A Divine Mandate to Conquer the Stars?

Does God want us to become a multiplanetary species?

There are at least six otherworldly portals in my house—six that I know of, anyway. I guess there could be secret gateways to alternate dimensions lurking underneath the bathtub, since I’ve never checked. The ones I do know about are right there in the entryway, hanging along the wall in a neat row. You can’t miss them as you step in (and don’t worry about taking your shoes off—you’re in Ireland, friend, and most Irish don’t fuss about traipsing around indoors with footgear on. Weird, I know, but actually very convenient when you get used to the idea). These portals are vibrantly colourful, so much so that I can’t help but stare into them and get whisked away to their strange environs over and over again. Let’s see if I can work a little literary magic and transport you through a few of them, too…

One portal takes you to a stark and desolate place scorched by alien sunlights. Yes, sunlight plural, because there are two suns wheeling overhead. This world is called Kepler-16b. As you peer across the threshold, you spy a lonely astronaut ahead of you, gazing up at the great spheres. Only, he isn’t so alone, you notice—two shadows extend out from him, each cast by a different sun. He’s got company after all.

Another is Kepler-186f. Here, the great sun overhead is a red giant, and the red-wavelength photons have altered the photosynthetic processes of the resident botanical life so that it grows a rich crimson instead of our Earthly green. You can see two astronauts venturing deep into this garnet glade, holding gloved hands as they walk along a white picket fence. You might catch up with them, if you run.

I know I’m being coy. These are portals for my imagination, of course. They belong to a collection of posters designed by NASA. I love them for their stylized retro sci-fi aesthetic, channeling the kitschiness of 60s and 70s travel brochures. There are catchy taglines in bold text advertising adventure among the stars (for the low, low price of a lifetime in cryosleep and eternal separation from your loved ones back on Earth). But I love them most of all because they feature real places. Peeking through these glossy paper windows is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting them. I sometimes stop and ponder that before heading off to work—those are real places. Like, physically real. I could travel there, if I had the means. I could see those twin Suns, or those red plants, or—more modestly—one of those as-yet unvisited places in our own solar system. It could be the seas of Titan, the ice floes of Enceladus, or the great canyons of Mars. That last one seems particularly achievable, as of late. Maybe in my lifetime, even, or my children’s. With or without our consent, Elon Musk seems driven to catapult the human race into the interstellar age (when he isn’t catapulting sports cars into the solar system ahead of us). And he’s not the only one with big plans for future humanity. So, it seems reasonable enough to assume that someone—maybe not the person we’d like, but someone—is going to make it happen sooner rather than later. It’s not hard to imagine my near-future self waving a handkerchief at a rocket carrying my offspring away to the first fully habitable Moon base or Martian colony. And, I have to admit, wouldn’t that be kind of great?

Would it?

Artwork credit to the creative team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Intitute of Technology.

Above is an image of one of the ‘portals’ I mentioned, originally created to help ordinary humans like you and me better imagine ourselves as participants in the human journey toward reaching the stars. If you haven’t heard of NASA’s ‘Vision of the Future’ posters, check them out here. They’re free to download (but maybe read the fine print first: JPL Image Use Policy).

I was lucky enough to obtain some framed prints of them while living as a bachelor in Stockholm. Endless thank-yous to my wife for allowing me to continue to display them in our shared home!

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‘To subdue the Earth…’

So, would it? Would it be so great? Is that what we ought to think—setting our boots on the soil of strange planets and planting the flag of whichever nation-state or corporate entity we happen to represent—that’s a ‘good’ thing? The fulfillment of our destiny, perhaps? Did God* imagine when he created us (if you’ll entertain for the purpose of this argument that He did) that we would one day grow wise and powerful enough to leave our Earthly confines behind and ‘be fruitful and multiply’ among the stars? Are we meant to understand this as a moral undertaking—an ennoblement of the human spirit?

If we want to look at the issue of human interstellar expansion as being ‘good’, as in morally good, we’ll have to take into account what God’s perspective is. As we’re working from a fundamentally Christian standpoint—though I imagine there would be a fair bit of overlap with other faiths and spiritualities—we need to begin by aligning ourselves with God’s will; that is to say, when it comes to space exploration and colonization**, we should aim to behave as God would wish us to behave, because God is the ultimate revelation of ‘good’ in the universe.

