Outer Space or Virtual Space?

22. August 1996 Florian Rötzer

Space Utopias of the Digital Age

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The feeling of being on the threshold of something materialises with the return of space, although at the same time we dream of societies in which we can live in peace. Even those who fight against technology, wanting to lead us back into the wilderness and its immense spaces, dream of this. For example, the recently caught Unabomber shares with all net enthusiasts the hope of creating new, comprehensible communities in which the individual still has value. The Unabomber's attacks were directed against the anonymous structures of mass societies of the industrial age in order to return the possibility of autonomy to the individual on the margins of big cities and their big organizations. Even if his utopia consisted of "untamed nature" and flesh, whose importance gets recuperated in it, he also tried to revive the idea of the "frontier" and with it, the omnipresent obsession for individual freedom in an open space, an idea also widespread in cyberculture.

Doomsday fears are growing at the brink of the new millennium. We imagine ourselves crossing the threshold of a new age while the old one with its symptoms of crisis collapses behind us. People are fascinated by the symbolical dates of an instrument called calendar which, although spread worldwide through colonisation, is nonetheless arbitrary in its setting of the Year Nil. Even without taking into consideration these magical dates -which have become a permanent source of worry and of hope since the Modern Age which called itself thus - we believe ourselves to be in a time of fundamental change. If up until now we have been caught in a postmodern climate of nuclear threat with limits to our growth, stuck inside a sealed horizon with only a backward-looking perspective -one which at most has allowed for farewell ceremonies, incited our intellectuals to preach post-history and condemn rationalism, provoked the boom in esoteric and other doctrines of salvation and otherwise did not promise anything new- now little by little the techno-imaginary seems to be taking hold of people's minds and creating new utopias. Locked inside the wreck of spaceship Earth, we long for an empty, untouched space to hold our utopian energies, a vacuum waiting to be filled with all our expectations. Contrary to what may have been predicted, space is again becoming an obsession in the age of virtuality.

Civil wars and wars about power over certain geographical areas are still raging - wars which seem perhaps more conspicuous and paradoxical than ever given growing globalisation and virtualisation - although they are no longer waged primarily for control of local resources nor for the economic power embedded in infrastructures. The more uniform the world culture becomes, the more differences between us we desire to have, whatever that may mean. While regional wars over territories are being waged to create homogeneous communities -whether ethnic, religious or class-based- in people's minds there is much more at stake. Population growth allows for the resurfacing of an old fear: becoming a people without space. At the same time however we continue to destroy the biosphere at an even greater speed than after the end of the cold war as many countries are using the tools of capitalism and new technologies to try to reach the living and development standards of the Western world; thus international ecological standards established by nations of globalising economies are easily overlooked if they cannot be translated directly into money. Civilization leaves behind itself scorched earth and destroyed cities. Fantasy, especially the type shown in science fiction films such as Strange Days or Twelve Monkeys, indulges in descriptions of these kinds of uninhabitable, usually urban, areas.

Strangely enough the problems of position and location, undermined by cyberspace and its resulting globalisation, lead us back into the geopolitically embedded identity of the loser. Securing position means self-assertion within a limited area: it is about a sense of "Here", an island, which has to be defended against the outside. Furthermore, capitalism has been freed from its restraints and alternatives with the collapse of the communist states and at the same time both camps have lost their common enemy. The enemy, Evil, is now dispersed and has settled inside the systems, penetrating them and becoming intangible though its omnipresence. A clearly visible enemy, dwelling in the realm of Evil, unites people in spite of all their differences and makes each system's basis unassailable. However if the visible, identifiable enemy disappears, he turns up on the inside spreading fear, insecurity and paralysis. Governmental rules and institutions which maintain social stability through balancing acts are considered means of suppressing individuality: the common good disappears with individualism.

Just like on the Internet, the huge, global playground of cyberspace where intranets are creeping in more and more with their firewalls impeding free movement but at the same time using its infrastructure, the absolute freedom of the individual continues to be propagated while the commercialisation of all areas of life, and with it increased privatisation and surveillance, is creating new borders. The existential coordinates of space are inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, your own and the strange, the foreign. If you don't want to be run over or only want to maintain and secure your borders reactively, then it seems you have to change direction: you have to set off into new spaces which you can colonise, upon which you can impose your own laws, where freedom, wealth and adventure are promised, that allow you to look towards the future with hope, that provide you with a new orientation which, at least traditionally, is linked to a trajectory in space, to progress and to leaving the "cocoon".

