broadcasting of television and radio programmes. These systems are integral to what Castells (1996) labels the ‘informational mode of
production’, the space of flows characteristic of an information-intensive and hypermobile world economy. The politics
of the satellite industry may
be approached through regulation theory (Leyshon 1992; Feldman 1997; Boyer & Saillard 2002), in which the stability of market
relations is maintained, however tenuously, by state intervention, even at the global scale, which is necessary to provide
institutional cohesiveness and minimise negative externalities. Regulatory structures must accommodate the mixed needs for co-
operation and competition among various groups of providers and consumers, including states and corporations (Demac 1986).
Second, the paper draws upon critical geopolitics (Agnew & Corbridge 1995; O’Tuathail 1996, 2000), which emphasises the social origins of statecraft and how
hegemony and territoriality are constructed. Politically, satellites have long comprised a major component of national espionage
efforts, constituting what Poster (1990, p. 121) calls a superpanopticon, ‘a system of surveillance without walls, windows,
towers, or guards’. Throughout the Cold War, satellites were instrumental in what O’Tuathail (1996) calls the discursive scripting of geographic space, its
ideological construction by politicians, military planners, and the media that engaged in an indiscriminate ‘othering’ of the communist foe. Today, global
satellite transmissions of television and radio traffic threaten national controls over information flows. Morley & Robins
(1995, p. 43) argue ‘satellite broadcasting threatens to undermine the very basis of present policies for the policing of
national space’
Satellites are part of the private sector
WARF 2007 (Barney, prof of geography @ KU) GEOPOLITICS OF THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY
Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie (Dutch Journal of ecnonmic and social geography) Volume 98, Issue 3, pages 385–397, July 2007
Two regulatory regimes characterise the changing political and economic organisation of the satellite industry. The first consists of
the state dominated system dominated by the International Satellite Organisation (Intelsat), which coincided with the post-war Fordist boom,
the Pax Americana and the Cold War. This era witnessed national ownership of most telecommunications systems via government monopolies (Graham &
Marvin 1996). The
second, more recent, regulatory regime consists of the neoliberal, privatised and deregulated system
characteristic of the contemporary age of post-Fordist flexible production, one associated with the decline of Intelsat’s
monopoly, the rise of national and private carriers, and the challenge of fibre optics. While no simple dichotomy exists, for each era contains
elements of the other, an examination of each regime sheds light on the multiple avenues through which terrestrial politics are projected to new heights, in this
case literally. By far the
largest and most comprehensive organisation involved in the regulation of global satellite traffic is
Intelsat, headquartered in Washington, DC (Kildow 1973). Intelsat’s origins lay in US government attempts to expedite
the entry of commercial providers in the satellite market (Hudson 1990). In 1962, Congress passed the Communications Satellite Act
establishing the privately-owned Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat), which enjoyed a monopoly over international satellite service to and from the
United States for the next generation (Galloway 1972). Comsat became the nucleus of Intelsat in 1964, with Early Bird providing its early fleet, and originally
owned half of its shares. The organisation started with 19 signatories, all from the economically developed world, but excluded the Soviet bloc; today, 201 states
are represented. Intelsat is
not regulated by any public body and is accountable only to its national members, which are
stockholders (Hudson 1990). Voting power is concentrated in the Board of Governors, in which representation is proportionate to shares of ownership: The
United States is the largest contributor, responsible for almost a quarter. Today it remains by far the world’s largest
provider of domestic as well as international satellite services and dominant regulator of orbits and frequencies. It
owns and operates a fleet of 25 high-powered spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, far more than any other network; indeed, Intelsat boasts
of being virtually the only truly global satellite system. Most international telephone calls (which generate two thirds of its revenues) are routed through Intelsat’s
satellites, each of which carries tens of thousands of voice circuits, although international television transmission is its most rapidly growing source of revenue.
Other services include radio, integrated digital services, business-to-business services, rural community services, news gathering and weather reports. Intelsat’s
433 earth stations, comprising 79 per cent of those capable of transmitting international traffic (Table 2), give it a nearmonopoly status. The distribution of earth
stations (Figure 4) reflects international discrepancies in wealth and power between economically developed and underdeveloped nations; the United States, with
61 stations, dwarfs any other nation.
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25
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Satellite development just enables the US to fight capitalist wars.
Dickens 10 Peter Dickens, Monthly Review’s, http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Capitalist-Expansion-Into-Space.aspx#ixzz1PrbcMpOP,
Yet among these plans and proposals, it is easy to forget that outer space is already being increasingly humanized. It has now been made an integral
part
of the way global capitalist society is organized and extended. Satellites, for example, are extremely important elements
of contemporary communications systems. These have enabled an increasing number of people to become part of
the labor market. Teleworking is the best known example. Satellite-based communications have also facilitated new forms of
consumption such as teleshopping. Without satellite-based communications, the global economy in its present form
would grind to a halt. Satellites have also been made central to modern warfare. Combined with pilotless Predator
drones, they are now being used to observe and attack Taliban and Al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. This action is done by remote control from Creech Air Force Base at Indian Springs, Nevada. The 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star
Wars” program, aimed to intercept incoming missiles while facilitating devastating attacks on supposed enemies. A version of the program is still being
developed, with the citizens of the Czech Republic and Poland now under pressure to accept parts of a U.S.-designed “missile defense shield.” This is part of a
wider strategy of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which has for some time been official U.S. Defense Policy.4 Using
surveillance and military
equipment located in outer space is now seen as the prime means of protecting U.S. economic and military assets
both on Earth and in outer space. Less dangerously, but still very expensively, a full-scale space-tourism industry has for some time been under active
development. Dennis Tito, a multi-millionaire, made the first tourist trip into outer space in 2001. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has now sold over three
hundred seats at $200,000 apiece to its first tourists in outer space. The program is due to start in 2011, with spaceports for this novel form of travel now being
built in Alaska, California, Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, the United Arab Emirates, and Esrange in Sweden. Excursions circling the moon,
likely to cost the galactic visitors around $100,000,000, are now under development.
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26
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: development = commercial use
The 1AC authors are not objective- companies are the underwriters for space policy,
just waiting to commercialize space
Marshall 95 [Alan Marshall, “Development and Imperialism in Space”, published in Space Policy journal, Alan Marshall is in the Institute of Development
Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/026596469593233B]
With the end of the Cold War, those companies
that made a living from the supply of military hardware to governments have
to extend their interests in the
space part of their markets in order to secure profits from building rockets and space stations rather than missiles
and military aircraft. The same companies that championed the causes of national defence against the communist
threat through massive military deterence now extol the virtues of the benefits to be gained from massive investment
in space activities.’ In the light of this analysis, it can be explained that the search for new fields into which surplus capital can be invested, may in fact be
experienced a drop in demand for their military goods and an associated drop in profitability. Thus they are seeking
promoting human space expansion (despite the dubiety of it ever becoming a self-funding process). But its lack of success as a singly powerful enough motivator
of Solar System development is shown by the torpidity of current human expanionist practices into space. Another model of imperialism worthy of attention with
regard to outer space development is that originally put forward by Hobson.* The Hobsonian thesis basically states that imperialism is the manifestation of the
search for new markets. Within the historical period with which Hobson himself was dealing (the Victorian era) this search was undertaken by the state on behalf
of, and for the benefit of, the bourgeois classes. Geopolitical
expansion of the nation state.
imperialism was merely a way of ensuring the continued economic
Our capitalist conceptualization of ‘property’ means that the plan results in the use
space for commercialization.
Jonathan Rowe, 2007(A key thinker and writer about the commons for many years, Rowe is a former Senate aide, editor of the Washington Monthly and
writer at the Christian Science Monitor, “If The Commons Is A Form Of Property, Does That Make It A Commodity?’ http://onthecommons.org/ifcommons-form-property-does-make-it-commodity)
Property is not a thing, nor the metaphysical absolute that inhabits the ideological mind. Property is a construct, a
bundle of rights that changes with the context. A first year law student learns this early on. Partnership rights are different from
shareholder rights. Rights in a cooperative are different from those in a condominium. Property in a marriage is different from that
in a mutual fund. They all are property. But they are encoded differently to achieve different ends. So with common property.
Historically, commoners did have rights that were much like property rights, even if some theoreticians have been reluctant to call
them such. Commoners tilled common fields by right, not at the sufferance of a private owner. No one could keep them out of
woods that were traditionally common. In England, commoners would ?perambulate? their parish each year to make sure that no
uppity lords had tried to fence off for themselves what traditionally belonged in some sense to all. But these common
rights were vulnerable because not encoded in law. They existed in custom and usage rather than in deeds of
ownership. When parliament set out to enclose the commons, and redistribute it to private owners, no formal rights
stood in its way.
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27
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Companies will commercialize outer space- plan is just increasing real estate.
Jonathan Rowe, 2006(A key thinker and writer about the commons for many years, Rowe is a former Senate aide, editor of the Washington Monthly and
writer at the Christian Science Monitor, “Billboards In Space, Accomplices In Enclosure,” http://onthecommons.org/billboards-space-accomplices-enclosure)
Then there is outer
space, that vast realm of mystery and promise that to the arrested minds in the marketing industry is
just a blank billboard waiting to be filled. In 1993, a company called Space Marketing had the idea of launching a
mile-wide raft with the Olympic rings as an ad for the 1996 Atlanta games. Special glasses would be needed to see the rings – as with
the old 3-D movies – but it didn’t take a genius to see where this was headed. The raft didn’t go up. Commercial logos have, however. SpaceShipOne, a private
rocket ship funded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, had a NASCAR-like proliferation of them: M&Ms, Champ Car World Series, 7Up and Virgin
Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s space venture. The former Soviets actually have been the leaders – if that’s the word – in pimping outer space. Back in 1996, it
sold space to Pepsi on the Mir space station for a four-foot can. Four years later Pizza
Hut tacked a 30-foot logo on a Proton rocket in
Kazakhstan. There have been continuing efforts to turn the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) into a billboard delivery
system, so far unsuccessful. But the wheels are turning. At MIT, which is a talent farm for the space program, a group of students is
trying to finance a research satellite by selling ad space on the side. Prices range from $35 to $250 per square centimeter; the hope is
to raise $500,000 by next year. “We needed more funding and realized that we’re sending up this satellite into orbit with all this space on board used for nothing,”
one Ph.D. candidate told the Boston Globe. “So why not sell it to people who want to express a message?” Yes, why not? To someone who has grown up in
America over the last two decades, it’s an understandable question. Our terrestrial space is full of ads. People offer up their own bodies
via logos on their clothes. Why not logos on the side of a research satellite as well? And as funding for education and research
gets cut, the money has to come from somewhere. Soon people forget that it could come from anywhere except ads As below, so above. What we are down
here we will be up there. Already space is filling up with launch debris. Why not ad trash as well? To see a spacecraft as a Pepsi logo is not an innate human
trait. It comes from social conditioning, and forgetfulness. To
question the present we need a reference point in memory of something
different. Take that away, and all that’s left is complicity with a self-reinforcing status quo.
