Reviews and Comments

Both a fantastic history of how the tropes and imperial intent of Christianity at its worst made its way to a bunch of atheist science nerds looking to claim the stars and a thorough straightforward critique of today's spacefaring corporations and the way the US government paved the way for privatizing what was supposed to be the "common heritage of mankind" ...oh, and dissecting what the "common heritage of mankind" even meant in the first place. While most of what I have to say about Astrotopia is critical, I want to make it clear that I think this is an excellent read that is especially useful for environmentalist and social justice-minded lefties like me who still think space is pretty neat despite our distaste for SpaceX or NASA or the Space Force and don't know how to reconcile the conflicts that brings.

My criticisms are minor frustrations over things of little consequence to the whole. Vague handwaving toward indigenous "ways of knowing" and the like without really interrogating what you're putting forward is a modern academic tendency that always gets on my nerves in much the same way as well-meaning calls to "listen to x voices!" The problem there, of course, is not in the rightful inclusion of those perspectives but in the hesitancy to treat them as ideas to mull over and respond to like any other. I don't mean to suggest these things were only brought up to virtue signal or that some terrible error was made (I truly believe the effort to be a well-intentioned and harmless one), I just eagerly await the day when academics gesturing toward indigenous knowledge and belief then leaving it to sit give way to that knowledge getting the same push-and-pull as anything else.

We're told that seeing natural "projects" as having their own value and agency apart from their use to humans would lead to us having a much better relationship with nature than the Christian and post-Christian view of the rocks and lakes being inanimate and below us. That seems reasonable, if a bit beside the point if (as she concedes), most Western readers probably won't be able to flip a switch and think in that way. But we never get the "so what?" How would we transform this world into one aligned with those principles? How could that even happen, besides just pleading with people to think differently? What happens to the belief systems and cultural groups which it pulls against? There's so many hows and whys left floating up in the air that it starts to feel more like a thought experiment than anything all that real. I'm asked to consider the cliffs and streams as pagans might, and while that's an interesting exercise, it certainly doesn't move me toward or away from anything in particular. For me, at least, that would require some kind of belief. Certain kinds of animism lead to perspectives that align with my goals when it comes to environmental justice. That's cool, but tells me little except maybe who my potential allies are.

Though if I'm entirely honest, my main hangup remains justice on Earth and not exporting the horrors here into the cosmos. If our economic, social, and environmental problems at home were suddenly all hunky dory, I'm not sure I'd have any problem with us getting some metals from an asteroid or living on Mars or whatever. I see balances between human and natural needs that can arise without taking something powerful from the thought that a mountain has as much right to exist as I do. Harmony can be pragmatic, too.

I think Rubenstein gets lost in the weeds a bit, taking a bit of the heat off of who and what are responsible for "our" extractive and wannabe colonial attitude toward space. Don't get me wrong, this is clearly a work written from a perspective that is at the very least extremely critical of capitalism, but when all is said and done, the call to action is asking us to consider ancient knowledge and the "pantheistic mysticism" the Bezosites dismiss. It's so inward, so focused on freeing your mind and desperately hoping your ass will follow. I say free your ass instead. Say communism.

Give this a read, even if you think it'll just be preaching to the choir. I assure you, you'll get more from it than you expect.

Chances are that unless you're extremely young, the models of dinosaurs you see nowadays are very different from the ones you grew up with. There's a lot of us who are vaguely aware of these more modern images of dinosaurs with lots of colorful feathers, but haven't really looked into it beyond that, and this book is fantastic for catching us up on what we missed.

What makes Dinosaurs Rediscovered stand out is that it's not content to just tell you all the cool new stuff we know and leave it at that. No, this is a lot more concerned with the Hows, because our drastically different modern understanding of dinosaurs compared to the big lumbering lizards of old is a result of massive changes in the practice of paleontology and its related fields. The 20th century saw the transformation of paleontology as a matter of collectors making educated guesses into increasingly proper, testable science that we're only beginning to see the fruits of. While catching you up on our knowledge of the dinosaurs, you're also dragged through how the whole process of getting there in a manner that both is accessible to a lay audience and that respects your intelligence. I won't pretend that I fully understood every single complicated graph shown, but I will say that I understood most of them and never felt like the author got lost in the weeds of overly specific technical explanations.

Dinosaurs were (and are) cool and cute and fascinating, and I'd really suggest this to anyone looking to modernize their knowledge about them and take in all the fun new stuff we know and get a peek into how we actually learned it all. Even if you're not particularly interested in the dinosaurs somehow, this is worthwhile as a study on how with modern technology and a whole lot of critical thinking, we can make the intangible tangible for the sake of learning.

Sometimes I worry about reaching the limits of what we can reasonably learn in the natural sciences. There's only so many fossils down there, after all, and someday we'll have found each and every one. That's a sad thought, but here I've been reminded of just how much more we can squeeze out of what we have. Humans are so cool. We were left a bunch of stones and we've wrung buckets of blood out of em.