Expanding Beyond Earth – The Illusions Of ‘Progress’

In 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that China offered a ‘warning example’ to the West. Yes, Mill sniffed, Chinese culture had benefited from ‘men to whom even the most enlightened European must accord, under certain limitations, the title of sages and philosophers’, but the Chinese mind had long since lost any capacity for ‘human progressiveness’:

‘… they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners’. (John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, Penguin, 1974, p.137)

‘Improved’ by whom? By ‘us’, of course, the ‘foreigners’, ‘the more civilised portions of the species’, whose ‘human progressiveness’ over the subsequent two centuries has generated record-breaking temperatures, storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, mass destruction of species and numerous other disasters to our ‘improved’ world whose climate is most certainly not ‘stationary’. Just a single, recent example:

‘Fuelled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year, a BBC analysis finds.

‘Nearly 50 days have smashed existing highs for the time of year by the largest margin in the satellite era.’ (My emphasis)

One thing is clear, for all our hubris, when we unleashed our industrialised efforts to ensure the world was ‘further improved’, we knew not what we were doing. Stumbling in the dark over a cliff is not ‘progress’.

For Westerners like Mill, and now much of the world’s Westernised monoculture, ‘progress’ has always been a matter, not just of change, but of change transcending natural limits. It has meant ‘conquering’, ‘dominating’, ‘improving’ upon nature, and ultimately moving beyond the Earth itself to new worlds.

This worldview was exemplified by Korean War fighter pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous comment after he became the first person to set foot on the moon in 1969:

‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’

The words are often matched with an equally famous picture of Earth viewed from the moon as a blue-green marble shining against the blackness of space. Noam Chomsky put this mythmaking in perspective:

‘NASA offered new ways to milk the public for private gain, while also helping the Kennedy administration to arouse badly needed jingoist sentiments, at least until people tired of watching spacemen stumbling about the moon to no purpose.’ (Chomsky, ‘World Orders, Old and New’, Pluto Press, 1994, p.105)

Armstrong’s comment clearly implied that we were on some kind of purposeful path – if it was a ‘giant leap for mankind’, it must have been in a meaningful direction. Indeed, the ‘leap’ into space is widely deemed as natural and right as birds flying the nest, as children leaving home, as Europeans sailing on a tide of ‘manifest destiny’ to ravage the ‘New World’. But can we really be sure these are valid analogies?

Certainly, it is right and good that both bird and child fly the nest, but they remain an integral part of the environment for which they are perfectly evolved. Would it be ‘progress’ for a human cell to permanently fly the nest of the human body?

Casting all such doubts aside, a million science fiction films, TV series, novels and short stories encourage us to believe that it is right and natural for an organism evolved on Earth to head off-planet. Astronauts are depicted traveling vast distances under unaccountably Earth-like gravity without ill effects. It is taken for granted that our ‘destiny’ lies ‘out there’, where we will find something more: answers, Truth, perhaps even God.

Consider Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction epic, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, released at a time when faith in the promise of science-based ‘progress’ burned a lot brighter than it does in our decaying time.

At the heart of the story are mysterious alien obelisks able to accelerate human evolution, initially stimulating primitive hominids to master the use of tools and weapons. In the age of space travel, a second obelisk, discovered on the moon, and a third orbiting Jupiter, trigger the next evolutionary leap, as an astronaut is transported to a far-distant world where he is revamped, refurbished and returned to Earth as a more highly evolved ‘star child’. The central, unquestioned conceit of the film: ‘progress’ means transcending ‘the surly bonds of Earth’.

‘Into The Stars’

Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and a high-profile BBC presenter, commented recently:

‘Our civilisation must expand beyond Earth for so many reasons. It’s extremely important that we do it, and as quickly as possible.’

Reportedly a staunch advocate of ‘a collaborative approach between state-run space agencies and private enterprises’, Cox added:

‘If we don’t expand into the stars, no one else will. It becomes an obligation for us to take those first steps.’