The plan means space will be commercialized
Rowe 2008 (Jonathon, former editor at the Washington Monthly) The Parallel Economy of the Commons, the world watch institute.
www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/SOW08_chapter_10.pdf
The parceling out of the broadcast airwaves to private corporations was part of this same lineage. In recent decades the process has metastasized from discrete
acts into a wholesale assault. From the microcosm of the gene pool to the far reaches of space, corporations have been
transgressing all boundaries and laying claim to that which previously was assumed to belong to all. Often
corporations have direct help from government, such as the expansion of the intellectual property laws that made
possible the patenting of seeds and genes. The Bush administration has worked to parcel out tracts of ocean to corporate fish farmers. There
are efforts in Congress to privatize outer space as well, for the purpose of advertising. The momentum now is so great
that corporations often need no direct help at all.31 The escalating enclosures of recent decades have prompted a
response that is almost like an autoimmune reaction. Spontaneously, all over the world, people are seeking to reestablish boundaries and to
reclaim territory that has been lost. The environmental movement is one example of this, as are the campaigns against corporate globalism and genetically
modified (that is, corporately enclosed) food.
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28
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Treaties
While treaties like the OST may stop sovereignty claims, they do not stop
privatization
Collis & Graham 2009. (Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation Professor of Communication and Culture
Queensland University of Technology.) Political Geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management. Management and Organisation History, 4(3).
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21225
As Hertzfeld and Von der Dunk (2005, 97) explain, ‘as long as the potential for valuable economic resources on the moon exists and the possibility that private
firms can make a business out of using those resources, it is highly unlikely that the major spacefaring nations will ever agree to a Common Heritage agreement’.
Further, the original OST, which the USA did ratify, may
configure Mars as beyond the sovereignty claims of states, but the
status of non‐government organizations – specifically corporations, whose Space expenditures now outstrip
governmental outlays (McCurdy 2003, 244) – remains unclear in the Treaty. Many legal commentators argue that the
Treaty’s contradictory Articles complicate Space’s spatiality: under both Treaties, states may not claim Space as their
sovereign possession, but they do retain full property rights in any Space stations or facilities, even those constructed
on planetary surfaces or subsurfaces (Marko 1992–1993, 322; Wiles 1998, 520). Similarly, states may not claim Martian land while
it is still on Mars, but if they remove any Martian resources from their original locations, these resources become
national property and can be exploited (Christol 1981; Marko 1992–1993, 320). The status of Martian space in relation to non‐governmental
organizations remains under intense debate (Handberg 2006; Pace 2003). Many insist that the OST prevents state sovereignty, but not necessarily private
property for non‐state actors (Hertzfeld and Von der Dunk 2005; Kopel and Reynolds 2002). As
US space entrepreneur Jim Benson, CEO of
Spacedev, argues, if he claims land on another planet and commences mining it, ‘what are they [the UN] going to
do?’ (Australian Broadcasting Commission [ABC] 2005). We are reminded of the historical parallel in the giant monopolies granted
to entities such as the East India Company, the corporate manifestations of mercantile colonialism.
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29
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Mars
Mars is a resource to be exploited
Collis & Graham 2009. (Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation Professor of Communication and Culture
Queensland University of Technology.) Political Geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management. Management and Organisation History, 4(3).
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21225
Two distinct versions of Martian spatiality emerge from the terraforming debate. Terraformers position Mars as instrumental, thus falling
squarely within the positive side of utilitarian ethics (an intellectual pet of the 19th‐century propertied classes): Zubrin, the founder
of the assertively pro‐terraforming Mars Society, argues that as an entirely lifeless space, Mars is a resource for
humans to use and colonize (Zubrin 1996a). Zubrin’s (1996a) spatiality is committedly anthropocentric and utilitarian: in his
vision, Mars is a dead space of no intrinsic value, mutely awaiting its activation by human terraformers . Zubrin is far from
alone in championing this version of Martian spatiality. As the debate about whether Mars should be legally terra communis or terra nullius demonstrates, Mars’s
political spatiality is currently dominated by anthropocentrism, the position, as Pyne (2003) writes, which holds that ‘as long as life or other cultures are not
present, there is no ethical or political crisis [in terraforming] except whatever we choose to impose on ourselves’. As in the schism between NASA
and the Mars Society – the former advocating gradual colonization led by scientists, and the latter arguing for
large‐scale private colonization as quickly as possible (Lambright and VanNijnatten 2003) – the spatiality of Mars as a passive
resource for human use and possession remains largely unchallenged. The argument is primarily an environmental one: terraformers
argue that terrestrial overcrowding and resource depletion mean that a failure to colonize Mars would eventually result in the decline of humanity. Is keeping a
lifeless planet lifeless more important than allowing for the continuation of human life, they ask? Fogg (2000, 210) states that terraforming is natural because
humans are essentially expansionist. McKay (1990) similarly biologizes Martian colonialism, arguing that humans are the natural ‘pollinators of the universe’
whose instinctive task it is to fertilize the galaxy. From a terraforming perspective, then, Martian space is inert and dead, a tablua rasa dumbly awaiting human
animation.
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30
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Link: Mars (Zubrin specific)
The colonization of mars would use slave labor- Zubrin’s utopian description is racist
and dehumanizing
Gouge, 02.
Catherine, West Virginia University. “The Great Storefront of American Nationalism: Narratives of Mars and the Outerspatial Frontier” Americana: The Journal of
American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2 <http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/gouge.htm>
Zubrin's account of a frontier free-labor utopia, where "each and every person is precious," recalls a conventional
colonial dynamic in which, of course, labor is most certainly in high demand. In this dynamic, people willing and able to do
the back-breaking, "unskilled" labor or brave the "wild," "untamed" frontier environment are indeed "precious." Those
who find it "useful" have always valued indentured servitude, and even chattel slavery. This does not mean, however, that the
roles of laborers and settlers are unscripted. Indeed, scientific and science-fictional texts about the Martian frontier are similar in at least one significant way: they
similarly invite our imaginative participation, and they often operate with the same set of ideological presuppositions. Set on the Martian frontier, for example,
Phillip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964) addresses the frontier labor shortage. In Dick's novel the ad [calling for people to emigrate to Mars] listed all the skills in
demand on Mars, and it was a long list, excluding only canary raiser and proctologist, if that. It pointed out how hard it was now for a person with only a master's
degree to get a job on Earth, and how on Mars there were good-paying jobs for people with only B.A.'s [sic]. (19) Likewise, according
to Zubrin's
depiction, individual roles are unscripted and there are jobs for just about everyone. 6 . Moreover, in Zubrin's account each
individual has the freedom to "play" any part he or she desires, so long as it is "useful." This improvisational theater
as a metaphor for frontier labor "freedom" avoids the issue of efficiency that would certainly need to be a
consideration in a life-threatening Martian environment that would be very difficult and expensive to access. Indeed, as I
have already suggested, only those "actors," to use Zubrin's metaphor, who were deemed useful would likely be invited to
"improvise," and even then only within certain limits. Arnie, the creator of the ad in Time-Slip, is quite pleased with the advertisement he
creates: "Surely it would attract people, he thought to himself, if they had any guts at all and a sincere desire for adventure, as the ad said. . .There were no
opportunities on Earth. You have to come to Mars, Arnie said to himself. We can use you here" (19). And
this is precisely what Zubrin's utopian
portrait of the Martian improvisational theater implies: we (read: those of us in charge, we who own the theater) can
use you (read: our improv actors, our inexpensive labor). In a recent edition of Space News, Zubrin encourages volunteers to apply to live in
the Mars simulated research center for the summer: "Exploration is something all human beings should be engaged in. There are experiments and activities that
require specialists, there are other activities that can be performed simply by motivated people" (8). To be fair, the motivation to which Zubrin refers with regard to
the Mars Arctic Research Station will have to be that of those who are enthusiastic, as Zubrin is, about exploration. They will not be paid. However, the move he
makes to align the "uncertified" with the "motivated" is a significant one historically, since the exploitation of allegedly "unskilled" labor has often been justified by
"motivation." The Chinese were similarly constructed by the Big Four in the building of the transcontinental railroad in the
originary American frontier. In fact, they were valued because 1) they were cheap labor, 2) they were reliable labor, and 3)
they were willing and able to do dangerous work with explosives in some of the most treacherous mountain passes,
work that simply would not have been completed without them. This did not mean, however, that they were
compensated fairly for their labor, nor does it mean that they had any control over their wages. They were "used,"
quite simply, because they had very little employment choice as a group considered to be racially "other" in
nineteenth-century America. In fact, their willingness to work for less, and work hard for it, was explained away by
their "Celestial" motivation. Their motivation was both that which made them valuable and that which defined them as
racially "other." Consequently, they could improvise on the railroad by doing work so risky others would never dream
of doing it, but only to the benefit of those investors
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31
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Impact: Genocide
Capitalism is the root of genocide and oppression- the expansion to space will
inevitably kill millions in the name of free markets
Jalata 11 - Professor of Sociology & Global Studies Asafa, January 24th 2011, “Terrorism from Above and Below in the Age of Globalization”, p.1-4) NAR
As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials, minerals such as gold and silver, markets, and free or cheap labor
expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of production and to increase the accumulation of capital or wealth. “The treasures
captured outside of Europe by undis-guised looting, enslavement, and murder,” Karl Marx (1967: 753-754) writes, “floated back to the mothercountry and were there turned to capital.” Most liberal and leftist scholars have failed to identify and explain the role of state-sponsored or state
terrorism that colonial officials, European companies, and ex-peditionary forces used during the expansion of the racialized capitalist world system to transfer the
economic resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonial forces or settlers and their collaborators. The development of the nation-state
and the capitalist world system occurred through war making, violence and organized crime (Tilly, 1985: 170). We cannot
clearly understand the essence and meaning of global terrorism without comprehending the essence and characteristics of state terrorism since states were born
and consolidated through vi-olence. Under the guises of “free markets,” “civilization,” and Chris-tianity, forces of European states or state-
sponsored companies committed acts of terrorism and genocide that were, more or less, ignored. In fact, the issue of terrorism
only started to be addressed when, after World War I, colonized peoples in Africa and Asia began their liberation struggles against European co-lonial states.
The terrorist attack on the life and liberty of American indigenous peoples by European colonial powers and their
collaborators destroyed existing institutions and econo-mies and exposed
the conquered peoples to poverty and fa-mine-induced
“holocausts” (Davis, 2001). Discussing how the cultural destruction of indigenous peoples resulted in massive deaths, Karl Polanyi (1944: 159-160) argues,
“The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and vio-lent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim. These institutions are
disrupted by the very fact that a market econo-my is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into a commodity, which,
again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every … cultural institution in an organic society.” The
capitalist world economy that in the 19th
was simultaneously accelerating famine and famine-induced
deaths in the rest of the world: “Millions died, not outside the „modern world system,‟ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were mur-dered by the
theological application of the sacred principles of [Adam] Smith” (Davis, 2001: 9). Today, mainstream Eu-ro-American scholars gloss over
such crimes and refer to them as actions of “discovery” and “civilization.” State terrorism, genocide, and the
destruction of indigenous institutions and the devastating consequences of famine have been closely inter-connected
in the global capitalist world system. In addition, the international community rarely holds accountable its members that engage in state terrorism
century was permanently eliminating famine from Western Europe
and genocide. Kurt Jonassohn (1998: 24) recently noted that terrorist state leaders in develop-ing countries “not only go unpunished, they are even rewarded. On
the international scene they are accorded all the respect and courtesies due to government officials. They are treated in ac-cordance with diplomatic protocol in
negotiations and are treated in the General Assembly of the United Nations. When they are finally ousted from their offices, they are offered asylum by countries
that lack respect for international law, but have a great deal of respect for the ill-gotten wealth that such perpetra-tors bring with them.” Despite the fact that some
government elites claim that the state provides protection from domestic and external violence, “governments organize and, wherever possible,
monopolize the concentrated means of violence. The distinction between „legi-timate‟ and „illegitimate‟ force makes
no difference” (Tilly, 1985: 171). Political violence has always been involved in producing and maintaining structures, institutions, and organi-zations of
privileged hierarchy and domination in society. Those who have state power, which incorporates the power to define terrorism,
deny their involvement in political violence or terrorism and confuse abstract theories about the state with reality.