Although European nations have performed this trajectory in the past during their periods of colonisation and industrialisation, they not only have had to retreat back step by step but are now facing the danger of losing their supremacy and of being outstripped by the countries they once dominated and exploited. We can already observe a maelstrom that is pulling capital, knowledge and jobs out of the old countries. Only the ruling class in the USA seems to be able to refer back to an image of themselves at the time of colonisation in an ungloomy way. This is why especially amongst this class dreams of the good old world of the frontier that must be tamed are flourishing. Unlike in Central or South America, in the USA colonisation produced a new, untouched world, a "God's Country", which, through the almost complete extermination of its indigenous population and by living by the maxim that guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness, even included in the Constitution, liberated the immigrants from their ties to their countries of origin. To many, the subjugation of the American continent, the independence from Europe and the conquest of the wild West still stands as a model. The taming of the frontier, the exodus of individuals and groups and the escape from the state structures all belong to the identity of the Frontiersman and constitutes, in spite of its victims, part of a national success story reinforced by the media dream world whose stories always put the individual or small group into the limelight. A great many people continue to see in these narratives a historical duty of the American nation.

However, the wild West no longer exists and the globe has become rather small. Unrestrained expansion has come up against the limits set by nature which is no longer an enemy but a subtle system upon which survival depends. It is now only possible for individuals and not entire nations to set off for new frontiers or simulate discoveries in limited geographical spaces on Earth, in the style of adventure holidays. Thus the search for a new frontier is blending more than ever into technological developments, lead by America, which have not only created new possibilities here on Earth but have also permitted mankind to enter outer space and virtual space for the first time. However America, the supposed land of opportunity, shall serve here only as an example to outline the contours of the techno-imaginary on a social level.

1. The Metaverse

The science fiction novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (Munich 1994) gives us a first look into future life in the net and its repercussions on the urban environment. If you read "Snow Crash" together with Mike Davis' descriptions about Los Angeles (City of Quartz, Berlin / Goettingen 1994, as well as: Urbane Kontrolle - die Oekologie der Angst, in S. Iglhaut, A. Medosch, F. Roetzer (ed.): Stadt am Netz. Ansichten von Telepolis, Mannheim 1996) you get an impression of the future of urban space that is rampant with hopes and fears. Sociology of the future has long since emigrated to science fiction. Cities and their communities are disintegrating more and more into suburban, sealed-off zones, ghettos and defensive settlements which lock themselves up.

This tendency to seal off areas and homogenise inhabitants also has its examples in history, especially in the history of utopias. Utopian towns were always small and understandable and their inhabitants were not torn apart by social conflicts. They were not towns of anonymity, of desire, of challenging social and moral conventions or of fighting between different levels and classes of society; but rather they were places of peaceful coexistence between communities. Big city utopias, hardly ever developed, came about when the industrial age exploded: people started dreaming of garden towns, smaller, more closely connected units were set up to contrast against the large agglomerations and the popular image of a community was that of a village rather than an urban society, even when this only found expression in satellite towns or accommodation units. This reaction to mass society and its urban life continues in the utopias of the Sixties and can be found in Marshall McLuhan's metaphor of society constituted by electronic means of communication as a "global village".

Now that modern utopias based upon the individual's fulfillment within society and its transformation have failed, or rather have been abandoned, it seems possible to satisfy the desire for communal structures in cyberspace, redeemed at the same time in real space by the construction of new walls inside the dual city.

Neal Stephenson has subtly integrated into his novel as a self-evident fact of life the sociological analyses of the dual city by Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis and Manuell Castells. Nation states and their governments only exist as powerless authorities while territories are divided up into ghettos. Everybody who wants to enter will be searched. The world is divided up into city states, a "pluralistic" patchwork of ghettos. In "Snow Crash", one of these ghettos is Mr. Lee's Great-Hongkong. It is not an interconnected city area but rather a random conglomerate of protected enclaves: "Mr. Lee's Great-Hongkong is a private, fully extraterritorial, independent, quasi national structure which is not recognized by other nationalities." The decay of cities causes fears that force surveillance and control, isolating social classes from each other. The struggle between rich and poor, old and young and between different ethnic groups is a daily occurrence. Political power, linked to territorial possession, is being crushed as much by local fragmentation as by internationally operating companies who base themselves in and run the global network. "Snow Crash" is set in Los Angeles, the city of the future, where growth only happens in the valleys and canyons out of which people flee, thus making it vacant for refugees who immigrate into the city: "The only ones that have stayed in the cities are the street people who feed on garbage and immigrants who have been scattered like grenade splinters by the collapse of the Asiatic empires and the techno-media priesthood of Mr. Lee's Great-Hongkong. Clever young people like David and Hiro take the risk of living in the city because they like the stimulation and know how to handle it" -and because they can at any time immerse themselves into the virtual world, far more attractive than reality.

