Anthropology Now

ISSN: 1942-8200 (Print) 1949-2901 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uann20

What Happened to the Future?

David Valentine

To cite this article: David Valentine (2015) What Happened to the Future?, Anthropology Now, 7:1, 110-120

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19492901.2015.11728312

Published online: 19 Apr 2016.

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Download by: [Claremont Colleges Library] Date: 21 August 2016, At: 12:14 books and arts dernity’s key narrative of progressive tempo- ral stages—characterized by dates, events, charismatic individuals, growth, technologi- What Happened to cal innovations and movements toward the the Future? future. For these scholars, the mode of so- cial analysis is spatial rather than temporal, David Valentine critiquing capitalism’s rapaciousness and resulting social, political and economic in- equalities by drawing attention to the simul- taneity of global events and arrangements. W. Patrick McCray. 2013. The Visioneers: How a And so the end of history is also the end of Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future. Princ- the future. eton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 368 pages. Yet the 1970s was also the period when “the future”—dystopian or utopian, fixed Erik Seedhouse. 2013. SpaceX: Making Com- by forecasts but open to technological ma- mercial Spaceflight a Reality. New York: Springer- nipulation—seemed to most fully capture Praxis. 244 pages. the imaginations of the lay public, politi- cians, policy makers and forecasters, in- Over the past few decades, critical theorists cluding some anthropologists. The 1972 have increasingly moved away from time as publication of the Club of Rome’s The Limits the privileged domain for explaining human to Growth—with its warnings of social col- experience and toward a geographical or lapse and the necessity of retrenching global spatial conceptualization of socio-political socioeconomic structures in order for hu- processes. For many critical theorists, his- mans to live within their ecological means— tory seems to have ended at some point be- catalyzed both dystopic visions of an immi- tween the conclusion of the 1960s and the nently doomed world and counter-visions beginning of the 1970s, for different if inter- of a prosperous and ever-expanding human related reasons. For Slavoj Žižek, it is 1968 future. This latter future would arguably be and the capture and then betrayal of the secured by technology and resources at the hopes of that radical year by Western states’ very large and very small scales of matter. embrace of free-market ideologies now re- Patrick McCray’s splendid Visioneers uses ferred to as “neoliberalism.” For Peter Sloter- Limits, and the responses to it, as the fulcrum dijk, it is 1974 with Portugal’s withdrawal of his history of the individuals and techno- from its overseas territories, bringing to an social movements that coalesced around end 500 years of European colonialism. plans for a future of space settlement at the And for Bruno Latour, it is more generally large scale and nanotechnology at the small, in the early 1970s with the acknowledgment just as the end of history had arrived. of the sustained ecological crisis resulting McCray coins the term visioneer to de- from the colonial-industrial age. The “end of scribe a person who combines three factors: history” thus marks the end of Western mo- a vision of a positive and expansive human