Based on an idealized relationship between the state and society, philosophers and thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Rousseau, and Plato have identified three
functions of the state that would earn it legitimacy. According to state theories, the state protects and maintains internal peace and order in society; it organizes
and protects national economic activities; it de-fends national sovereignty and national interests (Bushnell, et al., 1991: 6). In reality, most states violate most
of these theo-retical principles by engaging
in political repression and state terrorism in order to defend the interests of a few
powerful elites. Furthermore, the revolutionary theories of the state by Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin (1971) remain a dream because states failed to introduce
revolutionary social transformations that would eliminate oppression, repression, state terrorism, and the exploitation of people (Maguire, 1978). The occurrence
of political repression, oppression, state ter-rorism, and dictatorship in the former Soviet Union, China and other former revolutionary countries demonstrate that
the state has remained the site of violence despite its legitimating dis-course. As Charles Tilly (985: 18-19) puts it, political
violence is closely related
to the art of statecraft, and most of the time, “the state, like an unchained beast, ferociously [attacks] those who claim to be its master, its own citizens”
(Tilly, 1985: 7). Annamarie Oliverio (1998) criticizes scholars who produce definitions of terrorism on behalf of the state and promote outmoded concepts,
analyses, and theories in state bureaucracy, the media, and in academia.
The motivations of those who hold state power and engage in
state terrorism are to maintain the global economy, structures of politics, and hierarchies of cultures and peoples in order to
extract economic resources. The main objective of those who engage in non-state terrorism is mainly to politically respond to economic, political, and
cultural inequalities. One common denominator of the theories of non-state terrorism is that it is mainly caused by grievances of one kind or another. These
grievances involve national/religious/cultural oppression, eco-nomic exploitation, political repression, massive human rights
violations, attacks on life and liberty, state terrorism, and vari-ous forms of social injustices. Yet, whilst it is acknowledged that
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32
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
revolutions, social movements, and non-state terrorism generally involve grievances, all
grievances do not result in revolutionary or social
movements, nor do they all cause sub-versive terrorism. There must therefore be some intervening structural, conjunctural, and behavioral
factors particularly that act to transform some grievances into non-state terrorism through some agencies of the aggrieved population. The combination of
factors such as collective grievances, the continued oppressive and exploitative policies of state elites, the refusal of
state actors to address longstanding grievances peacefully and fairly, the development of extreme ideologies in the
form of religion or another ideology, and the emergence of leaders, ideologues, and cadres in aggrieved populations
can facilitate the emergence of subversive terrorism. We cannot adequately grasp the essence and characteristics of modern terrorism
without understanding the larger cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which it takes place. Since terrorism has been conceptualized, defined, and
theorized by those who have contradictory interests and objectives and since the subject matter of terrorism is complex and elusive, there currently is a wide gap
in establishing a common understanding of terrorism among scholars of terrorism studies. Most experts on the subject look at this issue from a narrow
perspective by ignoring what I argue to be the reality: that terrorism is a social cancer for all human groups affected by it.
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33
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Impacts- Standing reserve
The impact is the commodification of all life, from space to humans to weapons.
Joronen 2008, Mikko. Department of Geography, University of Turku. 2008. “The Age of Planetary Space: On Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of
Globalization.” https://www.doria.fi/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf?sequence=1
Accordingly, Heidegger understands modern technology above all as a metaphysical project. Modern technological devices, from the “manual technology and
manufacture” of the industrial age to the revolutions made first by the “engine technology” and then by what Heidegger (1998h:132–133) calls the ruling
determination of modern technology as “cybernetics” (i.e. the rise and irruption of the systems of maximum possible automation of command), all manifest a
peculiar mode of revealing that is not just total in nature, but an ever-growing imperial drive structured to constantly reach towards global enlargement and
technological unfolding leads to a diversity of phenomena, including the worldwide
homogenization of modes of living, the constant mobilization of cultural and economic practices, the global circulation
of information, goods, capital, people, and knowledge, the establishment of colossal stocks of energy with massive
potentiality of destruction as well (with the weapons of mass destruction), and the commodification and productisation
of all aspects of life from nature to culture, from genetic information to consumption culture – even a certain
insensibility with regard to tragedies of suffering (for instance through the television spectacles of war and
catastrophe), as Haar adds (1993:80; see also Gillespie 1984:128; Mugerauer 2008:xv-xviii). In spite of the seemingly diverging characters, the former
intensification. Eventually such
phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena of the age defining metaphysical scaffolding of technological revealing; it is the ‘framework’ of calculative drive, the
technological revealing of ‘enframing’, which allows for multiple set of phenomena to emerge. As will be later shown in more detail, such sense of unity is first and
foremost typical for a metaphysical mechanism of unfolding operative throughout the 2300 year tradition of Western thinking, a mechanism still being constitutive
is the
planetary outcome of such a technological mode of unfolding, which according to Peter Sloterdijk (2009) was first initiated and
started as a ‘mathematical globalization’ – as a project that in Heideggerean reading was boosted into its technological form by early modern
philosophers and mathematical physicists – further proceeding as a ‘terrestrial globalization’, finally leading to an age of
‘planetary globe’, which eventually turned the earth into a mere planet under totally penetrable networks of orderings
for the contemporary technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and self-heightening ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) of all things. As a matter of fact, it
(Thrift 2008:234–235; Morin 2009; See also Heidegger 1998h:133; Dallmayr 2005:44; Radloff 2007b:36–48). As the thesis will show, the contemporary planetary
unfolding was first initiated by the latent ground of thought behind the metaphysical formulations of early Greek philosophers, further boosted by the
mathematical developments of early modern thinkers, finally coming forth as cybernetic systems of ordering cast upon the planet. In
such a planet,
conceived as a mass of matter wandering in empty universe, everything is called to be useable, penetrable,
mouldable, ‘decodable’ and mobile.
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
34
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
I am going to beat you with my baby bump.
35
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Impacts- Genocide
The 1Ac’s reliance on technology creates a standing reserve which justifies
extermination of all life.
Athanasiou 3 [Athena Athanasiou, Professor of social anthropology at the University of Thessaly, "Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics,
and the Cut Body of Humanity," Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14.1, p.125-162, Muse]
In Heidegger's questioning (understood as a will to essence), edibility
and extermination are interlaced, and as such, are inscribed—or
the regime of industrial planning and technology. The mass annihilation of human bodies and the
mass production of the means of human subsistence together usher in the era of technological Enframing, articulated—
through Heidegger's framing device of analogy—as instances of the modern technologies of amassing, clearing, crashing, and
becoming-waste. 10Man, plant, and, most crucially, the animal—the other of man in Western metaphysics—emerge
as essential categories whose ontological distinctions are blurred and collapsed at the horizon of modern technology.
emplaced—within
With the obsolescence of the (nostalgic) aletheic essence of "handling" 11 in favor of mechanical means, bodies (human and non-human) are figured as final
products, mere effects, of a technological inevitability, vestigial (or skeletal) residues of physis in the topos, or better, in the thesis, of the factory and the camp,
the wastelands of modernity. The emphasis on this essential operational affinity occludes—or brings to light precisely by "writing out" of the self-aware
tropological space—the singularities and temporalities of the human/non-human spectrum: those whose labor and time are
consumed and exploited in the automated assembly-line of human food agriculture; those who feed their human
living mortality by consuming the industrially produced agricultural commodities; those who, by virtue of their assigned biogenetic and
[End Page 135] morphological status as non-human animals—are susceptible to being confined to motorized frameworks of human
"handling"; and those, naked and anonymous, who were not only forced into slave labor but reduced to "life that does
not deserve to live" by the biopolitical technology of the Nazi extermination camp. These disparate singularities remain
unacknowledged—bound to dissolve in the crucible of Enframing—not only precluding certain kinds of questions and foreclosing the possibility of a different kind
of questioning but also absolving the philosopher from the "task" of responding differently to the paradigm of extermination. In the Heideggerian text, the
agricultural factory and the concentration camp thus become the exemplary delimited spaces of modern Enframing, where the spectrum of technomediated
"mere life" is delineated in all its limits, continuities, and discontinuities. In the exchange of typical instances, "examples," "para-deigma-ta," the regime of
Enframing, where "man is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve," is fused with technological execution
whereby the naked body is left bare of any subjective content, standing before the sovereign power that constitutes
and obliterates it as such. Heidegger's reference to the concentration camp gives an example as much as it sets an
example: it brings to light the naked body of the technologies of modernity as indistinguishable from its intimate limit ,
and the word soma thus resumes its Homeric Greek limit-designation of a fallen or thrown nonliving body, a "corpse." But it does so, however, in a way that
obliterates the eponymous subjectivity of those nonliving bodies, reducing them to a faceless and nameless mass of "by-products." It
does so in a way
that undermines any involvement with response-ability for the Nazi realm of Enframing, a regime of decimating Jews,
homosexuals, Gypsies, and communists, all precluded from the realm of humanness and, as such, put to death. The
subjugation of human life and death to biopolitical sovereignty comes to be what is at stake in modern technology; it
also returns to haunt Heidegger's questioning of technology. In a certain sense, the force of substitution encapsulated in Heidegger's use of the correspondence
between industrial agricultural production and the industrial production of corpses here resonates uncannily with the scene of sacrificial offering (in its particular
instantiation in the scene of the "holocaust," which signifies "burnt offering"). And thus, absolved from the form of political execution sanctioned as the racial
purgation of "the human," the
systematic obliteration of the crematoria becomes redolent with the innocuous expiation of the
sacrificial pyre. In the illuminating ritual flames of [End Page 136] symbolic exchange and fusion, the forces of displacement and replacement take the
upper hand; boundaries bleed and limits are tested between the living and the dead, subject and object, the natural and
the social, the sacred and the profane, inclusion and exclusion, humanity and divinity, human form and animal form,
animate and inanimate matter, the saved and the lost, the edible and the discarded, killing and purifying, and killing
and eating.
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36
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Impact- destruction of the commons
Private enclosure of space will destroy the commons and allow any type of abuse as
long as it is ‘profitable.’