Only in the "Metaverse", the virtual city, does there still exist a limited, communal living environment of millions of people. But the social cracks of the real world are also mirrored in the virtual city. Only those who have money or possess programming competence can move freely in this parallel universe, buy private estates and have themselves represented in tailor-made avatars. If you own a computer in Stephenson's Metaverse and have the money to acquire land and build your house on it, you can materialise in it. Visitors who log in from public terminals, for example, reach the endless main street of this Metaverse by passing through certain floodgates, comparable to airports. You can recognise them because their avatars are in black and white and low in resolution - in short, they are cheap looking.

2. The Ideology of Cyberspace

In efforts to colonise cyberspace we find few or no such scenarios. Dominated by the "Californian Ideology", the belief on the right as well as on the left side of the political spectrum is that with the entry into cyberspace all problems will be solved automatically; or people simply "forget" that cyberspace is grounded in and influences reality. The paper that probably best expresses the search for a new "frontier" in cyberspace is the manifesto A Magna Carta for the Infomartion Age drawn up in 1994 by American conservatives (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, Alvin Toffler) of Newt Gingrich's circle. Although cyberspace has no real geographical ground to claim, its colonisation is strongly linked to hopes of securing both position and predominance for the American nation. For us, the historical Europeans, it is doubtlessly strange to see what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have worked out as the characteristic feature of the "Californian Ideology", namely that here liberal, individualistic and sometimes anarchistic thoughts combine unproblematically with a glorification of capitalism and its darwinistic principles to form an amalgam which seems to unite the new virtual class above and beyond all other differences:

"The far-reaching appeal of these West Coast ideologists doesn't only result from their contagious optimism. Above all, they are passionate representatives of an attitude that appears in an innocently liberal political form: they want the implementation of information technologies in order to create a new democracy in the spirit of Jefferson where all individuals can express themselves freely in cyberspace. While celebrating this apparently admirable ideal at the same time these sponsors of technology reproduce some of the most diabolical characteristics of American society, especially those that are rooted in the legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California is based upon deliberately turning a blind eye towards the other, far less positive characteristics of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental destruction."

Cyberspace is considered to be the solution to all problems in the real world, which one supposedly leaves behind by stepping over the technological threshold, and at the same time it is the continuation of the American Dream where the individual and his freedom stand above everything else - if he is successful. Therefore sometimes cyberspace enthusiasts, probably without much reflection, regard free access to the web and freedom of expression as the redemption of democracy while at the same time neglect, or simply ignore, the living conditions of real life.

The success of cyberspace as a new utopia is not only due to technological innovations and the promises of profit that go along with it. The entry into cyberspace is interconnected, above all, with the urban reality of cities, decay of public areas, increasing suburbanisation and the setting up of the dual city. Cities are no longer geographical condensations of capital, power, culture and knowledge. They have become places where you are locked up in or try to escape from, where you erect sealed-off areas, apartheid zones, secure high-tech bunkers and closed spaces which are monitored by the same technologies that cyberspace is constructed of. In the same way that we are penetrating the inner world of cyberspace, flats, houses, entire city areas and new defensive settlements are cutting themselves off from the outside, and as substitutes we construct cities in cyberspace or build parallel cities in the form of theme parks. Instead of strolling around and working in public spaces in cities, the members of the virtual class are doing so in cyberspace, permitting them to overlook the black holes and to form homogeneous communities which are eventually aimed at becoming autonomous islands with surveillance. These kinds of islands exist on Earth and are for the moment still, like Biosphere II, imperfect projects; but the fantasy of being able to leave the Earth behind and to develop new territories in cyberspace or in outer space is gaining force.

The authors of the manifesto admit however that even in the USA the Third Wave in the development of humankind after the agricultural and industrial ages has yet to arrive and that we are trespassing a new territory where no rules exist. However they know what the definitive conditions are for entering cyberspace in the fulfillment of the American Dream and the American economy: deregulation, competition, privatisation, decentralisation and demassification of all institutions and culture at any cost, something which can only mean commercialisation of everything for all those who can afford it and indifference towards those who have been left out of the information society. According to the authors, nobody knows in which direction the de-massified individuals and communities will float off to, but isolated individuals will come together in "different communities" of "electronic neighbourhoods" and will be bound together only by common interests and no longer by geographical closeness and common duties, except perhaps those which base themselves on the concept of the "American Way of Life", praised in an unconditional and uncritical way by the authors.