110 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 future secured by technological develop- to massive and sustainable human space ments; actual research and engineering settlement. The question for many, though, which advances the vision; and the promo- was why? After all, the United States had tion of the vision to policy makers and the reached its Cold War goal of demonstrating public through media and activist networks technological (and thus ideological) superi- in the hope of advancing that future. The ority over the Soviet Union by sending hu- two men who are the visioneer-protagonists mans to the moon. Why should it continue of this book—Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton investing a large portion of its national bud- physicist, and Eric Drexler, one of O’Neill’s get in space? For O’Neill and proponents erstwhile students and an MIT graduate— of space settlement, the initial answer was imagined their futures at the two extremities ideological: humans need a frontier, and of scale: O’Neill’s plans for massive outer space is human destiny. The practical an- space settlements and Drexler’s promotion of swer, as McCray shows, came in the form technological development at the nanoscale of Peter Glaser’s contemporaneous propos- operate at spatial scales that challenged lim- als for a space-based solar-power satellite its of possibility, investment and credibility. system. Arising out of the same complex of But they also operated at a temporal scale space exploration and space technology, that required massively coordinated action Glaser offered a response to the gloom of in the present to secure the dynamic and ex- Limits by proposing a massive space infra- pansive future they envisioned. In the end, structure that would beam solar power from as McCray shows, both spatial and temporal orbiting solar collectors, solving the loom- scales morphed their projects in very differ- ing energy crisis, reducing carbon-fuel pol- ent ways—and the lesson might be indeed lution, and boosting the global economy by that history is over. significantly reducing the costs of power. In A respected and tenured professor at a space-based solar power, O’Neill and his leading research university, O’Neill is, as Mc- supporters found the political-economic Cray points out, an unlikely figure to appear rationale for space settlement: residents of in the guise of a visioneer. Beginning with his space colonies would manufacture and a physics seminar at Princeton organized manage solar power satellites from space re- around the possibilities of human space set- sources. This would, in turn, resolve Earth’s tlements in the fall of 1969—just after the ecological crises, and the “virtuous cycle” first Apollo moon landing—O’Neill became increasingly convinced that space settle- ment was the answer to the conclusions of This tension between the Limits. With the brief Apollo era concluded seriousness of purpose ... and the by 1972, both NASA and space proponents kookiness of the whole thing ... were turning their attention to the idea of follows all modernist projects of space stations and establishing routine hu- man presence in low Earth orbit (LEO), pre- radical futures. cursors (it was hoped by space proponents)

David Valentine what Happened to the Future? 111 of growth and expansion into the cosmos expensive; they required a leap of vision would be achieved naturally. into the future that politicians and the public McCray insists that it was the actual work were increasingly unwilling to take. And the O’Neill and his collaborators did—design- buy-in of politicians and policy makers was ing, costing and even building early demon- essential, for the idea of private enterprise stration hardware—that in part makes him taking on the risk and expense of develop- worthy of the title “visioneer.” But O’Neill ing space infrastructure was outlandish. For recognized that combating the inherent gig- McCray, O’Neill’s commitment to a state- gle factor of the space settlement movement led effort—tied to an un- was essential to advancing the movement’s derstanding of the collective social good of goals where it counted: in Congress and the space settlement—underpinned his politics. White House. To this end, in 1974 O’Neill This is one of the few false notes in Mc- established the Space Studies Institute (SSI) Cray’s otherwise insightful book. As he in Princeton, an event featured in a front- demonstrates in several places, “space” pro- page article in , and he duces strange bedfellows. Space-settlement actively promoted his plans in the media proponents and enthusiasts scatter across and to policy makers. This public promo- the conventional left/right arrangements of tion is McCray’s third criterion for qualify- the politics that, in the early 1970s, were ing as a visioneer. He devotes a fair amount about to become even more polarized in of space to a discussion of the O’Neill-in- US political life. McCray implies that from spired L5 Society, a grassroots space-advo- the 1970s to the , to which he jumps cacy group—named for one of the points in his final chapter, the ideological under- of gravitational stability between Earth and pinnings of the space-settlement movement the moon—and to Omni Magazine, a key shifted from a leftist commitment to a soci- venue for the popularization of the space etal project of a new commons in space to a settlement movement in the 1970s and early rightist and privatized individualistic mode. 1980s. This tension between the seriousness My own reading of O’Neill leads me, rather, of purpose (the tenured and respected physi- to hold onto McCray’s broader observation cist, the hardware, the solid numbers, the about the capacity of the promise of space clear plans) and the kookiness of the whole to send terrestrial political alignments into thing (UFOlogy alongside space settlements disarray. It is not so much that O’Neill clung in the pages of Omni, the outlandish enthu- to a communalist view of the future. It was siasms of some amateur supporters) follows inconceivable in the 1970s that a private all modernist projects of radical futures. And company would undertake such an effort, as in so many of these, it doomed O’Neill’s notwithstanding the science fiction of Rob- plans. ert Heinlein—another hero of the space-set- As McCray shows, the future imagined by tlement movement—in stories such as The O’Neill and his supporters slowly crumbled Man Who Sold the Moon. It is, rather, that over the course of the 1970s. It wasn’t just space is the open signifier for American poli- that O’Neill’s proposals were enormously tics, enabling many kinds of imagined forms