The counterargument, of course: it might be that ‘no one else’ is expanding ‘into the stars’ for the same reason that ‘no one else’, perhaps, is infesting their planet with nuclear weapons or eroding their environmental life-support systems. In other words, perhaps because it is a bad idea. It may be a signature goal of an aggressively high-tech, expansionist worldview that quickly proves suicidal.

If Cox seems to, at last, be promising a Star Trek-like voyage to ‘the final frontier’, he brings us down to Mars with a bump, saying of the red planet:

‘It is actually the only place we can go beyond Earth.

‘In any plausible scenario, there is nowhere else that humans can go to begin their step outwards from a planet other than Mars, other than the Moon.’

The grand vision, then: mankind may one day stumble about Mars to no purpose.

Certainly, Cox’s expansion ‘into the stars’ will have to wait, given that the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away; one light-year being the equivalent of 5.88 thousand billion miles. How far is that? Well, NASA’s speedy spacecraft, Juno, travels at 165,000 mph. At that rate, it would take 2,958 years to travel one light year.

But there’s more and worse. Thomas Lang, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California, San Francisco, comments:

‘People think of technology as the limiting factor in space flight, but it’s not. Human physiology is the limiting factor.’

The problem:

‘We’re attuned to living in gravity.’

Not just to gravity, but to the precise level of gravity found on this planet, at this distance from the Sun, with this moon orbiting at exactly this range of distances. Even the waxing and waning of the moon has profound impacts on female menstrual cycles and other patterns of human and animal behaviour. Many people are strongly impacted even by the arising of a full moon. I myself have often noticed an unexplained restlessness. The mystery is often resolved the moment I glance up at the night sky.

Given this extreme level of sensitivity even to our small moon, what would be the result if all our usual gravitational influences were completely removed for years?

The impact of altered gravity on human physiology became very clear during the first Apollo space flights in the 1960s and 1970s. After just eight days in orbit, Apollo astronauts were so weak that they had to be pulled from their landing capsules. The common misunderstanding is that this is simply because muscles have been idle in the absence of gravity. Sonja Schrepfer, a professor of surgery, comments:

‘When astronauts return to Earth’s gravity, muscle weakness is only part of the reason they can’t stand up. They also don’t get enough blood to their brain, because their vessel function is impaired.’

A report in Nature adds some sobering detail:

‘Gravity ensures that the blood in our body maintains an optimum blood pressure level. While standing, the blood pressure in our feet is as high as 200 mm Hg (millimetres of mercury). In the brain however, the pressure is only 60 to 80 mmHg. Take gravity away and the blood pressure equalizes around 100 mmHg throughout our body. Our face puffs up with fluid and our legs thin out because the fluid drains out. The shift to higher blood pressure in the head triggers an alarm that the body has too much blood. Increased blood pressure can make the blood vessels bleed. Optic nerves can swell and this can impair the vision. High blood pressure can lead to a stroke that can damage that area in the brain that processes images. Thus, gravity acts as an important force that helps to maintain the correct pressure in the right places in our body.’

Schrepfer notes that the immune system is also affected:

‘Over half of the Apollo astronauts had some sort of immune problem. So, we knew back then that the immune system wasn’t working well in space.’

These are the same changes found in the less robust immune systems of the elderly. While on Earth the changes take 30 years, in space they begin to occur after 30 minutes.

Lang found that astronauts returning from a six-month stay on the International Space Station had lost between 6-9 per cent of the total bone density from their hips; about as much in a month as a postmenopausal woman loses in a year.

A September 2024 report by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found:

‘After a month at the International Space Station, a set of 48 bioengineered human heart tissue samples beat about half as strong as similar tissues that remained on Earth.

‘The tissues also became weaker and started showing genetic evidence of inflammation and oxidative damage that are hallmarks of heart disease.’

In 2016, an article in Nature described the fate of astronaut Scott Kelly, who suffered ‘loss of bone mass, atrophied muscles, and redistribution of blood within his body that has strained his heart’.

It seems the very size of the cells in our body are impacted by changes in gravity, with all manner of cascading impacts.   

But why would we not expect every aspect of our physical and psychological functioning to be massively affected by such a radical change? As Thomas Lang says, our entire organism is ‘attuned’ to our level of gravity. Is it too much to imagine that it is simply not possible for human beings to spend extended periods of time isolated from these precise gravitational requirements?