Amin 10 - Egyptian economist, a research officer for the government's "Institution for economic management ",an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in
Bamako (Mali), professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris, director of the Third World Forum(Samir Amin, 2010, “Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or
Ending Capitalism?” , pg.42,
There are key questions concerning both the use that an economic and social system makes of the natural resources
of the planet and the philosophical conception of the relationships between human beings (and within society) on the
one hand, and between humans and nature on the other. The response to these questions that a society has given in
the past describes the rationality that governs its economic and social management. Historically, capitalism has
mainly ignored these considerations. It established a strictly economic rationality with a short-term vision ('the
depreciation of the future') and was based on the principle that natural resources are generally put at the free
disposal of society and, what is more, in unlimited quantities. The only exception is when certain resources are
privately appropriated, as the land or mining resources, but subordinating their utilisation to the exclusive
requirements of the profitability for capital, which exploits the potential. The rationality of this system is therefore
narrow and becomes socially irrational as soon as these resources become scarce, even exhausted, or when their
usage, in the forms imposed by the economic profitability of capitalism.
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37
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Alt Solvency
Having an ethic that values the universe as a whole is the only way to solve
Daly and Frodeman, 08.Erin Moore and Robert, Indiana University. "Separated at Birth, Signs of Rapprochement: Environmental Ethics and Space
Exploration." Ethics & the Environment 13.1 (2008): 135-151. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011.
This anthropocentric and geocentric environmental perspective shows cracks when we try to extend it to the cosmic
environment. The few national or international policies currently in place that mention the environment of outer space (e.g. NASA’s planetary protection
policy, United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space) consider the preservation of planetary bodies for science, human exploration, and
possible future habitation, but there is not yet any policy that considers whether these anthropocentric priorities should supersede the preservation of possible
indigenous extraterrestrial life, or the environmental or geological integrity of the extraterrestrial environment. Anticipating the need for policy decisions regarding
space exploration, Mark Lupisella and John Logsdon suggest the possibility of a cosmocentric ethic, “one which (1) places the universe
at the center, or establishes the universe as the priority in a value system, (2) appeals to something characteristic of
the universe (physical and/or metaphysical) which might then (3) provide a justification of value, presumably intrinsic value, and (4) allow for reasonably objective measurement of value” (Lupisella & Logsdon 1997, 1). The authors discuss the
need to establish policies for pre-detection and post-detection of life on Mars, and suggest that a cosmocentric ethic would provide a
justification for a conservative approach to space exploration and science—conservative in the sense of considering
possible impacts before we act.5 A Copernican shift in con- sciousness, from regarding the Earth as the center of the
universe to one of it being the home of participants in a cosmic story, is necessary in order to achieve the proper
environmental perspective as we venture beyond our home planet.
The 1ac impacts prove that we have messed up our planet. The plan ensures more of
the same. Only the alternative can solve.
Daly and Frodeman, 08. Erin Moore and Robert, Indiana University. "Separated at Birth, Signs of Rapprochement: Environmental Ethics and
Space Exploration." Ethics & the Environment 13.1 (2008): 135-151. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011.
Lessons learned about our impact on the Earth’s surface and atmosphere have relevance as we travel beyond our home planet. The
unintended and
often destructive effects of humankind on the Earth environment highlight the need for caution and restraint as we
travel beyond our home planet. Several authors, acknowledging the probability that humans will one day be active and constant presences in
space, have suggested the need to identify and preserve wilderness areas on celestial and planetary bodies .4 Using the
United States National Parks System as an analogue, scientists Charles Cockell and Gerda Horneck (2004) suggest that an extraterrestrial park
system with strict regulations and enforcement measures would go a long way to ensure that portions of Mars remain
pristine for science, native biota (if any exist), and human appreciation. Such a policy would acknowledge the competing interests and
priorities of many parties: national space agencies, the international com- munity, the community of space scientists, private enterprises who have fixed their
sights on space tourism, commercial, and/or industrial enter- prises in space, environmental ethicists, and the general public. The issues involved are complex.
National Parks in the United States were established after centuries of thinking through the relationships between human and nonhuman, nature and culture,
beauty, truth, and the sublime, and humans’ obligations toward the Earth. Scientists and political decision-makers will have to confront
these issues, whether explicitly or implicitly, as they consider the future of the space program. But this thinking will
now take place in a context where humans are aliens. Earth- bound environmental philosophy occurs in a context where we are a natural
part of the environment. On other planets we face a new first question: what are the ethical and philosophical dimensions of visiting or settling other planets? In
short, should we go there at all? To date, the discussion of natural places has turned on questions concerning intrinsic and
instrumental values. Intrinsic values theorists claim that things have value for their own sake, in contrast to theories of instru-
mental value where things are good because they can be used to obtain something else of value (economic or otherwise). This debates tends tend to get caught
up in attempts at extending the sphere of intrinsically valuable entities. Ethical extensionism depends on human definitions of moral considerability, which
typically stem from some degree of identification with things outside us.
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38
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
We must seek out new political systems- the current one cannot solve, only a new
ontology can solve the problems of commodification
Carroll 10 – *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, “Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in
search of the new,” Interface 2:2, 168-198, )
In the most general terms and at the highest level of abstraction, the
question of counter-hegemony evokes the dialectic of bringing the
new into existence, against the sedimented practices and relations that, as Marx (1852) wrote, weigh ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ Yet it
is from existing practices and relations that the new is fabricated, which is to say that the future is already contained as
potential within the present. ‘Fermenting in the process of the real itself’ is what Ernst Bloch called ‘the concrete forward dream: anticipating elements
are a component of reality itself’ (1986:197). Counter-hegemony, as distinct from defensive forms of subaltern resistance, strives to shape those ‘anticipating
elements’, so that they may become lasting features of social life. For counter-hegemony, the challenge is to seek out in the present
the preconditions for a post-capitalist future and to develop political strategy based on an analysis of those immanent
possibilities (Ollman 2003). Gramsci captured this dialectic with the metaphor of welding the present to the future: How can the present be
welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and
‘anticipate’ the other (1977: 65)? The new is no mere ‘fashion’, the latter being a preferred trope of modernity (Blumer
1969), closely integrated with consumer-capitalist accumulation strategies, and thus with reproducing the status quo. Often the new
reworks the old, with radical effects. Viewed dialectically, the new preserves yet transforms extant reality, as in the incorporation of
indigenous ways as alternatives to neoliberal practices that have grown decidedly old (cf. Bahn 2009). This dialectic between
what already exists and what might be constructed out of that is integral to any project of purposeful socio-political
change. Movements, as Melucci (1989) has emphasized, are laboratories for social invention. They are carriers of the ‘new means and
values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships’ that Williams (1977: 123) identified with cultural emergence; ‘emergent publics’ that create
possibilities for a more democratic way of life (Angus 2001). Movements
succeed in creating change when political and cultural
opportunity structures open up (Tarrow 1998). But which movements, which practices and which alignments of movements and practices, in short
which ‘new combinations’ (Dyer-Witheford 2001) might already carry the new – and under what contemporary conditions might they have efficacy? These are
more concrete questions of counter-hegemony. Theorists of agency and structure note that, although social structures are sustained solely
through the practices that reproduce them, such practices, precisely because they are structurally reproductive, do not produce
much that is new; only transformative practices have that capacity (Bhaskar 1989; Fraser 1995). Indeed, a well-established
hegemonic structure naturalizes social cleavages and contradictions, securing the active, agentic consent of subalterns to
their subordination (De Leon, Desai and Tuğal 2009: 216; Joseph 2002).
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39
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Case turn: Econ
Profit driven exploration and development only benefits big business which turns the
case because there is no thought given to ethics or how the space exploration will
benefit human kind
Billings, 05. Linda, research professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. “Frontier Days in
Space: Are They Over?” Space Policy Journal. <http://lindabillings.org/lb_papers/Frontier_and_Space.pdf>
The Cold
War rhetoric and today’s rhetoric are virtually the same. This sort of thinking reinforces the idea that
conquest and exploitation are reasonable ends for space exploration. American space exploration initiatives today
are ostensibly intended to promote global leadership, economic competitiveness, scientific excellence, and
technological progress. But the idea of conquest and exploitation for the sake of profit is an insidious threat to
achieving any of these ends. With the Cold War over and the entire world accessible, the military industrial complex is extending the
doctrine of manifest destiny into outer space. In the late 20th century, the common wisdom is that humankind has conquered nature here on
earth. Now the conquerors who run the military industrial complex are looking toward the chaos and emptiness of space as new territory to claim and tame. As
the doctrine of manifest destiny was used to justify purging U.S. territory of indigenous residents, it is
being used to justify clearing the way
into space. Hence, space enthusiasts continue to speculate about mining the asteroids and staking claims on the
moon. (See Lawrence D. Roberts, “Foundations for Castles in the Air,” Space News, January 20-26, 1997) When the Department of Defense recently
announced that one of its space probes had found evidence of water on the moon, proposals immediately started surfacing for developing the moon and the
asteroids. (See John S. Lewis, “Water on the Moon, Pie in the Sky.” The New York Times, December 7, 1996) And aerospace industries continue to air plans for
expanding their businesses into outer space. Lockheed Martin executive James Blackwell has expressed the corporate viewpoint very
well: “In the 20th century we have called space ‘The Final Frontier.’ In the 21st we will call it something new. We will
call it ‘Open for Business.’ “ (“Space Shots,” Space News, February 3-9, 1997) (It is worth noting that the United States refuses to ratify the 1979
United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies,
because it prohibits sovereign claims on extraterrestrial property.) It is undoubtedly possible that space exploration could degenerate
into the kind of conquest and exploitation that characterized the West’s domination over what is now called the
developing world. Thus, NASA and its partners in space should be vigilant in their efforts to avoid repeating past mistakes. Exploration for the
purpose of aiding and abetting conquest and exploitation will not build a sound foundation for humankind’s
future in space. Initiatives intended to conquer and exploit, to fence off bits and pieces of the solar system and
extend private property rights into space, are not worthy of public funding.
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40
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
A2: Perm
If we are ever to develop an ethical space policy the kritik must come first
Collis & Graham 2009. (Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation Professor of Communication and Culture
Queensland University of Technology.) Political Geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management. Management and Organisation History, 4(3).
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21225
There has not yet been a human landing on Mars, however over a period of more than 40 years, 30 Mars missions have been attempted (Shayler et al. 2005,
20). While
humans have not yet physically arrived on Mars, our robotic prostheses have. And with the January 2004
it is vital that we attend to Mars’s political spatialities because these will
configure the ways in which humans eventually physically engage – or do not engage – with the planet. The European
announcement of plans to send humans to Mars (Bush 2004)
imperial explorers who began excursions five centuries ago shifted expeditions to ‘the new world’ from the domain of speculation to that of physical and political
practice. Similarly, Mars has moved out of science fiction and onto national budgets and the agendas of international legal
bodies. Vigorous scientific, technical, and political energy is being channelled into the possibility of transforming
Mars’s physical geography, yet, as Linda Billings (2006) asserts, policy makers in Space‐faring nations in particular have given
scant attention to the political spatialities of the animation. planet (2006).7 It is these spatialities that are currently in flux, and not Mars’s
physical terrain. ‘We have the opportunity to explore Mars’, as Fox (2006, 225) writes, ‘as not just a matter of what we can do, but also what we should do’. And
it is political spatialities that will ultimately underpin any future activities on the planet. In his quasifictional study of Martian
colonization, Kim Stanley Robinson (1994, 367) points up the importance of attending to these Martian spatialities now: ‘noosphere preceded biosphere – the
layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams’.