Let’s begin at the beginning, then. It was always clear to me from when I first conceived of this essay that I would have to start with Genesis 1. This ancient story supposedly lays out God’s true design in creating the world and humanity. We know there was darkness, then there was light, he divided the waters from the firmament, all that jazz. What we want to start digging into is what sort of divine directive he gave to humanity upon our conception. We needed instructions, didn’t we? Rather bewildering thing, being created. It would make sense if we started off with a few pointers—that way we would know if we were making a mess of things. So, are there any God-given imperatives that lay out how we ought to orient ourselves in the world that we can extrapolate upon, now that we stand up on the precipice of otherworldly expansion? My mind was immediately drawn to this key passage, where God delivered His mandate to the newly created Man and Woman:

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:28

Now, there’s a lot to unpack there, definitely. Humans have been interpreting that passage for millennia and coming up with all sorts of strange ideas about what it means for us and how we ought to conduct ourselves. Certainly, one prominent narrative that has emerged is that humans have been elevated to a prestigious position within the natural order, and it is our right to exert our authority over the lesser denizens of the Earth. We should ‘multiply’ (spread to all corners of the globe) and ‘have dominion’ (command and shape what we find there to suit our own purposes). At best, this missive from God might be taken to mean that we should take what we need to thrive, but no more, so that we might act as good stewards of this place we call home. At worst, it might be interpreted as a sort of carte blanche for humanity to ravage the Earth to fuel the whims and ambitions of our ever-expanding civilization—it’s our dominion to do with as we please, after all.

We won’t afford that second attitude much credence, as it stinks of egomania and greed. Let it be enough to say that there is a clear imbalance in a world where we consume so much and give back so little. What I’d like to focus on is that curious word, ‘subdue’. The Hebrew word used in the text is kabash, which means to exercise force as a demonstration of power. We humans must kabash with nature. This strikes me as an apt description, especially when considering the prospect of humanity carving out a niche for ourselves on hostile and foreign planets totally unlike the one our fleshy frames have been adapted for. The planets we might someday choose to settle could easily have no water, no air, no food, hardly any sunlight, harsh winds, toxic radiation, violent quakes, freezing temperatures, scorching temperatures, or a combination of all of these and more. And what of living aboard space stations as we travel to these distant places, or float in orbit while armies of terraforming robots work to transform these worlds into habitable New Edens? Zero-G environments cause our very bones to waste away. Astronauts need regular psychological evaluations to ensure they are coping with the intense mental strain of living in relative isolation, far from the safety of home, confined to metal cylinders liable to violently explode should they suffer even the tiniest rupture. Is this not kabashing? Do we not need to fight for our lives every inch of the way on our journey to the stars?

Of course, Earth is plenty dangerous in its own right. That’s my whole point. If we are meant to ‘subdue’ this planet—force it to facilitate human flourishing over all else—why not other planets as well? Can’t God’s command be extended beyond this little blue one we find ourselves situated upon? To use a video game analogy: is Earth merely our ‘overworld’ that we ‘spawned’ into? If it were, perhaps we can begin to view the entire universe as our game-world—our playground for exploration and adventure, as well as expanding our dominion. Perhaps there is, in fact, a Biblical basis to justify the exorbitant amount of time, effort and resources required to pursue space exploration. Perhaps those billionaires funding rocket missions and researching the viability of Mars colonies are doing the Lord’s work. I mean, sure, there are plenty of people here on Earth now who could use some help, but we’re talking about the next step in human civilization. If we pull this off, we’re talking about tapping into the limitless resources of an infinite cosmos, scouring the vast expanse of outer space and for land and booty. We’re going intergalactic, baby. Who’s gonna stop us?

Heavens above

Let’s put the brakes on that train before it leaves the station. Or, siphon the fuel from that rocket before it leaves the launchpad—whichever metaphor seems a better fit. My dad and I, we hashed it out, and its looks like we’ve been playing rather fast and loose with what kabashing is actually all about. So far, we’ve imagined God placing humans on Earth as a kind of starting point. We’ve assumed that Earth can be taken to mean ‘the natural world’ at large—not unreasonably, I might add. Think of the semantic difference between ‘Earth’ the planet and ‘earth’ as in the dirt under your feet; the ancients who originally shared and recorded this story would not have understood the distinction, so we needn’t factor it into our analysis. What we’ve assumed, then, is that since everything beyond Earth is also part of the natural world, God’s divine instructions outlining how humanity ought to approach the natural world apply the same in space as they do here. As such, reaching for the stars is simply a logical progression in the divine drama playing out in our collective lives as a species. We can follow the same course as we always have.

