A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron said that today’s conflicts are being waged in outer space and that wars of the future will begin there. After going over the threats posed by Russia, he announced that France will allocate billions of euros for military spending in outer space.
“Space is no longer a sanctuary; it has become a battlefield.”
Such a statement is like a staggering slap to our simple minds. We are inheritors of a tendency to couple reaching outer space with overcoming wars and conflicts, and more than that, to see outer space, especially its stars and moon, as a place wholly disconnected from the disputes of the earth and the earthly.
Fans of Rahbani Brother poems sung by Fairuz will remember their juxtaposition of the moon that “shines a light over the people” and people “fighting each other,” as well as how they elevated the moon’s neighborship to a blessing that “leaves the most beautiful colors on our rooftops” and “sprinkles red corals”...
In 1963, the United Nations passed a treaty that was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. Dozens of countries followed suit in four years time.
“The Outer Space Treaty” thereby created a framework for international law that covers outer space. It prohibited the deployment of nuclear weapons and determined what constituted legitimate uses of celestial space, including the moon and other bodies. While it granted all states the right to explore outer space, it prohibited any claims to sovereignty over what it considered “the province of all humankind.”
The fact is that outer space and the moon are consistently revered by religion, literature, and art. The outer space is the home of souls and the realm of the transcendental, as well as the source of revelation and the place where the uncanny eclipses the known or knowable. As for the moon, ancient patriarchal cultures, in contrast to the Arabs, presented it as a woman who borrows her light from the male sun. Unlike the latter, which can burn us when it shines, seemingly imposing a cost for its light, the moon seemed generous and humble, illuminating the night with adoring love, but quietly and guardedly as though it were apologizing for a nuisance.
In the English writer Emily Brontë’s Romantic novel “Wuthering Heights,” Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw hardly ever share a scene that is not lit by moonlight, and their relationship knows no strains that its light does not witness.
In a contest very far removed from the Romantic images of literature, the Soviet Union and the United States set out to wound the narcissism that humanity had associated (or projected) with outer space and its moon.
In 1957, Moscow sent a dog, Laika (Russian for “the barker”), into outer space to orbit around Earth. Four years later, Washington sent Ham the chimpanzee to do the same and explore the feasibility and possibilities of life there.
And twenty years after Laika’s voyage, the great American director George Lucas launched what would become the Star Wars franchise. His epic films soon carved out a space for themselves at the center of global popular culture, branching out beyond cinema with adaptations in television, video games, novels, comic books, and more. However, the ubiquity of violence in these movies, with both their immense battles between armies and their individual duels, was an antidote to violence; or that was Lucas’s intention anyway.
Commenting on his first work, he explained that his goal had been to make “a film for a generation growing up with no fairy tales.”
It seems that the events of 1984 were not part of the effort to turn violence into games with the help of outer space. That year, US President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.” Its stated objective was to protect the United States from potential nuclear ballistic missile attacks, thereby neutralizing the threat of nuclear weapons. Many observers and scholars would later argue that this ambitious program exposed the Soviets’ failure to compete and played a role in reducing the lifespan of the Soviet empire.
On the margins of what has happened and continues to happen in this world, different theories jostle to explain, criticize, and reassess. Some claim that capitalism has nationalized outer space and finalized its commercialization, betting on profits from satellites, space tourism, and similar ventures. As for the major players involved, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, they indicate only one thing: a “new outer space” is replacing that of the Cold War era, when states made the decisions and implemented projects.
Reason compels us to favor the actions of technology over those of Romanticism, especially since the former evolves through science and produces scientific breakthroughs, offering humanity unprecedented opportunities to prosper. However, as the wealth of the rich begins to be measured in the trillions rather than the billions, and as hunger replaces wants as the measure of poverty, we almost find ourselves developing some sympathy for quasi-Romantic hostilities to and phobias of technology. What would we think, then, if Macron’s story about this space becoming a “battlefield” turns out to be true?
