Abstract
When we look into the night sky, we look into the past. The light that reaches our eyes from stars has traveled for years, rendering everything we see a trace of how things were at some other point in time. This raises the question of how our own planetary past is preserved and cast outward, a question that has stirred excitement among science fiction writers, astronomers, and archaeologists alike. An entanglement of pastness and futurity is intrinsic to outer space; for while the night sky presents us visually with intermingling pasts, the idea of preservation entails a future into which these pasts are cast.
Alice Gorman’s book Dr Space Junk vs. the Universe: Archaeology and the Future hinges on this entanglement of temporalities, inviting us to think about outer space as littered with human heritage even as it is vested with futuristic fantasies. Taking an archeologist’s approach to a subject explored in recent years by media studies scholars Lisa Parks and James Schwoch (2012), Gorman turns her eye toward the artifacts of a more recent past than the light of faraway galaxies, asking how space probes, satellites, and other relics of human exploration of space have and will come to have meaning as traces of human cultures in space. If the near future of humanity involves further space exploration, the distant future will be one in which skeletons of old technology are the only gravestones we have beyond the surface of our planet. So, she argues, we need to preserve and study the junk that is already up there for its heritage value, and think seriously about what values we want imbued in the stuff we send up in the future.
Part memoir, part exploration of how the concept of cultural heritage and practices of archaeology apply to the manmade artifacts beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Dr Space Junk is at times humorously entertaining and at times rigorously critical of space exploration and the artifacts it has left in its wake. Gorman is openly fascinated with, and even, in moments, nostalgic about space travel, which we know because of the book’s unusual straddling of personal history and archaeological treatise. There is something disarming about this openness; it is difficult, after all, not to feel something deeply personal in the face of the great unknown outer space she confronts us with. Her enthusiasm is also at times uneasy. As her work unfolds, it becomes clear that, even as she is moved and excited by projects of space exploration such as the Voyager missions, she sees them as important traces not just of technological innovation, but also a darker story of cultural appropriation and displacement. Space travel as we know it is steeped not just in Cold War politics, she explains, but in understandings of territory that are by no means universal and are indeed shaped by imperialist values (p. 221). She excoriates the ways the narrative of space exploration as a natural, universal urge has been used to justify militaristic missions, territorial appropriations, and supremely childish shows of might in space.
In a section that scathingly critiques Elon Musk’s launching of a sportscar into space, she writes: ‘Trophies are left in space as monuments to preserve memory and ensure continuity beyond the grave. They’re tangible reminders of who was there: an object standing for an individual, a nation, or an ideology’ (p. 217). And in their announcement and immortalization of those whose possession of capital enabled them to launch projectiles into space, such ‘trophies’ are also graves for the cultures whose cosmologies have been violently trampled. Her analysis of projectiles in space recalls Walter Benjamin’s (1969[1940]: 256) declaration that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ In one of the most detailed and disturbing sections of the book, Gorman demonstrates this barbaric side of space exploration by turning her archeological expertise to the surface of the Earth, revealing the literal erasure of aboriginal heritage sites in order to make way for a space rocket range in Woomera, Australia, thus exemplifying the cost of space travel for some terrestrial archaeologies (p. 238).
Accompanying the tension between her fascination with space travel and her critique of its imperialist impulses is another pervasive ambivalence: some parts of the book are written with the assumption that human life will continue even after we have used up the resources on Earth, while at other, more evocative moments, Gorman is able to move beyond this species optimism and envision an outer space in which even the most technologically advanced human artifacts are just little blips signaling into a void the past presence of a species long extinct. These moments resonate more powerfully than those that embrace a more optimistic future – especially since, thanks to her nuanced critique of human presence in space, we see how profoundly that ‘optimism’ is tainted with imperialism.
As she envisions space junk as relics of human pasts, her perspective sometimes seems frustratingly anthropocentric. One of the key claims of the book is that space must be rethought as a human cultural landscape (p. 224). It is hard not to read this, at first, as an imperialist vision of its own. Isn’t outer space so enchanting precisely because it is always so much more than whatever humankind can project onto (and into) it? The topic of archaeology of course requires a degree of anthropocentrism since human objects are at the core of archaeology’s investigation of the past, and the past in question belongs to human culture. Yet Gorman also opines that the ‘space industry’ is myopically anthropocentric, only considering space ‘in terms of what it can offer humans’ (p. 224). Space, she writes, must be conceived of as place, inherently valuable in and of itself and not merely because of what it offers humans (p. 225). This recalls Doreen Massey’s (1994) foundational work on space and place, which argues that conceptions of space as blank and open fuel imperialist fantasies, where place is layered with stories and processes, always in formation and not simply awaiting one’s arrival. Reimagining space as place, in this case, allows for an alternative to narratives of space that favor imperialism. Gorman looks toward aboriginal belief systems to reconcile her field’s anthropocentrism with her call for decentering humans in the place of outer space. As she explains it, aboriginal cosmologies provide alternatives to the international space treaties that shape how space is viewed territorially. ‘First Nations people around the world often have different law systems based around kinship, custodianship and responsibility’, she writes (p. 234). These systems, if turned upward, provide a model for envisioning space not as a new horizon to be explored, conquered, and exploited, but as an environment unto itself, a place with many intersecting histories, to be respected and stewarded responsibly.
The book concludes by having us imagine ourselves as extraterrestrial explorers, coming across and trying to parse the probes and satellites that belong to an extinguished earthly civilization. For Gorman, such traces are significant and worthy of preservation because they will inform these explorers of the future about who we were as a species. Gorman hopes that thinking of space junk as culturally significant will encourage an attitude toward producing it that is more representative of the diversity of human nature (p. 274). Capitalism, imperialism, and militarism may have won out so far, but, she hopes, space junk of the future could represent other, more egalitarian principles. But what these final pages suggest is just how limited a view of human cultures these traces can ever provide. Space junk, however collectively produced, will only ever reveal our urge to explore. It cannot adequately capture the other side of human cosmological thinking, the one that includes the emotion of looking up at the stars and feeling impossibly small, or the wonder of seeing light from the past, and imagining how our ancestors gazed at precisely these stars since time immemorial. So it is strange that Gorman concludes by writing: ‘Outside Earth, we may finally see what the characteristics of human nature really are’ (p. 273). What of those who have been excluded from the possibility of making a mark outside Earth? Their stories matter greatly, as she advocates, but their traces still remain almost entirely obscured in the archaeology she envisions.