Extraterrestrial Utopias

On the eve of the Apollo 11 lunar launch, Reverend Ralph Abernathy arrived at the launchpad with 25 Southern African American families, four mules, and two wagons. They were not there to protest the moon trip; they came to complicate it. If Apollo was indeed ‘for all mankind,’ Abernathy came to claim space for America’s overlooked communities in the fanfare. The end of the Space Race in 1969 loosely coincided with the end of the utopian modernist project; the post mortem of both has questioned their competitive, colonizing ethos and universalizing narratives. As a new space race brews today, female scholars from astrophysics to religion, argue that space presents an urgent opportunity to renegotiate human society at its most fundamental levels (Nesvold, 2023, Boyle, 2024, Rubenstein, 2024, Von Mertens, 2024). This paper brings together their ideas with preceding scholarship from history, philosophy, and science and technology studies, which framed global warming inaction as a crisis of imagination, and considered the ‘universal’ in humanity’s shared fate on the planet (Chakrabarty, 2009, Morton, 2013, Klein, 2008). The historical utopian project used temporal or spatial distancing to productively envision otherwise inconceivable worlds. The paper argues that the mechanics of envisioning life in outer space again offer an alternate-world displacement conducive to critical reflection on ‘new commonalities’ (Latour, 2010). In historical and contemporary examples in activism and art, it identifies glimpses of pluralistic, counter-hegemonic visions that center overlooked communities, co-exist with Earth’s changing environment, and imagine how to explore new worlds without exploiting them.