EXOPLANET ANTHROPOLOGY

The concept of compartmentalization can help us understand this phenomenon. The exoplanet believer’s mind represents a classic case of compartmentalized cosmology, set up by scaffolding numbers and formulae that stand for reality. They emerge as co-creating characters in a performance of outer space based on what Erving Goffman called a “harried fabrication of impressions.”¹⁵ The crucial difference in this case is that exoplanet believers are not aware that they are fabricating impressions that support the colonial cosmology. As far as they are concerned, the information they produce is just as scientific as the knowledge behind the design of a car engine, a steel bridge or radio communications. This illusion is supported by an array of gadgets featured in space productions. The presence of data generating gadgets is crucial for maintaining the impression that vital science experiments are conducted in space. Another key aspect of space gadgetry is its appeal to collectors who fetishize anything from computer circuits to pieces of wire and tires from alleged space missions.¹⁶ Space believer material culture bears many similarities to the American professional sports marketing model. It produces a barrage of posters, effigies for worshipping and inspiration, merchandise gear, books, cards, commemoration plaques, and many other items that stimulate the typical collector’s urges and appetites.¹⁷ 

The data such gadgetry generates must be usually aligned with assumptions that support the Big Bang theory, the colonial cosmology and its principal tenets. This makes so that the stories told through these gadgets can have vast practical and epistemological consequences. I only add usually because, on another level, anything goes and most people are unable to make the connection between a piece of alleged space exploration technology, the alleged data presented alongside it, and the physical demands of a cosmological model. 

For instance, the assertion that a universal expansion started at around 13.8 billion years ago implies that astronomers can somehow, always through some magical gadgets that make the invisible visible, verify this. This expansion should be observable and incontrovertible. The mythology that sustains this notion, based on mathematical speculations regarding so-called blue and red shifts, is never scrutinized. The textbooks, at best, claim that Hubble’s first assessments were corrected. Questioning Hubble’s assumptions is out of the question. As time passes, the numbers are continuously corrected, while the assumption that red and blue shifts represent velocities used to calculate distances in light years remains both intact and invisible. Yet, when we examine astronomy articles published in mainstream academic journals regarding the measurement of stellar distances, we find that they cannot distinguish between relatively close dwarf stars and faraway giant stars.¹⁸ This fact alone demolishes the notion that there is anything solid and verifiable about modern astronomical claims. They are always based on theoretical assumptions, made up equations, and computer simulations.   

The world is far more intriguing than it may seem through the pronouncements of mainstream astronomy. There are observable electric phenomena in our own skies, such as high altitude sprites, which are both always red and always linked to the blue lightning in much lower electric storms. Stars emit what astronomers themselves call acoustic signals that can be picked up with radio telescopes. These gadgets simply pick up frequencies in the sky. But those frequencies are believed to have reached us with such clarity despite the vast distances involved, ranging in billions of light years, and the alleged motions and extreme velocities of the solar system, as I just noted above. In the compartmentalized mind of the exoplanet believer, the assumption that vast expanses of expanding and moving space are covered by lights that bear acoustic signals and reach the Earth like clockwork, is never questioned. 

If any critical thinking still exists among exoplanet believers, it must be confined to the deterministic and reductive logics of equations that describe a fictional universe. However questionable it might be for critical thinkers, for believers, it is a treasure trove filled with billions of elements that demand study, and funding. Moreover, accepting the colonial cosmology model and running with it as a professional comes with added benefits. For instance, the mainstream astronomer embodies the prestige of being considered a scientist, an authority who makes proclamations about the universe, its origin, composition, and future. This status is paired with the economic benefits that sustain the space industry, such as high paying contracts, events, conferences, publications, documentary films, and so on. The only requirement that is sacred is playing along to maintain the illusion of progress in space exploration – there is no room for critiques that may aim at the foundations of the enterprise. These elements alone provide for a cushy future for conforming astronomers, ironically, on the Earth. Meanwhile, the foundations upon which the whole enterprise of current space science stands are nothing but quicksand.

Messeri’s work makes no reference to Operation Paperclip and the essential role of Nazi war criminals in setting up NASA and the American space program. Reading Messeri’s work, the reader has the impression that Operation Paperclip never happened, and if it did, it had no influence in space programs. Such a fiction is, for the careful historian, impossible to entertain.¹⁹ Despite how this incontestable, and admitted historical fact should alone destroy the credibility of all things presented to the public as realities about space, it seems to have little effect in a public spaced out by higher and higher doses of Space Crack. Of course, the concept of Space Crack represents my satirical-critical attempt to understand dogged belief in space stories as some kind of mind-dulling opiate. Yet, it refers to the daily doses of space stories that people consume without questioning.