Political spatialities, along with
fictional representations and media constructions, constitute Mars’s current cultural geography, its areology. The task of this
article has been to provide an analysis of its uneven terrain in the context of western political economic trajectories. The task of the larger project of which this
article is an early part, however, is only barely initiated. What comes next is an application of lessons learned from terrestrial colonialism of the past to Martian
spatiality in its current, precolonial stage. ‘It is clear that we should seek some ethical guidelines in advance before we repeat our
sorry history elsewhere’, write McArthur and Boran (2004, 149). Two specific questions emerge from this article, questions that are not yet answered:
should Mars be regarded as a terra communis, a terra nullius, or a space of intrinsic value? Second, should Mars be claimable space, and if so, how can it be
transformed into a possession, and by whom? Martian colonization is beginning: it is time, before we begin to build, to attend
to it critically.
Perm will be co-opted by the political order that created the problem in the first place
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 183-184
Perhaps surprisingly for such a universal movement, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space is a good example of how new social
movements operate on local and global levels (Eschle and Stammers 2004). Struggles and coalitions are typically organized
at both the regional and the global scales. Furthermore, these two scales interact, with local struggles informing those at
the global scale and vice versa. Resistance at the global level tends to have what Eschel and Stammers call an ‘instrumental’
form. The interests of the movement are pursued by any possible means and particularly via rational, more scientific
argument. Certainly the movement to keep space for peace has engaged with international political arguments about the legality and desirability of legislation
relating to outer space militarization. Resistance at the local level, however, is typically of a more ‘expressive’ or emotional kind;
with people articulating who they are, what they care about and why they are challenging the institutions of power. As
Eyerman and Jamison (1998) argue, music can have an important role in this (Box C.1). Institutions for global surveillance and defence such as the Echelon
surveillance system and the so-called ‘star wars’ US missile defence system depend on interceptor missiles and tracking devices located in different regions
throughout the globe. Resistance to such developments can again, therefore, have a strong regional or local basis. Members
of the Yorkshire CND have been conducting weekly protests (see Yorkshire CND 2007). A programme of local events constitute the Global Network’s annual
‘Keep Space for Peace’ week. As Castells (2000a) describes, the new social movements are made via loose-knit global and local
networks, with the internet having a central role to play in making the links between the different scales. There is most definitely an affective
bridge between GN activists on a global as well as a local scale. Psychoanalytic theory could certainly provide additional insights into the
workings of this expressive dimension of movement activity, though the ways in which the unconscious is implicated must be the subject of further research.
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41
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
If we win a link it’s a reason why you should prefer the alternative only. Only a critical
ontology solves.
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 183-184
Sociologists should not construct themselves as detached intellectuals, but should make their political commitments clear. Their
concerns should be with revealing the suffering that results from social processes that serve the interests of those in
power. There is a distinct danger that some fledgling projects to explore the relationship between society and the
universe, such as the field of ‘astrosociology’ being developed by Jim Pass (2004), do little but reproduce hegemonic common sense
about the benefits of space exploration and development (Ormrod 2005). Although astrosociology may draw public
attention to under-researched issues, it will offer nothing if it does not do so critically.
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42
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
A2: Timeframe
Imperialism hasn’t changed. The 1ac’s timeframe pleas are the same ones that
Kennedy used to justify the moon mission- it’s all political agenda.
Cronlund, 07.Anderson Mark, Associate Professor of History at the University of Regina and Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies at Luther College,
University of Regina. “The Mythical Frontier, the Mexican Revolution, and the Press: An Imperial Subplot” Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 37,
Number 1, 2007, pp. 1-22 (Article)
A second strategy evinced in Kennedy’s transcendent appeal was the rhetorical appropriation and manipulation of time to generate
a sense of both urgency and perseverance. Crafting a temporal rhetoric that defines the present moment as the
precipice before the next stage of human enterprise, Kennedy compelled his audience to realize and make good on
their ancestral heritage by embarking toward the moon. Kennedy not only sought to convince his audience that the
moon could be grasped, but that history was waiting for them to do so. This strategy was complicated, however, by the fact that the
urgency needed to garner support for the mission would have to be sustained over several years and with
questionable chances for success. Therefore, his construction of time needed to speak both to an immediate urgency
and to a sustained effort over a decade’s worth of struggle and innovation. His strategy for navigating through these concerns was a
historical vision that motivated his audience, not because of any immediate circumstances but because the history of humanity necessitated that that generation
move forward at that time. Strategic chronologies had, in fact, been part of Kennedy’s lunar rhetoric from its first mention in the “Special Message to Congress,”
where the time frame for landing on the moon was cagily defined as “before this decade is out.”46 He did little to narrow this broad target in the Rice University
address, merely rephrasing the deadline as “the decade of the Sixties” and “before the end of this decade.” Kennedy’s ambiguous time frame
worked toward dual purposes, giving him room to maneuver while simultaneously providing the audience with a
sense of finitude necessary for transforming an abstract idea into a specific task. The present moment of the speech could extend
throughout “this decade,” making the goal of landing on the moon appear imminent without requiring it to be immediate. The audience was relieved from the
burden of haste, making it easier for them to take the first in a series of steps over a reasonable period of time rather than an all-or- nothing shot.
on space exploration.
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43
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
A2: Science first
Scientists are embedded within the system of commodification- they are not
objective because they have an incentive to keep producing
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Visiting
Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 31-32,)
this more scientific mode
of relating to the universe merely intensified rather than alleviated the alienation of the masses from the universe.
Sohn-Rethel’s argument is that ‘abstract’, one might say ‘objective’, knowledge first arose as part of the exchange
relationship in what he calls ‘societies of appropriation’ or capitalist societies based on a high division of labour. The
person producing a commodity is, as Marx described, alienated from the exchange process, in which s/he comes to see
his/her product in terms of an abstract exchange value, which operates independently of the needs and uses which
the seller or buyer has in mind. This purely abstract system of thought represented in the form of money (‘a crude
approximation of the underlying principle’) leads to abstract, scientific, thought. Postone (1996) has argued similarly that
It should be noted that, contrary to Lerner’s (1991) argument, Alfred SohnRethel (1975) and Frankel (2003) have argued that
‘abstraction’ in general is central to capitalist societies. The development of capital in two distinct epochs has led to corresponding developments in epistemology,
according to Sohn-Rethel. First, the introduction of coinage in Ancient Greece led to Greek philosophy and mathematics. Second, the development of modern
capitalism led to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific revolutions. He goes on to argue, and this forms a major focus of his and Lerner’s thesis, that
the abstract form of scientific knowledge was instrumental in legitimizing the division of mental and manual labour in modern capitalism. The
argument is
that the existence of this abstract system justifies the existence of an elite of scientists capable of studying the
system untainted by the practical knowledge of the worker. Davidson (1985) is also extremely critical of the development of objective
scientific approaches to the universe that distance knowledge from people’s everyday experience of the universe. The latter, Davidson argues, remains Earthcentred (as in Tycho Brahe’s model). The result of de-centring Earth through science, for Davidson, is the creation of ‘a cold mechanical world’ (ibid.: 4). There
are important differences between Sohn-Rethel’s account and Lerner’s. For Lerner, Galileo, like the empiricists Copernicus and Brahe before him, represents a
break from the truly abstract philosophy of Plato. It is a break alleviating a lot of the problems of the division of labour by relying on artisan and serf knowledge
available to all. However, Sohn-Rethel sees Galileo as representing a distinct break from his predecessors in instituting a new form of abstracted knowledge that
severely heightens the mental/manual division of labour. He points to parallels between Galileo’s law of inertial motion and the abstraction of the commodity
exchange. Lerner does not draw out a full criticism of the relationship between capital and cosmology that replaced it. Contrary to what Lerner implies during
most of the book, colonial capitalism based initially on practical knowledge of navigation (now satellites, and possibly future capitalist exploitation of space
resources) has not been an age of equality or celebration of the knowledge of the manual worker. This epoch has had its own cosmic elite of
not only scientists but also engineers, and the military and the governments and corporations that control them. The
scientific cosmological elite of today is still maintained by others’ labour. They are given ‘the freedom to abandon the constraints of the
“ordinary” world’ (Ferguson 1990: 1).
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44
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
A2: Alt does nothing
The affirmative’s ideology makes their impacts inevitable. Without a critical ontology,
we will suffer serial policy failure!!!!!
Dillion and Reid, 00 (Michael professor at Department of Politics and International Relations University of Lancaster Global, Dr Julian Reid. Lecturer
in International Relations, Department of War Studies “Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emerge 132-134”
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40644986.pdf?acceptTC=true)
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the
law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the man- agement
of population. The
management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may
be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power:
economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, de- mographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now,
where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of
power. Here discursive forma- tions emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain num- ber of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers
and dan- gers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.34 More specifically,
where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy prob- lematic will emerge. Such
problematics are detailed and elabo- rated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlock- ing policy
domains. Policy domains reify the problematizatiòn of Michael Dillon & Julian Reid 133 life in certain ways by turning these
epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the con- tinuous attention of
policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of
the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we
may also dis- cover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways
that Fou- cault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is
no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human con- duct,
any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problemati- zation is capable of becoming a policy problem.
Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy sci- ence, in which problematizations
go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations.
Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institu- tional and ideological investments surrounding
accepted "prob- lems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological
assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epis- temological or
ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with
problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what
policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circum- stances over which they
ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet
serial policy failure - the fate and the fuel of all policy - compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis
that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.35 Serial policy failure is
no simple shortcoming that science and policy - and policy science - will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is
rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance
encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness land- scapes that constantly adaptive
and changing ensembles have con- tinuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global
governance promotes the very changes and unintended out- comes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of
policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving 134 Global Governance, Liberal Peace,
and Complex Emergency process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better
information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliber- ately installs
socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (pol- icy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking
and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge
networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten
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45
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.36 It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of
governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy
solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a mat- ter of definition as well, since
the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosoph- ical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower"
ways. Foucault was preoccupied with populations that were already territorialized within states. It becomes exceptionally difficult to elide the relation between
sovereignty and governmentality, as Foucault tended to do, when the "populations" at issue are global rather than local.37 The complex relation that has always
obtained between governmental and sovereign power becomes freshly posed as a consequence. Global liberal governance begins to dif- fer from the way in
which Fqucault argued that governmentality took population as its organizing principle, for example, inas- much as global liberal governance takes global
"populations" as its terrain of operation. However, global liberal governance also be- gins to differ from Foucault's initial account of governmentality inasmuch as
"population" discourse has evolved in consequence of the increasing influence of the biophilosophy disseminated through the evolution of the evolutionary theory
of molecular bi- ology.38 This, too, classically, depends upon the concept of "popu- lation," and the evolution of evolutionary talk has begun to gen- erate a novel
biophilosophical discourse that informs the allied accounts of complex adaptive systems, knowledge-based societies, and network organizations.39 These
increasingly distinguish the discourses of global liberal governance, especially those account- ing for its global economic success and those newly conceiving its
account of strategy and war.