112 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 of government and exchange to open up, tories in the production of larger forms of a literal space for the unfolding of multiple matter was enormously compelling to audi- possible future worlds. ences in the 1970s and 1980s. With articles By 1977, however, it was already clear about him in Omni and Scientific American, that the investments required for space set- enthusiasm from many of the same advocates tlement and space-based solar-power sat- who supported O’Neill and support from the ellites were not forthcoming. Despite the nascent field of cryonics, Drexler activated energy crisis, a space future of almost-free many imaginings about an expansive fu- power and space colonies taking on indus- ture. Drawing both on pervading analogies trial pollution and absorbing excess human of biological functions to machines and on populations was a few steps too far. It was on emerging technologies, such as the scanning the cinema screen, not in actual hardware, tunneling microscope, Drexler viewed nan- that this future would unveil itself for late- otechnology as a key solution not only to 20th century audiences. space settlement (his initial focus), but to so- But it was at this point too that a new cial problems more generally. Like O’Neill’s kind of promising future and a new visioneer vision, Drexler’s was not just technological emerged. Eric Drexler, a research assistant to but ultimately social. O’Neill in the early 1970s and the second Even without prior knowledge of Drex- protagonist of the book, was also deeply ler or nanotechnology, readers of McCray’s involved in the space settlement move- text can anticipate the impending failure of ment. For Drexler, the promise of a future Drexler’s visioneered vision. A range of fac- in space would be guaranteed through what tors worked against Drexler, not least the came to be called “nanotechnology.” Drex- material difficulties of manipulating biologi- ler’s path was different from O’Neill’s—he cal matter at the very small scale, a fact used worked through a self-established institute against Drexler by another leading propo- rather than a university, and his focus was nent of small-scale matter manipulation, on computer modeling bio-matter at the Richard Smalley. Smalley’s critique of Drex- microscopic scale rather than costing and ler was simple: Drexler’s unproven propos- building actual hardware. However, Drex- als operated through computer modeling, ler’s story feels much like O’Neill’s, and not bench-laboratory science. The focus on McCray is clearly drawn by the similarities. biological matter was also seen as a step too Like O’Neill’s work, Drexler’s investigation far, ignoring how little scientists yet knew into and popularization of the manipulation about DNA or genes. Although the criticisms of matter—and in particular, biological mat- stuck at the time, they clearly would not ter—at the very small scale drew enormous hold today given the integration of biology, popular and scientific attention, to the point genetics and computation. Drexler’s plans where his name became synonymous with (and reputation) were thus doomed by the what eventually became known as nano- same kind of temporal dissonance—being in technology. His vision of manipulating DNA the future before it was time—that plagued to operate as miniature, self-replicating fac- O’Neill. By the 1980s, the tone of media