The reduction and homogenisation of "communities" is the great ideal behind the ideology of cyberspace. They believe that if only deregulation were pursued consistently the power of computers would be entirely in the "hands of the people", a situation which would automatically guarantee freedom from tyranny on the information highways, improvement in air quality and, here American reality shines through for a moment, make it unnecessary for people to live in "overpopulated and dangerous urban areas" as a safe and private family home life would be possible. Cyberspace, in the authors' opinion, is progressively turning into a marketplace where "knowledge" materializes as "product" in the form of hardware, software, competition and information and is anchored in the renewed redemption of the "American Way of Life" and the "American Dream" as if the social conditions of the USA could be used as an example for the whole world. The danger exists that public areas and public life itself will disintegrate even more than it has already.

The authors of the "Magna Carta" are marked as much by an unconditional euphoria of individualism as by the glorification, without looking at alternatives, of competition, freed from all forms of intervention by the welfare state. Cyberspace, according to these authors, belongs to the people, not to the state; but the people in all its celebrated diversity and where social and / or ethnic conflicts have been eradicated is reduced to the users of those technologies offered by multinational companies and amongst which they can now finally choose as if these technologies were dozens of TV programs. The "Third Wave" in the history of mankind which the authors of this liberal and individualistic manifesto want to emphasize include computer companies, bio-technological enterprises, information-based production centres and those banks and software producers who trade with information; all in all, the members of the entertainment, media, communication, education and information services sectors.

In the authors' opinion these sectors will determine the society of the future. Everything else will be relegated to black holes, to third world-like places socially and geographically left behind -also increasingly found in highly-developed countries- or to reactionary representatives of outdated mass society. Today the ones to act are no longer large social groups oppressed by representation or laws but, instead, highly differentiated communities, "formed by individuals who celebrate their differences". These individuals (here we can't help but be reminded of Stirner) are difficult to unite and don't subordinate themselves to the "rules, taxes and laws" which served the "industrial magnates and bureaucrats of the past". The question is whether or not individuals are now "represented" by multinationals, such as Microsoft, which dominate worldwide in their sectors even if they are not as gigantic as the companies that defined the industrial age.

Although it is true that the need to change the conditions of property is propagated in the manifesto, only the end of copyright for intellectual property is discussed; and yet they are in favor of quicker amortisation rates for taxes on hardware and software. Furthermore, the new monopolies of the consortiums with their increasing concentration, fueled by the fusion of giants in the electronics sector, are not taken seriously and treated as a "quantite negligeable". On the one hand, all governmental measures that belong to the period of mass society have to disappear, but on the other hand the ideology of liberalism, pumped up once again by interactive, multimedia, big band-width computer networks, is not concerned with built-in standardisations and constraints of hardware and software.

The manifesto effusively states that computer technology has created more than a simple machine. Rather, cyberspace is said to be a "bioelectronic environment, literally universal". But it is not an environment that you enter peacefully nor one inside which you learn to live: it invites you to conquer and is to be considered a "bioelectronic frontier zone". Finally, after the Cold War and programmes like Star Wars are long over, a "new frontier" is born, the dream and trauma of the American people who have substituted the old "Go West" for "Go Cyberspace". Cyberspace is the latest American frontier. Hackers are celebrated in the same way as conquerors of new territories or outlaws were in the past, at least when they are finally integrated into the economic system after having sowed their wild oats in the new "wild West". They become "technicians" or "inventors" and later "creators of a new wealth in the form of baby companies" which, despite all the talk of universality, turn cyberspace into the economic property of the Americans. The conquest of cyberspace follows the example set by the settlers, cowboys, heroes of the wild West and soldiers who subjugated a continent that, in their eyes, didn't belong to anyone -pure colonialism. Forget about the Indians, the blood that has been shed, the slaves who worked away in the name of "individual freedom". "The bioelectronic frontier is an appropriate metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace if we remember the spirit of invention and discovery which motivated the seafarers of old to set out on voyages of discovery, which moved the generations of pioneers to tame the American continent and which, in recent times, resulted in the exploration of space".

