Astrotopia
The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
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Astrotopia
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Klett
About this listen
As environmental, political, and public health crises multiply on Earth, we are also at the dawn of a new space race in which governments team up with celebrity billionaires to exploit the cosmos for human gain. The best-known of these pioneers are selling different visions of the future: while Elon Musk and SpaceX seek to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward moving millions of earthlings into rotating near-Earth habitats. Despite these distinctions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity through the exploitation of space.
In Astrotopia, philosopher of science and religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein pulls back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling, like growth without limit, energy without guilt, and salvation in a brand-new world. As Rubenstein reveals, we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier zealotry in the centuries-long history of European colonialism. But Rubenstein does more than expose the values of capitalist technoscience as the product of bad mythologies. She offers a vision of exploring space without reproducing the atrocities of earthly colonialism, encouraging us to find and even make stories that put cosmic caretaking over profiteering.
©2022 The University of Chicago (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Astrotopia
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- aas
- 17-07-24
Honest, smart and to the point
This is a great book. Unlike the 1 star reviewer who offered nothing but unqualified negative rhetorical twaddle, Rubenstein's book "was" well researched, "was" sincerely delivered and
"did" have a good overview of the science.
If anything she actually held back on just how awful space would be to colonise.
Her central thesis questions a peculiar and yet plausible extension of the biblical Canaan Complex, the West's singular right to use God's agency for imperial conquest and even genocide. She then extends this argument to the language of space exploration.
Where she fell down in my view was not mentioning the global population apocalypse on the environment and her folksy alternative life values in the later chapters leaning towards spiritual world views that were for me utterly baffling for a modern pluralist society. I've come across this with other left thinkers, especially in the US.
It's also fortunate I had no plans to read Sci-Fi novels for there is a festival of spoiler alerts describing plot details.
All in all, if you side-step the last 2 chapters it makes for a great, honest, gutsy, intelligent and thoroughly ball-kicking enlightened critique of toxic religiosity, capitalist excess and the mind bending hubris of tec billionaires.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- James C
- 17-10-23
Unadulterated twaddle
The spoken audio quality of this is good/fine, as you would expect from any half-decent audiobook these days.
However, the actual book content is terrible, to the point of infuriation. I was keen to explore and consider well thought out and evidence-based arguments against “new space”, but there didn’t seem to be a scrap of that in this book. It is poorly researched and seems to just be the ratings of someone with a chip on their shoulder. The arguments made in the book are often highly hypocritical and based on a PROFOUND misunderstanding of what science is (and what it is to be a scientist). Not to mention her conflated view that scientists/technologists = unscrupulous capitalists = terrible people. That is not to defend capitalism, but it is wholly wrong to fundamentally equate all of those types of people, which is what the book essentially espouses.
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1 person found this helpful