David Valentine what Happened to the Future? 113 coverage of Drexler’s institute and his vi- sion of prosperity-through-nanotechnology Where McCray leaves off with the had shifted from breathless excitement to an future in the past, Erik Seedhouse arms-distant, ironic, even fearful stance. The takes it up in the present, but in a “gray goo” Drexler proposed as the matrix of nanoscale productivity and the weird- different register. ness of cryonics allowed his unsubstanti- ated technology to be too easily associated with a dystopian future of nano-level matter Seedhouse, as it was for O’Neill and Drex- gone wild and deadly, and to produce the ler, the future is very clear indeed. Ostensi- same giggle factor with which O’Neill had bly a book outlining the current successes of contended. Smalley, by contrast, went on to entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Space Exploration establish a virtual academic empire of the Technologies (SpaceX), it is more instruc- very small scale, allowing the term “nano- tively read as a future history—as though technology” to take something of a back readers were back in 1974 again—outlining seat and remain associated with Drexler; the inevitability of the commercialization of indeed, McCray documents how Drexler’s lower Earth orbit and the eventual future set- very name became anathema to serious sci- tlement of , which is Musk’s expressed entists working at the small scale, fearful of goal for SpaceX. The story Seedhouse tells similar associations with a kookiness that about the 2000s and early 2010s feels eerily might threaten their funding. And so once familiar to someone who has just finished again, readers see the future coming back to McCray’s book. Grammatical tense becomes upend itself. It is Smalley, not Drexler, who inadequate for thinking about revived fu- leads that future—a future now more mod- tures that have already been relegated to the est, more respectable, more predictable. past. This doubling back between past and future is evident even in the collective term *** used by advocates to describe early 21st- century entrepreneurial space companies: The future seems to exist in two forms for the Newspace. modern observer: growth or decline, prog- Seedhouse’s book is to some extent typi- ress or devolution, utopia or dystopia. This cal of a large range of offerings from presses binarism collapses in the denouement, how- such as Springer-Praxis, Apogee and Pro- ever; from the perspective of the present, metheus, books that revive the hopes of the futures of historical actors already seem O’Neill and Drexler and give them new to be logical outcomes, whether as failures form in the context of neoliberal boosterism or successes. That is, the future seems to be and a renewed commitment to the prom- known ahead of time, even if history has ises of technological salvation. If futurism ended. Where McCray leaves off with the had its heyday in the 1970s, the early de- future in the past, Erik Seedhouse takes it up cades of the have provided a in the present, but in a different register. For range of new futurists, from

114 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 to Nassim Taleb, and new proponents of a media’s first-skeptical, then-enthusiastic ac- growth doctrine for outer space, including counts of Musk and SpaceX, only this time and Robert Zubrin, who via a private, commercial enterprise. continue to rail against the enduring influ- For a bit of a plot complication, Seed- ence of Limits. These new futurists see the house introduces some of SpaceX’s competi- disorientations and shocks of the modern tors, other providers with the goal of trans- world—and in particular, technological ad- porting cargo, and potentially astronauts, vances—as resources for the future, carrying to the International Space Station (ISS). But the flames of free enterprise, open markets there is never really a doubt about which and exponential technological growth. This company Seedhouse believes will make it. futurism rides alongside technology. Plans If McCray’s book rounds history out by re- for space settlement and nanotechnology turning to an adult reality where the science have never really gone away, but material fiction fantasies of O’Neill and Drexler are developments in both fields have drawn domesticated to a normalized modern time media and public attention to them again, line, Seedhouse spins the plot anew into the once more in the positive. McCray makes future, his snappy prose moving readers in- an excellent case for how Drexler’s vision of evitably toward the commercialization of nanoscale manipulation of matter has in part LEO and the future settlement of Mars. been achieved in the present day precisely Published in 2013, this book comes well because of his visioneering, but he focuses before the denouement to the plot that pro- less on the achievements of contemporary gressive history, science fiction, space ad- commercial space enterprises bent towards vocates’ decades-long imaginations of the eventual space settlement. However, those future and SpaceX’s own publicity machine space settlement advocates are still around; have laid out: the crucial development of a indeed, as I have discovered in my own re- fast, reliable, reusable rocket to take people search on the space settlement movement, to orbit, and then Mars, cheaply. What makes some of the same people from the O’Neill space travel, exploration and ultimately the era remain hard at work on the goal. idea of space settlement so expensive is the Seedhouse’s book feels like a lesson in simple fact that it costs so much just to get modern time for the critical reader and rep- to low Earth orbit. The high price is not nec- resents Elon Musk as the kind of visioneer essarily due to the cost of fuel, but because figure that McCray paints more cautiously all rockets are essentially expendable. In and critically. Musk here is explicitly named space advocates’ oft-used analogy, it is like as “the space industry’s Tony Stark,” a refer- flying from Los Angeles to New York, scrap- ence to the entrepreneur, inven- ping the plane, and building a new one for tor and Iron Man of Marvel Comics fame. the return flight. (It is worth noting that the With that kind of start, readers already know was reusable, but depended where they are going: Mars. Like a re-run of on massively expensive expendable external history, Seedhouse unveils the company’s boosters that, among other factors, made early failures, the unstoppable optimism, the each flight come in at around a whopping