Deregulation and the retreat of the state as a controlling organization have always been the magical words of economic liberalism - naturally with the exception that state interventions are desirable when it comes to securing your possessions, contracts and profits. So currently, enthusiasm is centered on a stateless and bureaucracy-free cyberspace which on the one hand is supposed to belong to the people, and on the other hand should secure the position of the USA and its companies. Europeans should ask themselves whether, in spite of the fears of no longer being attractive as a location, they really want to follow this strange mixture of an individualistic and liberal sense of mission together with nationalistic emotionalism and the desire for economic dominance: this would probably entail sealing off social and territorial islands of high-tech culture from the rest of society and celebrating a diversity of something which we no longer have the political means to secure. Computer networks bring with them the danger of establishing levels of political influence and possibly suggest the dream of a direct, anarchical democracy which had been defined up to now in territorial terms - in the form of communities, countries and states. We are surely experiencing the slow decay of a representative and nation state-based democracy from which people, the globalised economy and the net-integrated media are all withdrawing. Europeans have learned from their own history that utopias that are blindly embraced only produce new horrors.

Cyberspace, or Telepolis, opens up a new living environment, but it will all depend upon which common good, which public life and which culture of difference will be used in the creation of an environment where everybody can coexist and where the biological survival of this planet is not endangered. Cyberspace, or Telepolis, seems to offer the chance to do everything over again, to leave the past and all the social problems of the present behind by offering a new living environment. Investments of time, capital and passion into cyberspace will probably reduce those that could be employed in the construction of the "real" world. Securing jobs and positions in a global economy as well as the fascination created by the new, virtual world and its new forms of action and communication could lead us to abandon reality to the point where life inside the space of places and life inside the space of data transmissions drift increasingly apart.

But Telepolis, or cyberspace, is not an innocent place outside our world. Just as anchored in reality as humans are to their bodies, the order of the new world has repercussions on the old one. This "liberal" manifesto is but one more in a variety of fundamentalisms which are awakening everywhere and which base themselves in places, be it in slums or in secured neighbourhoods. Telepolis doesn't eliminate the space of places and of positions where the fights that take place during the colonisation of the cyberspace will be manifested. The discourse about spacelessness and the destruction of space serves only to hide the fact that new spaces, new properties and new forms of power will not only surface in cyberspace but will be mirrored in real space as well.

3. The Interim Solution: Biosphere II

The ultimate model of a closed, high-tech living environment that could be located in any place has so far been a failure. Biosphere II, constructed in the Arizona desert, is the latest project of a space capsule which, separated from Earth, would be connected to other capsules only through telecommunication links. Furthermore, Biosphere II is an experiment to measure how a small social community would behave when cut off from the outside world and which structures would have to exist in order to allow the new high-tech farmers to live together and survive. This is what differentiates the people locked up in this terrestrial station from space travellers. Like in all projects of the information society in the background what we find is the hope of, in spite of the globalisation of the living environment, offering small, homogeneous communities a space to inhabit that protects them from the conflicts of the rest of society. Cyberspace is this kind of protected space which through surveillance can be controlled and secured. Biosphere II would be its representation in the real world but with all the advantages of televirtuality, a characteristic of cyberspace. Biosphere II is not an interface between the real world and cyberspace -it is the establishment and mirror image of cyberspace in reality. The relationship between simulation and reality is beginning to reverse itself. What cannot be dissolved into virtuality is locked into capsules and connected to networks. Biosphere II is the model for the realisation of Telepolis, a sealed-off interior which is self-sufficient and which in fact represents the kind of bioelectronic system that is being praised by the authors of the manifesto.

The real Biosphere II project has been moving away for quite some time now from its goal of constructing a self-sufficient survival capsule with closed cycles where only data can enter and leave and which would be fit for colonising in space. For example, during the two-year test phase a part of the team had to leave the artificial world for medical assistance and on their return they brought back equipment like computer parts and manuals. Oxygen had to be pumped into the system as it was creating too much carbon dioxide and the amount of food produced was insufficient. The labour to keep the system going, which meant planting and harvesting food, looking after the animals and controlling plagues of cockroaches and ants didn't give the inhabitants much time for research. Now Biosphere II will be turned into the world's largest laboratory for the investigation of ecological interactions whose conditions can be controlled with accuracy.

Nonetheless, Biosphere II is the redemption of urban visions of isolated and self-sufficient environments in gigantic man-machine systems and a model for the living environment of tomorrow: run like a machine, its principle is the perfect surveillance and control of all components. Following Buckminster Fuller's superstructures, Biosphere II is a dome made of glass and non-corrosive steel grids in which the water, air and food cycles are absolutely closed and recycled back into the system. 1600 sensors control the climate and the composition of the air, water and ground, sending this data to a central control system. The computer network permits a continuous representation of environmental data. Inside the system we find, apart from some humans, around 4000 different species of plants and animals, not counting the microorganisms. Biosphere II is divided into five "wild" ecosystems: tropical rain forest, savanna, coastal area, swamp and a maritime area containing a coral reef. Beyond that there are farming zones and living quarters for the inhabitants. Next to the main dome there are two other areas which function as the "lungs" of the system by balancing atmospheric fluctuations. The temperature is regulated from the outside by a water system and electricity also comes from the exterior.