The problem is, it really does look like God placed us on our Earth, not as a starting point, but as a domain marked by set boundaries. It’s right here in the story we’ve already been looking at: before humans ever entered the picture, God separated the waters from the firmament, creating the distinction between Earth and sky. The heavens, you might also call it. They are not to be confused with the ‘heaven’ that God resides in—that ill-understood, transcendent plane beyond our capacity to conceive, yet inextricably tied to our sense of self and purpose in the material world. Why does this distinction matter? It’s got everything to do with what the story of Genesis is, and where it comes from.

A little foray into the historical origins of the Bible, if you will. Our ancient ancestors understood a lot more than we give them credit for. We know that the great civilization of Sumer (circa 4100-1750 BCE) had a keenly developed awareness of astrology and astronomy, which is to say, they grasped the distinction between the heavenly and earthly spheres. They had calendars based upon the movement of celestial bodies; they had maps of constellations and zodiacs. Their ziggurats doubled as observatories. And who was a certain Biblical hero who lived during this period of flourishing Sumerian science and culture? Abraham did—the man whom God chose to receive divine His revelation. Through him, God would establish the nation of Israel, His covenanted people, or—to dispense with religious jargon—the group specially selected to exemplify and reveal His divine nature to the rest of humanity.

What does that have to do with Sumerian astronomy? Well, I hope this isn’t too scandalous for anyone reading this, but it is certainly true that there are ancient narratives of Creation which pre-exist the Biblical account in Genesis. (If you’re interested in learning a bit more about that, check out this podcast.) What we read in the first five books—or the Torah, to use the Hebrew name—scholars estimate to have been written down in the time of Moses, based upon a much older oral tradition. That’s about half a millennium removed from the time of Abraham, who features prominently in Genesis’ later chapters. We know that the ancient peoples living prior to this period recognized the contrast between their world and the world above; it’s codified in the language of the story they passed on generation to generation, which eventually became the Torah. So, reading this text closely, we see that when God created the Earth, He meant ‘Earth’ in the exact way that these ancient people understood it—not a planet, no, but a realm separate from that of the Sun and Moon, and further removed still from that of the gods. The Genesis story is developed for an audience with a well-developed cosmology that accounts for the terrestrial domain of mankind, the celestial realm of the stars and planets (which could be plotted and tracked mathematically) and yet another impermeable realm of the beyond—the spirit world.

When we read the Genesis account, knowing it was written for ancient readers, we should interpret the language used as describing these distinct ‘spheres’ in the same way that the intended audience would have understood them. A good maxim for studying the Bible: context always matters. Ancient audiences would have heard ‘Earth’ and thought of themselves—they would have heard ‘heavens’ and thought of the sky. For this reason, we cannot take that God was generalizing about the natural world as a whole—it’s not what they would have thought, either. Rather, he was being quite specific about the boundaries of the human ‘dominion’. It was Earth; their Earth, our Earth. The Divine Mandate applied to this planet alone. The heavens—and heaven beyond them—were not our playground.

True story, bro

If the cat’s not out of the bag already, I’ll give it a good shake. I am not a Creationist. I am not a literalist. I don’t think people should be, but that’s for them to decide. I fully accept the mountains of scholarly research and analysis examining the Biblical narrative from top to bottom, applying sociological, anthropological and archaeological lenses to figure out just what the heck is going on in these stories. I can’t say I have it fully figured out—far from it—but I am quite comfortable with the idea that the stories we read in the Torah and beyond are an amalgam of myth and fact. I think it’s only scientific to take such a view. But it doesn’t trouble my faith. Just because a story is a ‘myth’ does not mean it’s untrue. Why do you feel the weight of Simba’s tragedy in The Lion King when he nuzzles against the corpse of his recently-deceased father? Why do you feel incensed at the injustice suffered by Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird? Or the painstaking longing of Forrest Gump for the capricious Jenny? They’re only stories. Myths. Kid’s cartoons, fairy-tales and vapid Hollywood chicanery. Tom Hanks doesn’t really feel any of that stuff he seems to be feeling on screen—it’s all just make believe. Why can’t you just dismiss it as false and meaningless?

I think you know why. Stories are true in spirit, if not in fact. And we’re all about the spiritual here on this 'Stack. When you peel back the layers of a good story, revealing the beating human heart within, you know you’ve uncovered something True with a capital ‘T’. It speaks to your soul, and your soul is your link to God—your pneuma.