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46
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Ethics first (Also A2 Perm)
We must develop ethical frameworks for approaching space BEFORE we take action
Reiman 09’[Saara, Department of Social and Moral Philosophy, University of Helsinki, “Is space an environment?”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964609000289#sec3]
Some writers believe that space ethics should arise from practical issues and consist of solutions to these issues .
However, such an approach is in danger of becoming casuistic and contradictory - highly impractical once we move
beyond covering the most obvious problems. It might be better to try to form some basic ethical principles first and then
attempt to apply them to a range of practical issues. This approach would safeguard the integrity of the ethical system and, second, it
could also be adapted to treat completely new questions. Philosophically it may be beneficial to employ the tools of
environmental ethics in discussions about space ethics. If we act in space, the ethical questions we encounter often
have as much in common with environmental ethics as with the philosophy of science or sociology. There already exist ethical
questions that have a distinctly environmental ethical undertone (for example: if we discover life, how should we treat it?).
This strongly suggests that we should consider space as an environment for practical reasons. Studying space as an
environment allows us to have another perspective besides that of human interests. While it is true that studying the ethical questions of
space exploration from the perspective of human interests can answer many ethical questions (for instance, cluttering an important orbit with debris is unwise
mainly because doing so is against our own best interests in the long term, and this provides a good reason to avoid it4), other questions benefit from combining
different perspectives. Questions
such as whether or not it is ethically acceptable to mine the rings of Saturn until they are
destroyed or to blow the moons of Mars out of existence as part of a nuclear weapons test programme, are questions
where applying only a human perspective seems insufficient. An account of ethics that does not grant these places some inherent value
seems to be lacking something important - the perspective of the object of human actions. If we choose to ignore that perspective, we may fail to realize the full
consequences of our actions. When making moral decisions humans have a tendency to count only certain features of the objects of their actions as
significant. For example, when discussing the ethics of animal testing, laboratory animals are often portrayed as ‘models’ or biological machines with no
subjecthood or interests of their own. In the same way, some space explorers might see the objects of their interest – like the rings of Saturn – only as mineral
deposits. Adopting
the attitude that the rings of Saturn are an environment in the sense that they can be considered
things that have inherent value beyond their value to humans is a way to avoid this kind of blindness. According to Rolston,
it is very human but also quite short-sighted to value a system only for its production of life. As he puts it, while life is special in many ways, it is a mistake to
believe that this means that lifeless places, ‘mere things’, are beyond appropriate and inappropriate consideration [8].
We must consider ethics before considering policy action
Lin, 06.
Patrick, Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State Univeristy. “Viewpoint: Look Before Taking Another Leap For Mankind- Ethical and Social
Considerationa in Rebuilding Society in Space” Astropolitics. < http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14777620601039701.>
If space development is just on our horizon, there looks to be enough questions to require forethought and advance
planning related to the social, political and economic landscape of space living, in addition to the usual near-term
issues in space ethics. If this is our chance for a fresh start, then we should be deliberate and careful with our actions, thinking
through as many of the unintended consequences as possible. We already have centuries of philosophical, political
and economic theories in our stockpile; now is the time to dust them off, re-evaluate them, and finally turn theory into
action. One reasonable starting point would be to consider space development through political thinker John Rawls’
Original Position in which we operate under a “veil of ignorance” or pretend that we don’t know any facts about
ourselves, including who we are, what economic class we belong to, what nationality we are, and so on.[8] With our
biases stripped away, what rules would we set up, knowing that we would have to live by those rules once we find
out who we are? You may be just as likely to be a poor farmer in the heartland of America, or a Buddhist in Japan, or a wealthy businessman in Germany,
or an AIDS patient in South Africa, or an amputee in Iraq. Applying the veil of ignorance to rules in space, this helps ensure that the
processes we set up are fair and consider the interests of all people, including protecting the worst-off people from an
even worse and uncaring fate. What we probably don’t want to happen is to rush into orbit without a “big picture”
strategy – allowing individuals or corporations or governments to make up a plan as they go along, whether it’s to
camp on or erect billboards on or lay claim to other planets, untethered by orderly processes and safeguards. Had we given that kind of
forethought to administering the Internet, we might not have had cyber-squatters camping out on domain names, or disgruntled teens writing virus programs that
exploit gaps in the technology, or unscrupulous companies clogging our in-boxes with spam, or any number issues related to IP, privacy, security and other key
areas. History gives us plenty of other examples where we’ve introduced new technologies or crossed barriers without
giving forethought to our actions, which then caused problems that we could have avoided. We don’t even need to
look at the most obvious cases, such as splitting the atom. The automobile, for example, enabled us to more easily and quickly travel
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47
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
greater distances, but it also created pollution,
urban sprawl, pressure on natural resources, and other problems – things we
could have addressed much earlier. Nanotechnology, as another example, promises to give us great benefits, but it also holds great potential for
misuse and raises ethical questions, e.g., related to health
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48
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Value to life O/W Extinction
Loss of value to life is worse than annihilation. With death comes relief, but being
stripped of value is suffering with no end.
Mitchell 5 [Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology,
Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]
Devastation (Verwistung) is the process by which the world becomes a desert (Wfiste), a sandy expanse that seemingly
extends without end, without landmarks or direction, and is devoid of all life.20 If we follow the dialogue in thinking an ancient Greek
notion of "life" as another name for "being," then the lifeless desert is the being-less desert.The world that becomes a lifeless
desert is consequently an unworld from which being has withdrawn. The older prisoner makes this connection explicit, "The being of an
age of devastation would then consist in the abandonment of being" (GA 77: 213). As we have seen, this is a process that befalls the world, slowly dissolving it of
worldliness and rendering it an "unworld" (cf. GA 7: 88, 92f./EP, 104, 107f., etc.). Yet this unworld is not simply the opposite of world; it remains a world, but a
world made desert. The desert is not the complete absence of world. Such an absence would not be reached by devastation (Verwisiung), but rather by
annihilation (Vernichtung); and for Heidegger, annihilation is
far less of a concern than devastation: "Devastation is more uncanny than mere
sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation
on the contrary orders [bestelht] and spreads everything that blocks and prevents" (WHD, 11/29-30; tin). Annihilation as a thought
annihilation [blofleVernichtung]. Mere annihilation
of total absence is a thought from metaphysics. It is one with a thinking of pure presence: pure presence, pure absence, and. purely no contact between them.
During another lecture course on H6lderlin, this time in 1942 on the hymn "The Ister," Heidegger claims that annihilation is precisely the agenda of America in
regards to the "homeland," which is here equated with Europe: "We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate
[zuvernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means: the inception of the Western world. The inceptual is indestructible [unzersto'rbar]" (GA 53: 68/54;
tm). America is the agent of technological devastation, and it operates under the assumptions of presence and absence that it itself is so expert at dissembling.
America resolves to annihilate and condemns itself to fdilure in so doing, for the origin is "indestructible." We could take this a step further and claim that only
because the origin cannot be annihilated is it possible to destroy it. This possibility of destruction is its indestructible character. It can always be further destroyed,
but you will never annihilate it. Americanism names the endeavor or resolution to drive the destruction of the world ever further into the unworld. America is the
agent of a malevolent being. This same reasoning explains why the older man's original conception of evil had to be rethought. Evil is the "devastation of the
earth and the annihilation of the human essence that goes along with it" (GA 77: 207), he said, but this annihilation is simply too easy, too much of an
"Americanism." The human essence is not annihilated in evil-who could care about that? Instead it is destroyed and devastated by evil. Devastation does
not annihilate, but brings about something worse, the unworld. Without limit, the desert of the unworld spreads, ever
worsening and incessantiy urging itself to new expressions of malevolence. Annihilation would bring respite and, in a
perverse sense, relief. There would be nothing left to protect and guard, nothing left to concern ourselves withnothing left to terrorize. Devastation is also irreparable; no salvation can arrive for it. The younger man is able to voice the
monstrous conclusion of this thinking of devastation: "Then malevolence, as which devastation occurs [sichereignet], would indeed remain a -basic characteristic
of being itself" (GA 77: 213, 215; em). The older man agrees, "being would be in the ground of its essence malevolent" (GA 77: 215). Being is not evil; it is
something much worse; being is malevolent
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49
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Reps first
Space policy is defined by the rhetoric that surrounds it, thus we must critique those
representations before we can analyze policy choices.
Billings 06’ [Linda, 25 years of experience in aerospace Ph.D. in mass communication. February 3 “To the moon mars and back: Culture, Law and Ethics
in Space fairing societies.” http://lindabillings.org/lb_papers/space_law_ethics_culture.pdf
The social, political, economic and cultural context for the U.S. civil space program has changed radically since the 1960s.
But the rhetoric of space policy making has not. In the 21st century, politicians and other advocates are promoting
“the Moon-Mars thing” as exploration for the sake of exploring and also as a means of opening up the solar system to
private property claims, resource exploitation, and commercial development. In the words of one space advocate,
“The solar system is like a giant grocery store. It has everything we could possibly want…. The solar system’s seemingly
limitless energy and mineral resources will solve Earth’s resource shortages.”8 In these remarks is reflected a belief that the values of
materialism, consumerism, and hyper-consumption prevalent today are values worth extending into the solar system.
This conception of outer space depends on the idea of a solar system (and beyond) of wide-open spaces and
limitless resources. The so-called “the myth of the frontier” (Slotkin, 1973) in American history embodies a worldview in which the United
States is “a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top” (p. 5). President Kennedy’s “new
frontier” of the 1960s was “a heroic engagement” in a campaign against communism, including the civilian space program (Slotkin, 1990, p. 3). The
frontier
metaphor has been, and still is, a dominant metaphor in rhetoric about space exploration; it thrives today in discourse
of space exploration planning and policy making. “Space frontier” means different things to different people, and it is worth thinking about the
range of meanings invoked by the metaphor in considering what values are, could be, or should be embodied in the space exploration enterprise.