Messeri’s article is also silent regarding Richard Nixon’s Sea of Tranquillity speech during the Apollo 11 Moon landings in July 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War. Her narrative gives the impression that space exploration and the moon landings are not just military mind control operations, but realizations about the universe that help us refocus on  political earthly issues such as environmentalism. This twist is almost always present in space lore: the claim that looking at objects that are theoretical, unreachable and unverifiable, and making up stories about them somehow affects the quality of life on Earth.  Another version of this is the nonsensical idea that research on an orbiting space station is vital for improving conditions on the Earth. Astronauts make this claim continuously without a hint of critique. 

Thus, as space propaganda expands in support of environmentalist concerns, it must  be praised for its message. It does not matter that the same government produced the Moon landings, with glaring errors, and kept the population focused on fiction while waging war with chemical agents and Napalm, killing innocent people in Vietnam. The fact that Richard Nixon, a known crook, was in command at the time of the first Moon landings is also, obviously, nothing to worry about for the space believer or Messeri. Once conditioned believers hear the words space exploration everything else fades away magically, and they enter a fantasy world where anything they are told must be believed, and all critiques should be ferociously combatted.

Critical thinking, even in the social sciences, must be confined to a world in which the events that make up the modern make-believe space mythology, such as the Moon landings, are sacrosanct and immune to critique. This is the legacy of government sponsored mind control programs. The relevant history of space programs, propaganda and manipulation techniques are brushed under the rug like magic. Thus, even for an otherwise attentive anthropologist like Messeri, the ridiculous Apollo missions, marred with a library catalogue of amateurish production mistakes, made up of scale models and projection screens, have left the impression of legitimate and undeniable history. 

Messeri goes further, and couples the Hollywood representation of Apollo 13, featuring none other than the accused pedophile Tom Hanks, with the alleged memories of astronaut Jim Lovell, reinforcing the notion that Hollywood films about space are realistic. She focuses on a couple of scenes in which Lovell covers the Earth with his thumb, meant to draw a poetic connection between the two moments – stargazing in his backyard, and looking at the Earth while waiting over the far side of the Moon. Messeri, believing that the film depicts an actual event proceeds to summarize the scene: [H]aving just witnessed Neil Armstrong’s televised historic first steps,”

“[Lovell] sits in his backyard, stares up at a destination he longs to set foot on, and uses his thumb to block out he Moon’s presence in the sky. Later in the movie, with his life imperiled, his damaged ship comes around the dark side of the Moon, and blue Earth hangs above the Moon’s gray surface. Again Lovell raises his thumb, this time to block out the Earth, the destination to which he hopes to return. This gesture was not a figment of the filmmaker’s imagination but a movement encoded in the astronaut’s memory of his experience in space.” ²⁰ 

For Messeri there is no difference between the astronaut’s alleged experience and what the Hollywood film depicts. For her, blind to the contradictions of the colonial cosmology, these are sources of credible experiences. For her, both astronaut accounts and Hollywood recreations are unquestionable. However, astronaut experiences are simply scripted narratives that represent the official cosmology of the State. Messeri’s a blindspot is common among believers, who are unwilling and unable to question official space exploration lore. 

Messeri also makes a rookie mistake, referring to the far side of the Moon as the “dark side of the Moon.”²¹ According to the globe model that Messeri should be familiar with, there is no such thing as a “dark side” of the Moon, since the far side of the Moon should periodically become illuminated. At every New Moon, as well as during eclipses of the Sun, the Sun should illuminate the Moon’s far side. Like most people, Messeri remembers the Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon. In fact, there is a dark side of the Moon landing story — the fact that masses of people were convinced, with no credible evidence, that Americans landed on the Moon. They literally left in the dark, believing a cheap production was an actual colonial and heroic journey, the culmination of combined scientific and State prowess. 

Another contradiction that Messeri does not notice hinges upon a key question: how large should the Earth appear from the Moon according to the heliocentric model and the distances that astronomers take for granted? Would the Earth have the same size while observed from the Moon’s orbit as the Moon does while seen from someone’s backyard on the Earth? The question of proportions and distances and how things should look is also part of the puzzle that proves that the Apollo missions were faked on the Earth. 