David Valentine what Happened to the Future? 115 $1 billion). Once travelers leave Earth’s tioning in a microgravity environment. A gravity well, the costs of moving around range of other technological solutions are space are relatively low, especially if they being promised today by the various fields can refine fuel from lunar or asteroidal wa- that have followed in Smalley’s nanotech ter in its component elements of hydrogen footsteps, or even—as McCray notes— that and oxygen, as other entrepreneurial space are operating in ways Drexler dreamed of. companies such as Shackleton Enterprises But like SpaceX’s reusable rocket, these are and Deep Space Industries are planning. The nascent and unproven technologies. development of a truly reusable and reliable That doesn’t matter to Seedhouse, nor to space-transportation system would indeed most space advocates. Bearing all the hall- be revolutionary, radically reducing the marks of 1970s space advocacy, Seedhouse’s costs of going to low Earth orbit and open- book is aggressively optimistic, drawing on ing space to a much broader array of people SpaceX’s technological developments and and activities. SpaceX has already had re- Elon Musk’s charismatic visioneering as in- markable successes with evitable engines toward its early ground tests of the eventual human- its reusable technology ization of outer space. Sometimes the future arrives in McGregor, Texas, and Drawing here and there right on schedule. has also done four con- on the equally inevitable trolled reentries of the analogs to the American first stage of its West or the barnstorming rocket (the third coming very close to land- era, Seedhouse takes readers from SpaceX’s ing on an ocean-going barge, designed for failures in the early 2000s to the success- that purpose), but they are still far from hav- ful berthing of its Dragon capsule with the ing proved the technology. ISS on May 31, 2012, the first time a com- Space settlement is not just about rock- mercially produced spacecraft had ever ets and space stations, as O’Neill knew: achieved such a feat. life-support systems, hydroponics, radiation For space advocates, remembering where protection, adequate computer and com- one was when the Dragon berthed with the munication technologies, lighter and more ISS that day is almost like remembering one’s durable materials and much more are re- location when Kennedy was assassinated. quired for life beyond Earth. Though Seed- It’s that big. Here is my story: I was at the In- house doesn’t mention them, meeting these ternational Space Development Conference needs are a range of technological develop- in Washington, DC, where, in a serendipi- ments that seem to coalesce around both the tous plot twist right out of a science fiction big scale of space settlement and the small novel, I was listening with several hundred scale of nanotechnology, from research into other people as Charles Bolden, NASA’s ad- synthetic biology to 3D printing. A start-up ministrator, gave the opening keynote. I had called Made in Space flew a 3D printer to been in Florida earlier in the week, hoping the ISS in September 2014 to test its func- to witness the launch of the Falcon 9 bear-

116 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 ing the Dragon on its way to the ISS, but the in time to watch one of several Newspace flight was scrubbed a half second before lift- companies’ rocket engine tests far out in off. Disappointed, I had flown to DC for the the scrubby desert on the airport property, conference, a second launch being success- or a test flight of Virgin Galactic’s Space- ful in the meantime. So the live feed from the Ship2. Occasionally, those tests go terribly space station on the screen behind Bolden wrong, as they did on the morning of Oc- was a wild coincidence, an accident of his- tober 31, 2014, when Spaceship2 suffered tory. Bolden’s announcement to a crowd of a catastrophic failure just seconds after its space enthusiasts that the Dragon had suc- engine was ignited, destroying the vehicle cessfully berthed, the unbridled cheering and killing one of its test pilots. Such failures from the audience, the confirmation that almost inevitably reactivate questions about the commercial spaceflight era had begun, the future of commercial human spaceflight, was not plotted as such, but in the way that about the possibility of humans in space at things come together, it felt to me and to the all, and Mojave has many reminders of such ebullient crowd around me as though we questions. For example, visitors can walk were living the smooth story told by Seed- past the Roton, now a permanent exhibit house, as though someone had finally fixed near the main airport administration build- the -circuiting of time that emerges in ing, the prototype model of a single-stage- McCray’s book. Sometimes the future arrives to-orbit spacecraft that flew a few test flights right on schedule. in the late 1990s. It failed—like so many commercial spaceflight ventures—not nec-