In a society of digital networks, the material and biological environment of humans will not lose its importance as can be seen with the present high regard for the body and for nature; but it will be set up and organised around some rigid functional criteria. Following the example of Biosphere II and its parallel cities -shopping centres, malls, theme parks and the construction of Telepolis as a virtual world- more and more functions of the exterior world will be transferred into the interior worlds of enclosed spaces. The computerisation of ecosystems -the permanent surveillance by means of all kinds of sensors- primarily serves to set up warning and security systems to protect the bases of human life. Nevertheless, the knowledge gained from this would eventually be aimed at controlling this complex ecological machinery and, this not being possible, to construct autonomous microcosms which, closed off from the environment and under total surveillance, are run like any other technological macrosystems. The exterior serves the purpose of transporting goods and people, and nature of producing food and satisfying particular needs of relaxation which include the need for the aesthetic perception of nature that is manifested in man-made parks, nature reserves and biotopes. The environment continues to be a resource that has to be protected in certain respects in order to maintain life in the enclosed spaces. But these spaces, due to their "intelligence", will tend towards becoming increasingly independent and autonomous, becoming "bachelor apartments" linked to networks of a geographically dispersed Telepolis whose "black holes" will be bridged through cable and satellite connections for those who can save themselves in capsules, the Noah's Ark of the information age.

4. Sidereal Space

As mentioned above, Biosphere II is the great model for future space colonies. The project was born out of this idea, although it is also valid as a model for a new, technically possible living environment on Earth. Why should one think of the colonisation of space? NASA first listed some simple biological reasons like geographical expansion and unrestrained growth: "Why did life move out of the oceans and colonise the land? Because life grows and wants to expand. We have the possibility to live in space and that's why we will do just that". However they also learned their lessons from history and thus have since come up with more reasons for the colonisation: "The main advantage of space colonies is the possibility to acquire new land without having to take it away from someone. This allows for, but doesn't guarantee, a huge expansion of humankind without wars and destruction of the Earth's biosphere." By emigrating we would be able to escape overpopulation on Earth, the destruction of its biosphere and the possible impact of asteroids.

a) First Millennial Foundation (URL)

But there are also private organisations who promote the colonisation of outer space and wish to turn it into a national mission. For example, the First Millennial Foundation sees our modest destiny as bringing life to the dead stars, something that should keep us busy for at least the next thousand years. This is seen as a holy duty, especially as life would be condemned to die if it stayed earthbound. Life could be destroyed at any time by a comet or an asteroid and, moreover, the sun is going to explode sooner or later. They say that as it is, life on Earth is in deep crisis due to the population explosion. How will 10 or 15 billion people find space to live and food to eat?

As usual, when trying to find simple solutions for complex problems people don't try to work out the current difficulties on Earth or analyse the relationships of power and production. More land, more living space is the propagated solution. In fact, the first step towards colonisation that this foundation proposes is the construction of floating islands in warm areas of the oceans. According to them, the islands would form automatically when a conductive metal is brought into contact with the water and electricity run through it. The dissolved minerals in the water would then join to the metal and form thick layers of artificial limestone. If metal constructions were then added to strengthen these formations, together with electrical wire netting, it could result in a sufficiently solid base for the floating islands. The people living on them would live off the sea, cultivating fish and algae, and producing energy in an environmentally-friendly way. At the moment the oceans appear to be "empty continents" and "biological deserts", but life on these floating islands in warm tropical seas would be very pleasant. As life would develop around the same environmentally-friendly principles that are employed in these closed cycles, we are promised security because the colonies will be "relatively free from crime and other evils which we see dominating the cities" . This is so because we are talking about "a community of closely related individuals", in other words, a non-urban community. The ocean colonies will prepare us for life in closed systems and in "isolated and highly integrated communities", something which is after all a prerequisite for leaving this planet and which makes these conditions necessary.

b) NASA: Space Settlement Basics (URL)

The people at NASA obviously want to force the idea of colonising space for institutional reasons of self-preservation. Although they still continue the important activity of launching satellites -hundreds of which are now orbiting Earth- since the end of the Cold War, manned space programs which had become too expensive were drastically reduced. In their eyes, space travel has to become something available to everybody and not only to highly qualified specialists. Therefore only when space flights have become safe and inexpensive can thousands or millions of people take the opportunity of giving relief to our planet. After all, one hundred years ago nobody had ever travelled by plane while at present some five hundred million people are flying every year.

