Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,41

the earth.’ ” (This statement, culled from a newspaper report on the event, was not merely the overenthusiastic framing of an American reporter, but in fact echoes the words etched on the tomb of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian aeronautical engineer and space flight pioneer: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.”)

The banality of the statement, Arendt insists,

should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

Reading Arendt’s words, I hear in my mind the plaintive machine of Stephen Hawking’s voice, narrating the BBC documentary Expedition New Earth: “We are the first species that has the potential to escape Earth.” Like Musk and Zubrin, what Hawking is appealing to is a yearning for transcendence. There is, yes, an apocalypse that may happen—a man-made apocalypse like climate change; a cosmic apocalypse like the impact of an asteroid—but this is on some level a cover story for a deeper impulse, a desire to be done with the world itself.

And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit, of escape as a means toward the nobility of self-determination. The cultural critic Sarah Sharma has argued for an understanding of exit as an exercise of patriarchal power, “a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy.” It’s a force that she places in opposition to the more traditionally maternal value of “care.” The politics of exit are pursued, she insists, at the expense of a politics of care. “Care,” she writes, “is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition. Women’s exit is hardly ever on the table, given that women have historically been unable to choose when to leave or enter inequitable power relations, let alone enter and exit in a carefree manner.”

The world, after all, requires attention. The world requires care. To borrow Arendt’s terms, to repudiate the Earth—which is to say, the Mother—is to reject the imperative of care. Mars represents a conquering of new territory, and a leaving behind of the old: a self-determination for the few at the cost of collective autonomy. The days of this world are numbered. For those who are willing to escape it, a new life awaits.

The frontier rhetoric around Mars colonization—the invocation of pioneers, pilgrims, Manifest Destiny—brings to mind for me the advertising blimp that hovers over the filthy neon hellscape of downtown Los Angeles in one of Blade Runner’s early scenes. A gigantic screen displays the messages “Best Future” and “Breathe Easy,” while a voice blares from its speakers, addressing the acid rain–sodden subjects below: “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” The voice is a male one. It is confident and cheerful, and richly reassuring. It is the very voice of American capitalism itself.

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We return, for now, to Earth: specifically to a windowless ground-floor room in Old Pasadena, where a man named Art Harman—slacks, navy blazer, gold buttons—was standing behind a podium. Art Harman was the founder of an organization called the Coalition to Save Manned Space Exploration. He was a former adviser to the Trump presidential campaign; a conservative policy wonk specializing in both the expansion of American business interests into outer space and the protection of America’s borders on the surface of Earth.

His talk was entitled “Liberty in Space.”

Mars, Art Harman was saying, was the new land—the new planet—of opportunity. Mars colonization, as such, was all about free enterprise. A slide appeared behind him, a monochrome etching of ox-drawn covered wagons moving across the American Southwest, pioneers in broad-brimmed hats leaning back on their elbows against the desert scrub.

“It’s about the spirit of entrepreneurship and everything that goes with it,” he said. “The unknown. Adventure. This is