*** essarily because of immature technology but because of a lack of money. The density of In Mojave—90 minutes from Los Angeles these things in the space of Mojave matters, over the mountains and into the desert— as critical commentators would point out. Newspace and the future seem to have co- To the people working there, Mojave mat- alesced. It was from here that Burt Rutan’s ters for the future of outer space. SpaceShip1 won the Ansari X PRIZE in 2004 Nowadays the archive of the Space Stud- for being the first commercially built space- ies Institute (SSI), the organization O’Neill craft to reach the edge of outer space. Here founded in 1974 in Princeton, is based at the one finds the offices and manufacturing fa- Mojave Air and Space Port in a squat, WWII- cilities of well-known companies including era building simply called Building 1. Its of- Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Masten Space Sys- fice doubles as its archive, a large collection tems, Scaled Composites (builder of the Vir- of books, NASA contractor reports, journals, gin Galactic craft), Stratolaunch and smaller magazines, popular media clippings, space companies whose names may not be on the legislation, national space commission re- lips of the public or skittish venture capi- ports, comic books, art—pretty much any- talists, but which are equally committed to thing that has to do with space and space O’Neill’s morphed goals. Someone who gets settlement. Most of this material dates from the right calls might get up in the morning O’Neill’s days but has been augmented

David Valentine what Happened to the Future? 117 by various donations and recent books on here. For a moment, they looked to me as if space settlement, asteroid mining, space- they were wearing Star Fleet uniforms. My based solar power and so on. The dusty lino- shock was not that I had gone so native as leum floor is littered with colored dots that to believe that Star Trek and the future had have fallen from the spines of volumes, rem- met me on the strip in Mojave, but that it nants of a former archival system that is now was so easy for time, narrative, history, fic- oblique to those (such as myself) who have tion, space, to collapse in a moment. Like sought to bring some order to the collection the dots on the floor, it is possible to feel un- after its move. Working through this archive, glued from time here. one can read through early proposals for So, reading McCray’s cautionary book space-based solar power, asteroid mining, in Mojave is unsettling. Leaving the desert moon bases, Mars settlements. There is the on Route 14 to go back to places where the Paine Report, product of the 1986 national experience of time feels as though it flows commission on space under President Rea- more properly, one might have a sense of al- gan which, like the Augustine Commission ready knowing the outcome of these News- established more than 20 years later in 2009 pace ventures, a feeling for time’s inevitable by President Obama, sees sustained human circling-round back to failure, revised goals, presence in space—settlement and not sim- modest outcomes, formerly shiny system ply its exploration—as a key goal. Despite proposals now gathering dust on shelves the dust, the dried out glue and the cracking and ultimately staying fixed on Earth’s sur- spines, block out the names and dates and face. Start reading Seedhouse’s brightly opti- this material can feel entirely contemporary, mistic view of the future opened up by Elon fresh and new, not just historical, archival or Musk and SpaceX while waiting for a plane a fantasy of the past. at LAX—where iPads and Wifi and Google Time doubles back on itself in Mojave: abound, technologies that came out of the clunky WW II–era architecture and super- fervor of the same California ideology that high speed Internet, old fighter planes sitting underpins the dreams of big space and tiny quietly in a lot and the sleek, glossy lines of salvation machines—and one might feel SpaceShip2 on the runway, the quiet, awe- a jarringly counter-sense of prescient op- some Roton held down by cables against the timism. Just a few miles away from LAX in roaring desert winds and the dusty volumes Hawthorne, SpaceX is (will be? was?) gear- in the SSI office. And it is not just the past ing up to produce the world’s first-ever fully that comes up to meet the present. One eve- reusable launch vehicle, a heavy lift rocket ning, sitting in a shabby diner on the main capable of taking people to Mars, and strip of Mojave, waiting for an XCOR engi- doubtless other innovations for which it has neer to turn up for dinner, I saw a group of become justly famous. young, spandex-y people from Virgin Ga- As I finish this essay, news breaks that lactic being seated. These are the ones who SpaceX has been awarded one of two con- fly in from the UK, not the ones who live tracts to transport astronauts to the Interna-