Another fact also slips unnoticed in Messeri’s analysis — the categories of perception most people inherit as a colonial cosmology legacy are produced through partnerships between Hollywood, NASA and STEM corporations. These categories work together to induce the effect of a massive, intergenerational propaganda and marketing strategy. For Messeri, the contradictions I point to here are invisible, and the fact that Hollywood productions support NASA lore is just an innocent feature of historical recreation techniques. This is a very interesting effect of the colonial cosmology on social scientists — despite how  much experience they have and how critical they might be regarding the State and its general nationalistic mythology, they are like gullible, blind and childlike when it comes to the cosmological stories that the State and its actors spin to the public. This immense blindspot continues to inspire me to write on modern cosmological questions. 

Ironically, the film Apollo 13 (1995) was made with the same techniques used to film the Apollo missions, such as using takes filmed in parabolic flights. These takes always lack environmental context but space agencies present them invariably as unquestionable evidence for space exploration and astronauts orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. Since space agencies only present doctored and fictional materials, we should not be surprised to find out that humans could not endure the alleged acceleration required to reach those speeds. 

For instance, even a cursive look at Space Shuttle launches proves that the alleged accelerations and speeds are not met, and that the vehicles do not have the aerodynamics to reach the speeds associated with them. The spacewalks we see are filmed underwater, and we can identify particles and bubbles acting precisely as particles and bubbles under water. Space believers are constantly exposed to a continuous flow of space agency fictions that they are utterly unable to question. Thus, they believe that the stillness of an underwater pool should feel the same way as orbiting the earth at 17,500 miles an hour in the so-called vacuum of space! Even if you show them Chinese space walks replete with bubbles moving up surrounded by an animation of the Earth that fades and glitches, they will find an excuse to hold on to their belief in colonial space fiction. 

Messeri identified a foundational myth in the imaginary exoplanet science, a “story, told in white papers, at scientific conferences, and to broader publics” which “features a mother astronomer explaining to her children the potential worlds that await them in the cosmos.”²² This archetypal astronomer mother points to a random star in the sky and tells her children that there should be an exoplanet orbiting around it. The motherly astronomer claims that she knows “with certainty the there is a world upon which humans could comfortably live.”²³ As Messeri points out:

[T]he “discovery of a planet just like our own is the holy grail of exoplanet astronomy, and this imagination of a future moment gets told again and again within the community and to wider publics.”²⁴ 

The holy grail is a fitting metaphor here, an imaginary object of worship for religious fanatics. Messeri noted the repetitive use of this just-so story that has no basis in observable reality whatsoever. One of the most important features of space and other unverifiable, fictional kinds of propaganda, is the cyclical and unrelenting repetition of the same ideas, to make sure that they stick onto the mind of the receiver. Without repetition, which also implies the existence of a power that backs it up and supports it, these fictions would fall apart quickly, lacking a foundation in reality. Among the oddest features of the modern astrophysical religion is how doublethink logics permeate its inner textures and core epistemological principles. In other words, these fictions are not crafted with a basis on actual experiences in the world. Rather, they are based on inverted and self-contradictory fictional logics. Since people are accustomed to science fiction fantasy physics, with people traveling at ease to multiple destinations around many galaxies, they accept the impossible as inevitable. This affliction, a product of the devilish trick of presenting fiction as reality, makes so that virtually every bit of information that stems from space fields and support the colonial cosmology is tainted and spurious. The myth of the exoplanet mother affords the same illusion — its purpose is to reinforce a fantasy in the child’s mind, very much like the Santa Claus tale and its variations. It eventually tricks them into thinking that their own involvement with worldly corporate sciences will help humanity transcend its earth-bound condition, and propel them into the cosmos and beyond, many lifetimes and fictions away. Realistically, we should expect that the space exploration charade will fall apart on its own one day, and that the true nature of the Earth shall be revealed. That generation will live through a tangible revolution and will assert and discover true freedom. Yet, for as long as there are governmental, mind control structures and institutions, the dream of ultimate freedom and communion with the cosmos will be curtailed. 