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50
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
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51
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
***AFF answers: commons turn
Without regulation resources and the lack of them are exploited leading to an endless
cycle of poverty
Trawick ‘3 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_interdisciplinary_history/v034/34.4gelles.html; The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in
the Andean Commons. By Paul B. Trawick (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003)
Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to studying a particular community: Huaynacotas, a relatively egalitarian "indigenous" community; Pampamarca, a
"colonized" community with social inequality; and the town of Cotahuasi, the provincial capital, characterized by imposing haciendas and social decline. In
Huaynacotas, the Quechua language is [End Page 664] spoken by all and relatively few outsiders settled in the area. The differentiation of the peasantry has not
reached the extremes of the hacienda communities of the lower valley. Here the "egalitarian tradition" of water distribution is based on proportionality or "equity";
that is, "no one is allowed to deprive others of water by using more than the amount to which he is entitled, nor can he legally get it more often than everyone
else" (85). This situation is not intended to suggest an unstratified society. Although everyone receives an equal number of waterings, the size of land holdings
varies, as does the quantity of water received. Even so, proportionality basically means that people take turns and collectively ensure that nobody cuts into line. It
also implies that an individual's contribution to canal maintenance should be proportionate to the size of landholding. This egalitarian way of watering is bolstered
by transparency in distribution, as well as by the community having autonomous control over the source of its water. In
Pampamarca, where five elite
families have inserted themselves into a community mostly comprised of peasant families, landlords in each sector
receive water first. Water is then distributed by what Trawick calls a "hierarchical pattern," according to the number of
community offices fulfilled. Growing class differentiation between small, medium, and large landholders, inequity in
distribution, and the loss of the traditional authority's power is linked to a pattern that Trawick sees in other villages of
the valley where elite minorities reside. That the town of Cotahuasi has been even more usurped by outsiders is also
reflected in conflicts over water. Many Spaniards settled in these warm lower valleys, consolidating land in haciendas; the predominance of Spanish
over Quechua became well established. Over half of the water supply was eventually privatized on these estates, water clearly
becoming a tool of power: The haciendas' water grabbing "went beyond simple greed" to a means of depriving
people of water in order to exploit them (170). This system of private rights "was based on the threat of and the use of force,
on a power of the local elite that had no institutional or legal restraint" (172). The three communities represent a continuum, according
to Trawick, from a largely indigenous system in Huaynacotas to a highly privatized and conflicted one in Cotahuasi. Chapter six traces the historical impact of the
reforms introduced by Juan Velasco Alvarado and the "military radicals" during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Part of it examines class and other social
divisions in Andean communities, and the effects that these divisions have on irrigation and other social domains. Chapter seven follows the history of the
reforms of the 1980s and the ways in which a tragedy of the commons began to threaten both the environment and the social
fabric of the communities. Chapter eight provides a firsthand account of the Shining Path revolutionary movement in the region, as well as a discussion
of the disastrous effects of the elected official regime during this time—hyperinflation, corruption, and the "massive betrayal by APRA of the public trust" (283). It
is one of few ethnographic descriptions of this dire [End Page 665] period in Peruvian history. In this sense, Trawick attends to both
long-term and recent historical processes. Questionable, however, is the author's assertion that settlements throughout the Andes had "probably once shared the
same local tradition" of irrigation (1), which has become increasingly degraded through time (but which is still found in communities such as Huaynacotas).
Trawick sometimes conflates this "local" precolumbian tradition with the "Inca model." The main historical evidence that he presents is Garcilaso de la Vega's
chronicle, even though (as Trawick admits) Garcilaso is well known to have exaggerated the positive aspects of Inca civilization.1 But Trawick then further
confuses the issue, claiming that the "Inca system of water management was evidently a dual one, where the rules and principles of use depended to some
extent on the state of the water supply. At times when the supply was plentiful, or perhaps in places where water was always plentiful, as in Pampamarca, some
kind of hierarchical system was probably originally in place" (127). If the author is claiming that two "local" or "Inca" systems (one "hierarchical," the other based
on proportionality or "equity") were found in combination throughout highland society, why is it that the equity-based model alone exhibits what Trawick refers to
as "the basic principles of Andean irrigation" (304)? In addition to a lack of historical evidence, this argument's use of ethnographic analogy to reach
conclusions about the past, and about such a vast area, is suspect. The highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador are environmentally
diverse, stretching for thousands of miles, and have been home to great ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity since Inca times—not to mention great political
diversity before, during, and after the Inca period, ranging from major polities to small nations. For all we know, there may have been dozens of different hydraulic
traditions in precolumbian times; we do not know if the relatively short-lived Inca empire fundamentally altered them. Why should we assume that these diverse
groups all adopted the same "local" model of "proportionality" in irrigation? Although it may be the most socially and environmentally friendly way to manage
water, people—indigenous people included—do not always follow the best strategies. Fortunately, Trawick's argument about a shared local tradition is a minor
distraction from his detailed and fine-tuned ethnographic and historical research. Throughout the book, he deftly moves between historical, ecological, and
economic analyses of water control and community conflict, delving into the micropolitics of community life and local irrigation, as well as into the impact of
successive political regimes in the region. The conclusions discuss the materials presented in terms of the moral economy of Andean society, continuity and
decline in local communities, and the mounting pressure on water today, as international lenders and privatization initiatives threaten communal control. Trawick
[End Page 666] keenly observes that privatization "would merely restore a policy that has been thoroughly discredited, not just in Peru but in most Latin America
countries, one that has caused a lot of hardship and conflict in the past" (304). Providing great insight into this and other important issues, The Struggle for Water
in Peru is most notable for how it uses water to dip deeply into the ecological, technological, and social history of the Andes.
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52
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
AFF Answers: Onto bad
We must prioritize policy making to solve extinction before question ontology
Owen 2002, david Millennium Journale of international studies 2002 “Re-Orientation Internatioal Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical
Reasoning”
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “epistemology” and “ontology” often
signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear
that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a
characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different
theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help
individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a
confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical
turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or
interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or
interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of
these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these
philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theoryto recognise that it can provide powerful
accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded.
It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this
class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice
theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the point that, for
a certain class of problems, rational
choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of
their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The
second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theoryconstruction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian
Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the
challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the
inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven
work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the
description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy
rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in
similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of
phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this
strategy easily slips into the
promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the
formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of
warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the
disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulatesthe idea that
there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and
epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle
arises.
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53
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
AFF answers: tech inevitable
Even if the negative is right about their claims, development is inevitable and it’s too
late to avoid technology
Zimmerman 89 – Philosophy Professor, Tulane (Michael, Introduction To Deep Ecology, http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC22/Zimmrman.htm)
we have so
disturbed those rhythms that we can't even consider going back. To retreat to a pre-technological state would in fact be
dooming the Earth to destruction, whereas what we need now is to be more engaged in trying to repair the damage. How would a deep ecologist
respond? Michael: I think deep ecologists have mixed emotions about that, but I would agree with that critique. For example, if we stopped our
development at the current level, it would be a catastrophe, because our production methods are so dirty and inefficient
and destructive that if we keep this up, we're really in trouble. Some deep ecologists say that it would be all for the best if the industrial world were just to
A critique I hear often is that deep ecologists want to return to a way of life that's totally tied to the rhythms of the Earth, but at this point
collapse, despite all the human suffering that would entail. If such a thing ever occurs, some people have suggested, we could never revive industrialization again
because the raw materials are no longer easily accessible. I hope that doesn't happen, and yet it may happen. Now, social ecologists say that
deep
ecologists flirt with fascism when they talk about returning to an "organic" social system that is "attuned to nature."
They note that reactionary thinkers often contrast the supposedly "natural" way of life - which to them means social Darwinism and authoritarian social systems with "modernity," which in politial terms means progressive social movements like liberalism and Marxism. But deep ecologists recognize this danger. They call
not for a regression to collective authoritarianism, but for the evolution of a mode of awareness that doesn't lend itself to authoritarianism of any kind. So I think
the only thing we can do is to move forward. We need to develop our efficiency and production methods so that we'll
be able to take some of the pressure off the environment. We also need to develop increasing wealth for the highly populated countries so
their populations will go down. [Ed. Note: See Lappé and Schurman, "The Population Puzzle," in IC #21.] There's a necessity for new technology.
The question is, can it be made consistent with our growing awareness that the planet is really hurting?
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54
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
AFF answers: Perm
We must combine theory and action!
Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Visiting
Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 41,
The physical and natural sciences have often historically denied that their attempts to know the realities with which they are concerned are in any way dependent
on the social world. The ideal of science is of an objective discipline that is value-free and guided by its own criteria of
progress. The social influences on the theories and methods of science are therefore ignored. Likewise, in the social sciences in the last few
decades there has often been a suggestion that our understandings of the physical and natural worlds are mere
social constructions, a product of the society in which they were created, thus privileging the kind of knowledge held
by the social sciences over that of other disciplines. But as Bruno Latour says, whilst explaining the importance of material
reality, ‘it is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand narrative, the physics of subatomic particles to a text,
subway systems to rhetorical devices, all social structures to discourse’ (Latour 1993: 64). We maintain that, in order to
understand the dialectic between social and physical worlds, an ontology is necessary that explains how insights
from both the social and physical sciences can be combined. We recognize that causal mechanisms operate on a number
of different levels within the universe, and argue that the job of the social scientist is to work with the knowledge
produced by physicists and the like, combining that with sociological understanding. The result of this should be a
theory that reduces the universe to neither the merely physical nor the purely social. These points are related to the
fundamental tenets of critical realism as outlined by Roy Bhaskar and others (Bhaskar 1986, 1997, 1998; Archer et al. 1998) (see Box 1.1). Unfortunately, the
ongoing attempt by scientists to construct a theory of everything runs counter to this kind of ontology.
It’s too late to solely kritik- exploration is already happening, we need concrete action
Daly and Frodeman, 08.Erin Moore and Robert, Indiana University. "Separated at Birth, Signs of Rapprochement: Environmental Ethics and Space
Exploration." Ethics & the Environment 13.1 (2008): 135-151. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Revolutions in philosophic understanding and cultural worldviews inevitably accompany revolutions in science. As we
expand our exploration of the heavens, we will also reflect on the broader human implications of advances in space.
Moreover, our appreciation of human impact on Earth systems will expand as we come to see the Earth within the context of the solar system. Most
fundamentally, we need to anticipate and wrestle with the epistemological, metaphysical, and theological dimensions of space
exploration, including the possibility of extraterres- trial life and the development of the space environment, as it
pertains to our common understanding of the universe and of ourselves. Such reflection should be performed by
philosophers, metaphysi- cians, and theologians in regular conversation with the scientists who investigate space and the
policy makers that direct the space program. The exploration of the universe is no experimental science, contained and controlled in a
laboratory, but takes place in a vast and dynamic network of interconnected, interdependent realities. If (environmental) philosophy is to be a significant source of
insight, philosophers will need to have a much broader range of effective strategies for interdisciplinary collaborations,
framing their reflections with the goal of achieving policy-relevant results. If it is necessary for science and policymakers to heed the advice of philosophers, it is equally necessary for philosophers to speak in con- crete terms
about real-world problems. A philosophic questioning about the relatedness of humans and the universe, in
collaboration with a prag- matic, interdisciplinary approach to environmental problems, is the most responsible means
of developing both the science and policy for the exploration of the final frontier.
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55
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
Political movements need multiple voices to defeat the current system
Carroll 10 – *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, “Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new,” Interface 2:2, 168-198,
Just as hegemony has been increasingly organized on a transnational basis – through the globalization of Americanism, the
construction of global governance institutions, the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and so on (Soederberg 2006; Carroll 2010) – counterhegemony has also taken on transnational features that go beyond the classic organization of left parties into internationals.