So, to close this off before we meander too far: the ancient stories of Creation had already been woven when Abraham walked the Earth. He knew the ancient gods, their tales and feats. He would have believed in them. When God spoke to Abraham, what He did was reveal himself in a language that Abraham—the historical figure, not the mythologized one—could understand. No doubt what God revealed differed from Abraham’s own conception of the Reality of Things, shaped as it would have been by the contemporary culture. He would have known the story of Utnapishtim, for example; a Mesopotamian flood narrative that predates and (it can be argued) serves as the template for the Noah of Genesis. There were many gods in that story, but this God was introducing Himself as the true author and source of all. That was new. A cosmological shakeup was required. Thankfully, Abraham embraced this change, and the great work of redeeming humanity was begun. He passed on the story as he understood it to his children, who passed it to their children, ad nauseum. The story morphed and evolved in the retelling as ages passed and contexts changed. Civilizations rose and fell. Cultural influences ebbed and flowed. People came and went. But that does not mean that it became ‘untrue’ in any sense. If anything, it become even more true, as the human beings who lived it out encountered the spirit of God in their own individual circumstances, made sense of it in their own unique ways and, in sharing their legacy with the next generation, added their own voices to the chorus. Eventually, someone wrote it down, casting in stone the version that we have inherited.

There’s a weird, wonderful little science fiction story that explores the idea of ‘transcendent truth’ that I absolutely adore: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott. It’s a story about a society of two-dimensional beings who live in a two-dimensional world and are really keen on Euclidean geometry. Whom Edwin envisioned his ideal readership as, I have no idea. Math nerds*** and weirdos, I’d have to guess. Anyway, one day a certain two-dimensional person living in Flatland encounters a strange being who claims to come from a higher, third dimension. Everybody’s got depth there, you see; this being claims to be spherical, in fact. This just about blows the two-dimensional being’s mind because he’s never before conceived that there might be dimensions beyond his own. What is more, this so-called three-dimensional being appears to be a circle like himself—as flat as anyone else in Flatland. Our paper-thin protagonist has to make a leap of faith that the three-dimensional being is telling the truth and that there is in fact a higher dimension that he cannot see, so limited is his perspective. Eventually, he does make that leap…and of course, everybody else thinks he’s crazy.

I love this story because it seems to capture so perfectly what it must be like for a higher-order entity to interact meaningfully with lower-order entities. Imagine you wanted to introduce yourself to an ant. You wouldn’t get very far trying to shake its hand or telling it stories about yourself. Your best shot at effective communication would be spraying pheromones on yourself and…excreting things, I suppose. But you’d have to do it, because you can’t reasonably expect the ant to meet you on your level. You’re the enlightened one—you have to stoop down to be seen and heard, backwards as it might seem. You are all-powerful; they are fragile and ignorant.

For this reason, it seems entirely believable to me that God would need to ‘limit’ Himself in some way or other in order to communicate intelligibly with our monkey brains. Making a connection wouldn’t be impossible—certainly not for God—but it would require certain restrictive parameters to be set, else there might be undesirable side effects. Think about how Isaiah cries out in panic upon witnessing the glory of God, or how the disciples collapse during the Transfiguration of Christ. Like ants wriggling in mortal terror as a child plucks them from their hill and places them in a terrarium (where the uncomprehending ants will be fed and watered at regular intervals, as well as being completely protected from invasions from hostile species), we can’t handle the Truth. The best we can do is grapple with a distilment of that Truth into manageable, digestible droplets of truth. That’s not to say these droplets aren’t true, or even that they can’t cascade toward an ever-broadening awareness of greater truth—but it isn’t the Truth with a capital ‘T’. We’ll likely never know it this side of heaven; maybe not on the other side, either. But we can work to make sense of the the little that has been revealed. We can trust that we’ve been given enough, and that it’s not all up to us. We can follow our hearts, if that’s not too sanguine a sentiment, and believe that the Lord of the Universe is alive within them, leading us all toward greater, grander revelation—one that we can access in our own time and place, if we open ourselves to it in humility and honesty.

Home is where the hand grenades are

Okay, that’s a lot of ground covered. Where have we ended up? We appear to have thoroughly debunked the notion that God’s intended purpose for humanity is to expand our dominion to distant worlds. Earth is our home, as ever, and we are meant to make it as such. Perhaps we shouldn’t yearn for the stars, then—especially not if the people leading the charge are techno-oligarchs seeking to exploit and plunder galactic resources in the name of aggressive corporate expansion. Perhaps we shouldn’t leave if it necessitates the carving up of the celestial sphere into territories and satraps and redoubts controlled by fractious nation-states competing for the thinnest of strategic advantages. It’s hard to imagine it would be worth it, morally speaking, if whatever permanent settlement we establish beyond the stratosphere becomes an extension of the same sickly civilization we have here at home, manifesting all the same deficiencies. In fact, if science fiction has anything to tell us, this brave new chapter in the human story might be nightmarishly worse than any we have yet seen.