For Messeri the exoplanet myth is “a starting point to examine relationships between humans, outer space, Earth, and the environment as astronomers stretch the concept of habitability beyond Earth and across the universe.”²⁵ More precisely, this attempt to stretch habitability does not go beyond what science fiction authors have imagined. The only innovation is a trick — presenting pure fiction as if it were sound science. It sustains the colonial cosmology in its modern permutation fast in place, and opens up the way for more fictions to flourish. It also enhances suggestibility and gullibility by sensory deprivation and overload, an important theme we take up later in this work.

For the sake of stretching habitability, as Messeri’s work shows, exoplanet believers desire to live locked up inside a flying can for an unlimited period of time and without any realistic expectation of survival. They are even willing to participate in simulations of those constraints on Earth for the sake of indulging in that dream. This makes space travel believers participants in a kind of death cult. For them, the idea of space travel is so exciting that they would give up their lives just for a glimpse of it. They would happily abandon their families and loved ones on the Earth for the sake of feeling like pioneering space explorers. Would the families of hardcore space believers, in the name of glory and a place in history, support their wish to be blasted into nothingness in route to an exoplanet? This remains to be seen. In the film Contact (1997), while a triage is being made to select a person to pilot an alien space-time travel machine, an American astronaut’s family pressures him not to go, and he gives up after being selected. It is supposed to be a plot twist in that context.

Those who pretend to be or believe they are experts in so-called fields of exoplanet studies are actually experts in fictions that rely, at best, on reductive and absolutist mathematical formulae. Exoplanet science fiction attempts to draw on the validity of other math-based practices without warning its believers about the shortcomings of math. In this sense, it is  an anti-reflexive belief. It uses stories, equations and gadgets to construct a mental theme park, replete with thousands of orbiting satellites, millions of chunks of space junk, Van Allen Belts, and interstellar probes that communicate from billions of miles away, despite the extremely fast motions of the universe and other factors. This make-believe universe also includes various horror scenarios believed to be inevitable, such as massive stellar explosions, blackholes that swallow and burp stars, mass extinction events, nothingness alongside everything, randomness, blind chance, and predatory Darwinian aliens. Their just-so stories are incompatible with every non-colonial cosmology that ever existed. Overtime, the accumulation of such tales is like a phonebook of claims that cannot be independently confirmed but that the masses are unwilling and unable to question.

The imagination of the future that exoplanet believers present is far too optimistic for their own model. It proves how, for people who must believe, that is, who fell in love with fiction, contradictions that expose their illusion must simply vanish or be vehemently denied. If people knew how space agencies produce a theatre of fictional theme park rides, we would find no fault if they chose to play along with a collection of incoherent and fantastic stories. The problem is that people have been rendered unable to distinguish fiction from reality.

So-called reality television shows that present unreal storylines and characters actually first started with space agencies. The Apollo missions and Moon landings provide the paradigmatic example. The public is too naïve and unprepared to resist the fictions of the State. This molds their minds according to spurious perception categories. Accepting as unquestionable truth or rejecting space mythology leads to short and long-term practical and epistemological consequences. Due to its dominance, those who simply accept it may live in the ignorant bliss its fictions provide. Together, they defend the power of fantasy to control their minds against anyone who dares to question it. Their way of knowing the universe is effectively short-circuited, hacked, ready to be programmed further. Messeri herself is skeptical of exoplanet mythology. Yet, as we shall see, she is unable to be critical of NASA’s space exploration mythology and any of its missions, and believes anything astronauts say. This paradox places her work in a safe zone, an intellectual space that falls short of being  critically consistent just as the colonial cosmology it reinforces depends on the acceptance of fantasy to exist.

Alternatively, those who question and reject the epistemological premises of space believers may often feel like they are swimming against the tides, fighting an uphill battle, with small incremental, almost imperceptible wins. They may become isolated, craving for connection. The world for them can become like a hellish prison, where the idiots in charge roam about, and those who know the truth are surrounded from all sides. The social power of space beliefs curtails people’s perceptions and  it isolates and disconnects those who dare to step beyond it. Yet, with every injustice, questioners grow in their resolve. They feel and hear the power of a higher being, living in their hearts and propelling them to understand more and resist the pull of fiction. They know that there is more to life than conformity and that the life giving power within us sees everything. They long for the day of their reckoning with the creator. On the other hand, the controllers who abuse their power and worship money and worldly characters dread that inevitable encounter. As the Huron philosopher Kandiaronk would say, money, or “what [Europeans call silver is the devil of devils” and “the source of all evil, the bane of souls, and the slaughter house of living persons.”²⁶