118 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 they spell the inevitable doom of space set- I would argue that the challenge ... tlement endeavors, more dots on the floor. I would argue that the challenge, posed in is how to hold onto a sense of hope, a different context and in different ways by of surprise, of openness about the David Harvey and Sam Collins, is how to future. hold onto a sense of hope, of surprise, of openness about the future. The question is how to think about these histories (whose tional Space Station. History seems back on ends McCray neatly ties up and Seedhouse track. But Mojave’s lesson—the lesson of is so uncritically enthusiastic about) with- O’Neill, Drexler, and all the other visioneers out recourse to an anterior-future-historical who pepper the American past, present and tense, time doubled back, already decided. imagined future—seems to be that sooner, Space—vast and nanoscale, terrestrial and rather than later, people will be reading psychic—needs its future back, a future about SpaceX in a past tense at the SSI ar- that is neither simply progressive nor only chive, with another red or blue dot lying in regressive, a future that can be considered the desert dust on the floor. with more subtlety. Though he works in his But this is the challenge of the future at the final chapter to undermine this conclusion, end of history, equally for social theorists, McCray’s book has the effect of drawing at- historians, Newspace boosters and dogged tention back to the primacy of the spatial, in space-settlement advocates. And it is a chal- its invocation of scale, and ties readers to the lenge to the distracted public watching these sense they would get at the Space Studies events unfold alongside other events that Institute archive: it’s just the same future in mark (will have marked?) the ends of his- updated clothing. Seedhouse writes as most tory: violent conflicts, ethnic cleansing, in- Newspace boosters do: he sees the future creasing social and economic stratifications, as open, but open in a very specific way, natural and unnatural disasters, a changing i.e., for the inevitable unfolding of capitalist climate, a precarious world. The spatial turn systems of value in the cosmos. But even if already seems to fold comfortably into the neither of these books takes a critical per- turn to outer space. It is satisfyingly easy spective on history and time, together they to either imagine or to cut off the future by challenge readers to develop ways of think- short-circuiting it back to the past, be it the ing about the future that don’t simply make it settlement of the American West, the barn- repeat itself, for the purposes of either a uto- storming era of the early 20th century or pian or a dystopian punch line. Politically the Apollo era, analogs used by both News- and theoretically, it is important to open up pace proponents and their critics. For pro- to the surprise that the future may bring and ponents, such analogs offer the promise of struggle over what it may become without history repeating positively; for their critics, a certainty of already knowing its outcome.

David Valentine what Happened to the Future? 119 suggestions for Further reading Jean-Christophe Royoux, eds. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 223–240. Collins, Samuel G. 2008. All Tomorrow’s Cul- tures: Anthropological Engagements with the Fu- Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. Lon- ture. New York: Berghahn. don: Verso.

Diamandis, Peter, and Steven Kotler. 2012. Abun- Zubrin, Robert. 2012. Merchants of Despair: dance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Sci- York: Free Press. entists, and the Fatal Cultural of Antihumanism. New York: Encounter Books. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. david Valentine is associate professor of anthro- Maruyama, Magoroh, and Arthur M. Harkins, pology at the University of Minnesota. His first eds. 1979. Cultures of the Future. The Hague: book, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of Mouton. a Category (Duke University Press 2007), exam- ines the politics of the emergence of “transgen- Meadows, Donella H., et al. 1972. The Limits to der” as a category of identity, analysis and po- Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project litical action. His current research is a five-year, on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Uni- verse Books. longitudinal study of imaginings and narratives of the future among commercial outer-space entre- Sloterdijk, Peter. 2005. “Foreword to the Theory preneurs, funded by the National Science Foun- of Spheres.” In Cosmograms. Melik Ohanian and dation (BCS-1127070).

120 anthropology Now Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015