Look no further than the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation native to the Alien cinematic universe. Indentured workers trapped on miserable, uninhabitable planets, working off their debts day after sunless day, all the while having their personal freedoms crushed under the weight of corporate bureaucracy? That’s the reality of the main characters in Alien: Romulus (which I really liked, by the way.) It’s certainly a dystopian vision of what ‘interstellar migration’ might look like, but it’s hard to dismiss as being unrealistic. On a more fanciful note, though no less salient, we observe that across virtually all of the films, Weyland-Yutani shows remarkable ruthlessness in their efforts to economically compete. They go so far as conspiring to capture the Aliens—despite the creatures’ deadliness—for the purpose of transforming them into revenue. There’s always a market for cutting edge weaponry, the company executives calculate, and the Aliens are a ‘perfect organism’ ripe for weaponization. Employees become expendable in the pursuit of these prospective riches, and we see again and again how the company abuses the terrorized crewmates of the Nostromo, the Sulaco and the Patna as pawns to achieve their aims. Make no mistake, greed is a very powerful thing. It can be all-consuming; a rather frightening idea, when one considers that there are those who would see our species reach the stars to do exactly that—consume.

The Alien stories are fictional, of course, but they resonate because we see what is True about them. There is a deep, dark pit in the human spirit, and we seek to fill it with any number of things—often terrible things. The institutions we create do the same thing, only in even more destructive and deranged ways. Companies, governments, churches can be as soulless as anything when led by the blind forces of market dynamics, political expediency or religious dogma. Is it any wonder then why God might have intended for us to stay put? We can make things so catastrophically awful for ourselves down here, so why would we export that elsewhere?

We haven’t even discussed the most obvious objection yet. Aren’t there enough problems here on Earth—problems affecting real, living people, here and now—to keep us occupied as a species? If we’re serious about pursuing the moral good (as God would want us to be), why would we look to do it ‘out there’? Right here, right now, there is an unbearable amount of suffering. Children go hungry, natural disasters destroy crops and property, crimes are committed and go unpunished, the innocent are wrongfully accused and vilified, warmongers rattle sabers and march young people off to war, diseases afflict the young and the old; everyone everywhere is crying out for help. How could a person justify the kind of outrageous expenditure of resources it would require to establish a colony on Mars, an outpost on Mercury, a weather station on Venus? How many countless lives would be improved if those in positions of power and influence would turn their gaze from the heavens and toward their fellow man? Why doesn’t Elon Musk use his billions to solve world hunger instead of blasting luxury vehicles into space in the name of…what? Meme-culture? Putting the big middle finger up to the haters and the whiners and the generally uncool, purblind plebes who can’t picture themselves living happy and fulfilling lives in an artificial habitat on Mars?

Good questions all, my dear reader. You’re right on the money with those lines of inquiry. Do let me know what answers you come up with—I’m sure you’re onto something. And yet, for my part, I can’t help but wonder: are there any circumstances where it might be argued that space exploration and interstellar expansion might be viewed as ‘good’? Can any kind of moral argument be presented which might bolster our resolve and propel us beyond the boundaries of our God-given dominion to wander the vast no-man’s-land of the cosmos? We don’t have a Divine Mandate, no, but it doesn’t appear that there’s anything telling us not to try, right? Are we not a species of explorers and dreamers?

One idea comes to mind: how about loving our neighbours? Our extraterrestrial ones, I mean. Maybe they’re lonely, like ourselves. It would be good—as in, morally good—to offer them some company, wouldn’t it?

But more on that next time. Stay posted, because we’ve not yet dived as deep as we can go…

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*Side note: if all this God talk is losing you, perhaps try substituting in the word ‘love’ for God. God is love, after all. Would it be ‘loving’ toward one another, toward the natural world, toward any alien species we might discover along the way to attempt to settle among the stars?

**Side side note: we will dispense with the term ‘space colonization’ or ‘conquest’ henceforth, as it will likely only serve to muddy the discourse. Space colonization has been an idea that has existed in science fiction since the inception for the genre, but for obvious reasons, it carries heavy baggage now. Furthermore, we will limit the scope of this thought experiment to imagining humans exploring and settling ONLY uninhabited planets. If you’d like to consider how we ought to interact with the denizens of inhabited planets, at least according to Christian sensibilities—in a decidedly non-colonial manner—consider reading my previous essay, linked here.

***My editor advised me to cut ‘math nerds’ here due to redundancy, but I recognized an opportunity for a cheap joke. Sorry, weirdos.

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