What Sousa Santos (2006) terms the rise of a global left is evident in specific movementbased campaigns, such as the successful
international effort in 1998 to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); in initiatives such as the World Social Forum, to contest the terrain of global
civil society; and in the growth of transnational movement organizations and of a ‘democratic globalization network’, counterpoised to neoliberalism’s
an
incipient war of position is at work here – a bloc of oppositional forces to neoliberal globalization encompassing a
wide range of movements and identities and that is ‘global in nature, transcending traditional national boundaries’ (Butko 2006: 101).
transnational historical bloc, that address issues of North-South solidarity and coordination (Smith 2008:24). As I have suggested elsewhere (Carroll 2007),
These moments of resistance and transborder activism do not yet combine to form a coherent historical bloc around a counter-hegemonic project. Rather, as
‘we are witnessing the emergence and re-making of political imaginaries…, which often
lead to valuable localized actions as well as greater transborder solidarity’ (2009: 424). Indeed, Gramsci’s adage that while the line of development
is international, the origin point is national, still has currency. Much of the energy of anti-capitalist politics is centred within what Raymond
Williams (1989) called militant particularisms – localized struggles that, ‘left to themselves … are easily dominated by the power of
capital to coordinate accumulation across universal but fragmented space’ (Harvey 1996: 32). Catharsis, in this context, takes on a spatial character. The
scaling up of militant particularisms requires ‘alliances across interrelated scales to unite a diverse range of social
groupings and thereby spatialize a Gramscian war of position to the global scale’ (Karriem 2009: 324). Such alliances, however, must be
grounded in local conditions and aspirations. Eli Friedman’s (2009) case study of two affiliated movement organizations in Hong Kong and
Marie-Josée Massicotte suggests,
mainland China, respectively, illustrates the limits of transnational activism that radiates from advanced capitalism to exert external pressure on behalf of
subalterns in the global South. Friedman recounts how a campaign by the Hong Kong-based group of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior to
empower Chinese mainland workers producing goods for Hong Kong Disneyland failed due to the lack of local mobilization by workers themselves. Yet the same
group, through its support for its ally, the mainland-based migrant workers’ association, has helped facilitate self-organization on the shop floor. In the former
case, well-intentioned practices of solidarity reproduced a paternalism that failed to inspire local collective action; in the latter, workers taking direct action on their
own behalf, with external support, led to ‘psychological empowerment’ and movement mobilization (Friedman 2009: 212). As a rule, ‘the more such
solidarity work involves grassroots initiatives and participation, the greater is the likelihood that workers from different
countries will learn from each other’, enabling transnational counter-hegemony to gain a foothold (Rahmon and Langford
2010: 63).
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56
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
AFF answers: Alt fails
You cannot make ontological assessments of space based on earth policies, the 2
are totally separate
Reiman 09’[Saara, Department of Social and Moral Philosophy, University of Helsinki, “Is space an environment?”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964609000289#sec3]
One good reason to think that environmental ethics is important and that we ought to regulate our actions towards
other beings is that, on Earth, all things are connected and the harm we inflict upon our environment may well
become harm done to ourselves. Earth is practically a closed system,1 and we do not yet fully understand its
complexity [1]. Even if we agree that there are good reasons to limit the exploitation of Earth and preserve it, do we have to agree that we should
adopt similar attitudes regarding outer space? Most people think intuitively that it should make no moral difference whether we
travel some thousands of kilometres westwards or upwards. But is this intuition correct? Considering space as something that
does not enjoy a moral status equal to that of Earth's environments does not imply that it would be wise for us to exploit it short-sightedly. Certainly, it
would still be wise to keep our own long-term interests in mind while planning new projects. However, it is a very
different thing to recognize that it is in our own best interest, e.g. to reduce the amount of debris in important orbits (see [2]) or to preserve
areas that have important historical or aesthetic value, than it is to say that space, for the most part, has inherent value in the same way that Earth environments
are thought to have. On
Earth, the term ‘environment’ is loaded in so many ways that ‘space’ is not. Our own well-being is
closely connected with the well-being of our planet. If there is excessive pollution we will become ill or may even have
to move away from areas that have become unsafe. Space, on the other hand, is extremely hostile to humans to begin with. While it can be
argued that some phenomena taking place in space are significant from the perspective of human well-being, our actions in general do not have the power to
affect those phenomena in nearly the same way that we can affect the flourishing or extinction of life on Earth. Second, on Earth we have an
abundance of life forms. In space we have interesting phenomena but it is lifeless, and in environmental ethics life is
of special importance; many central environmental ethical concepts and ideas make sense only when we are talking
about places where there is life. It is still under dispute how far we should go to protect and cherish life here on Earth. Another complication is that the
theory of environmental ethics is often quite different from the practices in place in various levels of society: even when we know that polluting our environment is
harmful, we often choose to do it anyway for one reason or another. Keeping this in mind, it may be difficult to argue that we should prohibit all exploitation of
space on the grounds that pollution in the process is inevitable. For
instance, if we think about the idea of terraforming Mars, the
‘ethics of life’ makes a great deal of sense. If there is indigenous life on Mars, the question is: would it thrive more if
the atmosphere were denser, if there were steady supplies of water on the surface, etc. Or would such life suffer and
perhaps even become extinct? In the latter case, terraforming would not be ethically acceptable because doing so would diminish the diversity of life
in the universe, even if we could later bring Earth life to Mars. Spreading life from Earth to other planets would just increase its quantity (and consequently the
chances of survival were a disaster to make Earth hostile to such life). But
Martian life would be qualitatively different and, therefore,
losing it would be a loss that could not be compensated by introducing Terran life to a terraformed Mars, even if it
were possible to introduce more species than originally existed on that planet. The danger, as pointed out by
Williamson, is that an attempt to terraform Mars - the most likely candidate - could destroy existing but undiscovered life forms, as well as
changing existing landforms and other physical features [1]. Strictly speaking, it is unlikely that, at the time when a decision to
terraform another planet was made, we could completely exclude from consideration the possibility of the existence
of life not yet discovered. A good question is thus when is the likelihood of discovering hidden life low enough to
justify terraforming? On the other hand, if we can assert with great certainty that Mars is a dead planet, then
terraforming it would be a good deed, as it would make Mars more diverse, a more special place than it is as a lifeless place, as well as increasing
the chances of long-term survival for species that could be introduced to a new planet. Interesting geological features of Mars would still probably exist and
possibly even provide a base for forming new kinds of ecosystems capable of supporting the evolution of species that could not evolve on Earth. Our connection
with minor planets, comets and stars is very thin, however. How could building polluting mines on Ceres affect human welfare at all (except that it might reduce
pollution on Earth)? And since Ceres is – as far as we know - a lifeless place, what good would be gained by investing in expensive systems that reduce
pollution? The concept
of pollution is a negative one, something that is undesirable and produces adverse effects. It
may, however, be misleading to talk about pollution in places where there is nothing that could be affected adversely.
Not every effect that is caused by human action, nor every alteration to a natural state, may be adverse. Not every piece of discarded material may be pollution -
the presence of that material has to produce bad consequences in some way. In many cases, humans will be the
ones to suffer from a build-up of debris. In the case of congested major orbits this is already true [1]. This fact can be
acknowledged without talking about ‘harm to the environment’ in cases where the existence of an ‘environment’ is
questionable. Besides, most of what we can perceive in outer space is not nearly as complex as any one square metre of Earth, a planet soaked in life.2
Rocks and snowballs, clouds of dust and stars are fascinating, but often lack complexity compared to the smallest eucaryotes found on Earth. While some space
environments display phenomena that are not known on Earth, others do not. It is perfectly coherent to think that we ought to protect life on Earth and at the
same time believe that, apart from a few special places – such as the Apollo landing site and the geostationary orbit - exploitation of space has few
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57
SCFI 2011
Enclosure K (Space Daesins)
Silent Nihilists.
___ of ___
ethical issues unrelated to the protection of mankind's long-term interests. Therefore, we might as well talk about
protection of humanity's long-term interests when appropriate, without assigning any special moral status to space.
It may not be awesome but we have to think about the future of humanity when
considering space policy
Huebert, 08 [Jacob Huebert, http://jhhuebert.com/articles/environmentalists-in-outer-space/, “Environmentalists in Outer Space” in The Freeman.
Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law,.]
Some have said we need environmental regulation on the moon to prevent pollution from lunar dust. But why should this be a problem? There’s no atmosphere,
and it seems likely that those using the moon for mining and those using it for recreational purposes or for a good
view of the earth would rationally spread themselves apart. With relatively few parties and a strong incentive to
spread out, we can imagine that people might bargain either in advance to avoid conflicts or later do so to eliminate
them. Of course, to the extent that polluters (whether by dust, chemicals, radiation, or anything else) arrive at the moon first, they may establish property rights
there, including the right to “pollute.” Where no one has already homesteaded lunar or planetary land, a mine or factory owner may homestead an easement to
“pollute” the surrounding area that his operation affects. Then new arrivals will know that they should not locate in the area the established industrial operation
affects unless they are willing to subject themselves to the industry’s byproducts. On the other hand, where owners of hotels, golf courses, “wilderness”
preserves, and the like arrive first, they will homestead their land, including the right not to be disturbed by pollution. Should someone trespass on their property
with any form of pollution, they will be entitled to both damages and injunctive relief, just as pollution victims were in Great Britain and the United States through
the 1830s. One of the most promising uses for space is, of course, as a waste dump. This should be cause for environmentalist
celebration, not alarm. For example, nuclear electric power is far better for the environment than fossil fuels, which pollute the air and cause countless health
problems. But what to do with the small amount of toxic waste it creates? Once space flight becomes sufficiently affordable, the answer becomes simple: send it
on a long, long trip. Who but the most fanatical “cosmo-centrist” could be disturbed by sending our waste to Venus, an already hellish place where no living
creature will likely ever go? The
only colorable objection to this is that the waste might pose a risk to people on earth as it
leaves the atmosphere (say, if the ship carrying it explodes or crashes, as NASA vehicles are wont to do). But
presumably that risk would shrink as the private sector moves further into space transportation and space technology
advances. For example, a space elevator would not entail the high risks or costs of ordinary space flight. And, of course, carriers of hazardous waste would
be liable for harm they cause—which, along with their financial investment, would encourage them to take extreme care. Another potential benefit would be to
move polluting industrial operations off-planet. Again, environmentalists who really care about the well-being of humans or life generally (as opposed to rocks and
dirt per se) should delight in this prospect. As we’ve mentioned, some have called for part or all of outer space to be declared an untouchable “wilderness.” We
find this to be a rather strange preoccupation. Right now space is a de facto 100 percent wilderness preserve and will remain so
even if humans go there in large numbers. If environmentalists wanted to preserve specific areas, they could buy or
simply homestead land, which some of them have done on earth. Governments, though, have little incentive or ability to determine which
parts of any celestial body are best used as wilderness preserves and which are best put to other purposes. Such determinations would surely be corrupted by
the influence of special interests, just as special interests have influenced terrestrial environmental laws to the benefit of polluters. Indeed, the U.S. government’s
management of its national parks has been dismal, as have governments’ overall environmental records. So
if optimal preservation of that which
is valuable to scientists and other admirers of pristine lunar wilderness is the goal, the answer again is strictly
enforced private property rights. It is entirely unjust for “wilderness” advocates to use government to prevent others
from developing their property in space. They may speak in terms of intrinsic value, but they really seek to use the
law to forcibly place their personal aesthetic preferences above those of others, and above the welfare of the human
race.
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