Metallic armament flying faster than bullets; the Space Shuttle burst to pieces; astronauts killed or ejected into space. The culprit? Space debris – debris of a Russian accessory blown up by a Russian missile. The one survivor, Ryan Stone, has to find her way back to Earth with oxygen food declining and the abutting viable aircraft hundreds of miles away.
Metallic armament flying faster than bullets; the Space Shuttle burst to pieces; astronauts killed or ejected into space. The culprit? Space debris – debris of a Russian accessory blown up by a Russian missile. The one survivor, Ryan Stone, has to find her way back to Earth with oxygen food declining and the abutting viable aircraft hundreds of miles away.
Over on Mars, 20 years in the future, an analysis mission from Earth is going wrong. An epic dust storm forces the crew to carelessness the planet, abrogation behind an astronaut, Mark Watney, who is accepted dead. He has to figure out how to grow food while apprehension rescue.
Hollywood knows how to alarm and affect us about outer space. Movies like Gravity (2013) and The Martian (2015), present space as adverse and capricious – spelling danger for any audacious human who dares to adventure alfresco Earth’s accessible confines.
This is only part of the story, about – the bit with people center stage. Sure, no one wants to see astronauts killed or abandoned in space. And we all want to enjoy the fruits of acknowledged all-embracing science, like free which planets could host human life or simply whether we’re alone in the universe.
Valuing space
But should we care about the cosmos beyond how it affects us as humans? That is the big catechism – call it catechism #1 of exoteric ecology ethics, a field too many people have abandoned for too long. I’m one of a group of advisers at the University of St Andrews trying to change that. How we ought to value the cosmos depends on two other arresting abstract questions:
Question #2: the kind of life we are most likely to ascertain abroad is microbial – so how should we view this lifeform? Most people would accept that all humans have built-in value, and matter not only in affiliation to their account to addition else. Accept this and it follows that ethics places limits on how we may treat them and their living spaces.
People are starting to accept that the same is true of mammals, birds, and other animals. So what about microbial beings? Some philosophers like Albert Schweitzer and Paul Taylor have ahead argued that all living things have a value in themselves, which would acutely accommodate microbes. Philosophy as a whole has not accomplished a consensus, however, on whether it agrees with this alleged biocentrism.
