Posted by 
There are many home-grown problems on Earth, but there’s still time to worry about bad things arriving from above. The most recent is the asteroid 2024 YR4, which could be a “city killer” if it hits a heavily populated area of our planet in the early years of the next decade.
The chances of that happening are now estimated to be around 0.001%. But there was a brief moment after the asteroid’s discovery last year when the estimated danger of a direct hit crossed the 1% threshold of comfortable risk.
There’s a need to worry about planetary defence if we are to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. But there are many other things that could kill us, including climate change and wars. So what is it about space that grabs our attention? And how do these fears affect us – individually and as a society?
In the long run, something big will hit us, unless we can redirect it. The responsibility for preparation begins with us.
Yet preparation also carries risks. Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in the US, has warned that the technologies used for planetary defence can not only guide asteroids away from Earth – they can also guide them towards it as a tool in a military conflict.
As explained in his book Dark Skies, Deudney’s solution is to reverse, regulate and relinquish most of our human activities in space for several centuries to come. The more we do in space, he believes, the greater the likelihood that states will end up in catastrophic conflict. “The avoidance of civilisation’s disaster and species extinction now depends on discerning what not to do, and then making sure it is not done,” he writes.
He ultimately argues space expansion has come too soon, and we must reverse the process until we are ready. That said, he thinks we may still need some form of planetary defence, but that it can be limited.
Holding off for centuries is an unlikely option though. The chances of an asteroid strike may well be too high. And the political interest in space expansion is, at this point, irreversible.
Fear of space has grown alongside space programs. Worries about asteroid strikes and over-militarisation lean into deeper fears about space as the unknown. Yet they also lean into worries about the self-destructive side of humanity.
Both fears are very old. One of our earliest traceable human tales, the story of the Cosmic Hunt dating back at least 15,000 years, combines the two.
An indigenous Sami version, surviving in Scandinavia, describes how a great hunt in the skies would go wrong if the hunter is impatient and fires an arrow which misses its target and accidentally strikes the pole star. This would bring the canopy of the night sky crashing down to Earth. Again, fears about misguided human actions and the threat from above fuse.
We can see this in modern technologically driven fears such as UFOlogy. Some hard-core believers in UFOs are not only concerned about hostile visitors, but about secret collaborations among scientists on Earth, or, an entire conspiracy to keep the truth from the public.
Without belief in a conspiracy to suppress the evidence, the whole idea falls apart. But without belief that there is actually something to fear from space, there is nothing for the conspiracy to be about. Fear of space is a necessary part of this picture.
This is an idea neatly captured in recent times by the Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, who compares space to a “dark forest” in which alien civilisations are trying to hide from each other.
All of this presupposes something of a bunker mentality, an over-separation of Earth and space, or sky and ground. This is something I have referred to as ground bias. The bias allows space to appear as a threatening outside, rather than something that we, too, are part of.
Alien viruses
The rationalisation for such fear shifts about and is not restricted to asteroids, aliens, meteors and runaway military conflict. There is even a theory that viruses come from space.
When COVID sceptics went looking for an idea to explain why mask wearing was pointless, what many of them struck upon was an obscure theory put together by the astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe in 1979.
The duo ultimately had a good idea which they followed up with a bad idea. The good idea was that the components for the emergence of life may have come from space. The bad idea was that they came ready formed, as viruses and bacteria, and that they are still coming.
According this theory, well known pandemics of the past (such as the lethal 1918 flu pandemic and even epidemics in antiquity) were apparently the result of viruses from space and could not be the result of person-to-person transmission – least of all from asymptomatic carriers.
The COVID version involved a meteor exploding over China. In an interview, Wickramsinghe claimed “a piece of this bolide containing trillions of the COVID-19 virus broke off from the bolide as it was entering the stratosphere” releasing viral particles which were then carried by prevailing winds.
The idea illustrates the way in which fears about space are used to drive anxiety about human failings or wrongdoing. COVID scepticism has since gone all the way into the White House.
But fears about space can also be used to critique those in power. In our own times, they are used to fuel narratives about billionaires with private space agendas and presidential access, wealthy space tourists and even wealthier prospective colonisers of Mars and beyond. It is a tempting narrative, but one that sees Earth as closed system, which should not be opened to the outside.
We may, at some level, be afraid of space itself. We certainly have an exaggerated sense our our Earthly separateness from it. And there are some particular things that we do have cause to worry about. But there is also the risk that a fear of space can combine with suspicions about governments, leading us to embrace conspiracy theories as a way to consolidate different kinds of worries into a single, manageable, set of beliefs.
Tony Milligan receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 856543).
