Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating.
Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times.
But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will
produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
Industry Reviews
"The book is highly recommended to students of global security, international relations, and geopolitics." -- Didem Buhari Gulmez, Izmir Katip Celebi University, New Global Studies
"Remarkable, mesmerizing book" -- Stewart M. Patrick
"Deudney's research is highly original, empirically rich and driven by (geopolitical) theory.... It finally provides a theoretically-informed account of the possible effects of space expansionism on the security threats facing the Earth and humanity, the nature of the international system and of domestic regimes, and the future of individual and collective freedoms.... The book is highly recommended to students of global security, international relations, and
geopolitics." -- New Global Studies
"It is a big book and Deudney covers a great deal of ground, some of it rather difficult, but he does so with lucid and even frequently engaging prose. His criticisms of the arguments of various schools of space advocacy are fair-minded, and they go deep. They shook many of my long-held convictions about the desirability of an ever-expanding human presence in space....excellent." -- The New Atlantis
"[A] sustained argument against the militarisation of space and indeed the Promethean excitements of space itself. ... Deudney dismantles the idea that space exploration will lead to a transcendence of the Earth's natural constraints: more likely, he thinks, is total surveillance and an increased risk of 'planetary scope technological catastrophe.'" -- London Review of Books
"Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity [is] a learned, massively documented screed expressing what I think will probably soon become the prevailing view in academic circles" -- John Wilson, Englewood Review of Books, The Lamp
"Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity is a painstakingly researched, historically informed and theoretically sophisticated analysis centered on the disarmingly simple question: Is space colonization desirable?" -- Byron Williston, Boston Review
"Deudney forensically examines the techno-political worldviews on which various kinds of space expansionism rest. He then systematically takes the arguments apart, showing the dreams of space expansionism to be science fiction, military adventurism, and the vanity projects of billionaires. After his tour de force, we are led back to where we began, here on Earth. An essential book that has been a long time coming." -- Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics,
Charles Sturt University in Canberra, and author of Defiant Earth
"I am a dyed-in-the-wool space cadet of long standing, so I am 'the enemy' as far as Deudney is concerned. Yet, this amazingly well-researched and thoughtful book provides a deeply sobering geopolitical reality check for the space expansionists. It is absolutely important that the expansionist program be challenged by the arguments assembled here, and so far there has been no such challenge, or at least nothing nearly so well-informed and bracing as this.
Deudney has fired the opening shot in what could one day become the central debate about how humankind charts its future. A landmark achievement from perhaps the most original thinker writing in
international relations today." -- Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics
"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,' wrote the rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911. 'If humans are indeed in an infant state, then it also stands to reason that many-if not most-of their visions of the future are essentially infantile as well,' writes Deudney today. His closely reasoned, deeply disturbing, and always fascinating treatise warns humanity to resist dreamy temptations to colonize-and most likely
militarize-the solar system and to pursue instead 'space for earth." -- Walter A. McDougall, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, and Pulitzer-Prize winning author of the Heavens and the
Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