It is interesting to see that certain groups of people are mentioned who could find the colonisation of space especially attractive. For example, they suggest that being in space without the burden of gravity could be advantageous for the handicapped. They wouldn't need any machines or aides for moving as they could float around. Furthermore, the possibility would exist to send involuntary colonists to space colonies as they could be considered relatively inescapable prisons, like islands were in former times. This seems a rather obvious idea, although perhaps not in the way that the authors had intended, given that space colonies will always be a kind of prison even when constructed as protective settlements. They also suggest that they would be appropriate for some religious groups not wanting to live near "infidels", or else for those who would like to experiment with new types of social or political forms.

Biosphere II is once again the obvious model: a technically produced "independent biosphere" with closed cycles. The authors suggest, however, that it may be necessary to take at least some oxygen and a little food. Anyway, the idea wouldn't be to go straight into colonising planets or even the Moon. Rather, the first step would be to have some sort of gigantic containers orbiting the Earth so that at least people could still see and maybe visit her. Only later would we spread ourselves around in the solar system or move to distant stars because in later generations it won't matter anymore to people where they are. They do not go into detail here about the technical realisation of these suggestions. They put their money on nanotechnology, which will do everything by itself, and make possible the building of an "orbital tower" rising from the Earth's surface into space. In this way, materials and people could be brought by elevator into orbit with minimum expense. And even if everything would take lots of time and money, one has to remember that "New York, California and France" weren't built in a day and "Canada, France and San Francisco" cost a lot of money too.

We have already learned some of the reasons why outer space will be "a nice place to live". But there are more which I don't wish to withhold from anyone. The authors list several reasons, the first being the aesthetic one of having a "nice view". Not clouded by air pollution, from out there you can enjoy the marvellous panorama of the solar system and of course revel in the beauty of Earth. Secondly, the reduced gravity would be ideal for dancing or practicing sports. Two extremely attractive reasons for leaving Earth. But naturally, there are more.

The third reason has to do with freeing ourselves from our interdependence with the environment given that, unfortunately, living on earth means sharing only one biosphere and suffering the ecological crimes committed by others. As every space colony would be totally sealed off from the environment, the global ecological effects of our risk-taking society would not affect them: "If one colony pollutes the air, no one else has to breath in their filth." The fourth reason is paradigmatic to our topic which is why I will quote it in its entirety: "On Earth different groups have to learn how to live together very closely. It requires a great effort to live together with five or six billion homosapiens and some people don't tolerate this very well. Space colonies offer an alternative to trying to change human nature and to endless conflicts. The possibility of living in almost completely homogeneous communities as was the normal form of human existence during millions of years. Those who cannot adapt to living so close together have the opportunity of cutting themselves off from others by millions of kilometres of the finest vacuum, something that sometimes seems like a necessary thing. Access to space colonies would be through air gates and thus immigration control wouldn't play an important role." Up to now we can only choose amongst limited options of what the place where we want to live is going to look like. This "having-to-restrict-oneself" is very difficult to bear for genuine space travellers who are all individualists and builders of worlds, striving for their personal happiness. I will now quote the fifth reason, unable to formulate it better: "As the entire environment will have been created by man, you will be able to obtain whatever you want. Would you like an estate on a lake? Then simply build lakes. Do you love sunsets? Then program simulations of hourly sunsets into the weather system. Do you like walking barefooted? Then just make the whole environment foot-friendly."

Perhaps none of this is meant to be taken seriously but is only a 1995 satire on all those early dreams of emigration. In any case, the spirit of our times is reflected in these Space Settlement Basics from NASA, which maybe doesn't even know what one of its members has put on its web site. But there are others who obviously do take one thing dead seriously: the American dream of a new frontier intertwined with the colonisation of space.

c) Welcome to the Revolution: The Space Frontier Foundation (URL)

The Space Frontier Foundation, based in New York City, is an association of American citizens who are strongly represented on the Internet and maintains a mailing list with contributions to the series "The Frontier Files". It demands the colonisation of space as soon as possible as otherwise humankind will perish. For them, the USA as the "Frontier Nation" has a special responsibility in this area. In an effort to arouse national pride, this Foundation claims that America is getting nervous at the end of the 20th century. There are too many doubts in the "greatest nation that ever existed". The Cold War having ended, people need a new "vision of tomorrow" which offers something better than what we have in the present. According to the Foundation, Americans are "a nation of pioneers without a new frontier. There is no longer a clear, exterior enemy around which they could organise. History is repeating itself." In other words, times are bad.

Too many people see the future as obstructed. Images of a declining culture, in large part of cities in decay like in the film Blade Runner, haunt us. Unemployment, poverty, social struggles, the retreat into the private sphere and decreasing living standards produce insecurity, fear and individualism. The nation is falling apart. The Space Frontier Foundation has the solution: "The USA has to acknowledge the philosophical discrepancy between the things the nation should be doing in space and the things which we are in fact doing at the moment. Then we would be able to re-formulate our misguided space program into a new one that is more comprehensive, more exciting and more profitable. By putting these changes into practice, we, who understand the chance that the space frontier offers us, can provide America with a new image of its future -a future full of hope, an exciting future that motivates the entire society. A future of continuously expanding options...". The finite, whether in space or time, seems to be very difficult to bear. The future has to progress in the form of a continuously rising curve, otherwise everything falls apart, just like the capitalistic market when it stops growing. In the same way that a nation fighting an external enemy grows closer in times of war, the "emptiness of space" is supposed to generate a new type of society which includes everyone.

But what was it like in the old days when the wild West was being colonised? Was a new type of society created? Were new towns founded without suppressing others? But the facts of real history have little importance. In the foreground we have the wave that colonised the land (including its inhabitants) under the hopeful slogan "Go West". "25 years after Lewis & Clark railway carriages rolled into the West towards Oregon, thousands of pioneers were brought from the boats to the Californian coast... 25 years after the Wright Brothers, people could buy a plane ticket and fly around in airplanes... but 25 years after having landed on the Moon, we still sit in front of the TV watching old astronauts remembering the good old days." Things have to look up eventually in what regards morale as well as space. The ideology of "sustained development", directed towards the preservation of the biosphere, is said to be paralysing people when what is needed is the creation of "a new age of continuously growing hope". Once we commit to the vision of colonising space, which can only be positive given that space hasn't been colonised yet and because in this way we also protect our biosphere, then the "questions of where we are going as a race, how we fit into the big picture and what we have to do next will no longer have any importance. The only thing we will have to do will be to direct our gaze towards the thousands of stars in the night sky and we will find the answer. And the world is going to follow us. Because we are a nation of pioneers, this is our new country. And because we are all capable of doing this, it is high time that we are given the opportunity to prove it."

But who is standing in the way? The state is, because it is impeding access to space. Viewed as purely a means of oppression and not as an institution which exercises democratic procedures and social balancing acts, the state cannot open the way into the future. This can only be done, in the well-known capitalistic and individualistic style, by individuals concerned with the pursuit of happiness and profit -as deregulated as possible. Space as the new wild West. America, according to this Foundation, is a nation of free people, united by the belief that "man comes before the state and should have the right to create new riches, unimpeded by the state". The West was won using such a doctrine. The Foundation doesn't explain however how this typical, anti-state, extreme individualism can go hand in hand with the creation of new communities. It believes that if only individuals and companies were left alone in the "marvellous chaos of the free, democratic entrepreneurial system" then prosperity, freedom and a better life for all would be possible. Like at one time in the wild West, money is the exclusive driving force: without profit there will be no new goal".

Conclusion

As with the propagandists of cyberspace, the Space Frontier Foundation links the colonisation of space to individualism, which is always identified with a free, capitalistic market and the reduction of the state. Deregulation is the only maxim of happiness. Public life doesn't matter so long as it doesn't generate money. Individuals have to be successful and win, otherwise they will be lost and relegated to oblivion like the Indians were in their time. Freedom only means freedom of the market; in other words, competition. In this amalgam, typical of our times, utopias can only sustain themselves while moving forward, and cannot describe the place that will emerge at the end, let alone formulate collective rules of how it is to be socially organized in an acceptable way. The anti-state attitude and the orientation towards triumphant individuals, groups and communities is much too strong.

What then will the colonies in space and cyberspace look like? Not much different from those in the real world which are increasingly marked by the same maxims of capitalistic individualism and deregulation -like adventure parks, Disneyworlds and shopping centres, like suburban areas that spread around old cities without providing urban life, like cyberspace, increasingly commercialised and marked by private organisations with their intranets and fee zones. In a nutshell, like the way Mike Davis and others describe the future of our cities: breaking apart into segments, citadels and scanscapes under the pressure of multinationals and the new virtual class. Scanscapes according to Mike Davis are protected areas, models for all biospheres and space colonies, and serve homogeneous communities in which every step is being monitored in order to ensure against any foreign intrusion. They are linked through cyberspace and by highways, high-speed trains and airports.

Thanks for the translation to susy Ramsey and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who have organised the 5. Cyberconference.