A Giant Leap Away From Hubris

Despite emerging out of a materialistic, militaristic, unspiritual worldview, the ‘space race’ has always been rooted in a quasi-religious idea: that human nature, or perhaps Life, is inherently expansive, extroverted (although, simultaneously, ‘progress’ is supposed to be about transcending nature). It is somehow our ‘destiny’ to move out into the universe.

The superstition is reinforced by astronauts who typically wear the beatific smiles of a priestly caste doing, if not God’s work, then the work of natural selection, of Life, as they prepare for our next ‘giant leap’.

But perhaps this version of ‘progress’ is a complete misinterpretation of the needs and nature of our life on this planet.

Can we conceive of a different version? Could ‘progress’ mean rejecting the idea that we can, or should, try to ‘conquer’ and ‘transcend’ nature? Could ‘progress’, instead, mean fitting ourselves in, as individuals and societies, ever more wisely and sensitively with the world around us? Could ‘progress’ mean understanding how nature functions and how to avoid causing catastrophic harm to both ourselves and others?

Consider the example of a key requirement for survival: food. The disastrous industrial product that we call ‘processed food’ might just as well be called ‘progress food’. Cardiologist William Davis comments:

‘Of the 60,000 products on the typical supermarket’s shelves, only a handful are truly healthy and safe. It’s a striking example of how, when misguided dietary advice and profit-seeking converge, unhealthy foods proliferate, growing the profits of Big Food.’ (William Davis, ‘Undoctored’, Rodale, 2017, p.141)

Davis adds:

‘Processed foods are landmines of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, wheat and corn, hydrogenated oils, sodium nitrate, herbicide and pesticide residues, genetically modified ingredients with Bt toxin and glyphosate, bovine growth hormone, antibiotic residues, acrylamides, aspartame, synthetic food colourings, even arsenic.’

Carefully study the labels of processed food labels, Davis suggests, remove items containing these ingredients, and ‘there will be almost nothing left’. (p.142)

Our technologically ‘improved’ society is beset by epidemics of obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, depression, anxiety, insomnia and numerous other ills. In response, honest dietary and medical experts recommend exercise and food that are compatible with our evolutionary past. It turns out, we are best sustained by organic fresh food, freshly cooked, locally sourced, following a roughly Mediterranean diet. It turns out that ‘progress’ food is poison. Davis again:

‘Choose real, single-ingredient foods as close to their natural state as possible.’ (p.143)

A single-ingredient orange is good for us. Orange juice stripped of its fibrous pulp generates a sugar spike that is harmful to our hearts and brains. We need the fibre, the orange in its natural state.

It turns out that, when it comes to food health, ‘stationary’, after all, was good. What we have evolved to eat is good for us, while ‘further improved’ is bad.

There are other consequences, of course. Our ‘improved’ weather is hammering food crops around the world. In the UK this autumn, extreme weather has reduced grape harvests by 33%-75%, wheat 21%, barley 26%, and oilseed rape 32%. Colin Chappell, an arable farmer in Lincolnshire, said:

‘We’re getting into a situation where autumn planting is becoming unviable due to flooding and spring planting is risky because of drought.’

Other countries are being hit as hard, or harder.

An alternative version of ‘progress’ might involve exposing the truth that the science-based, high-tech version of ‘progress’, while profitable in the short term, is pyrrhic in nature, bringing longer-term disaster.

When we ‘improve’ the world with plastic, do we not poison the seas, ourselves included, with micro-plastic? When we ‘improve’ our lives with coal, cars and capitalism, do we not accelerate towards the abyss of climate disaster? When we ‘improve’ long-distance communication, do we not do so at the expense of short-distance communication, as infants, teenagers, all of us, vanish into our touchscreens?

Progressively Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing

Enlightened mystics like Chuang Tzu, Lao tse and Lieh tzu – the Chinese ‘sages and philosophers’ (‘under certain limitations’) patronised by Mill – saw deeply into the human mind, and identified a fundamental feature: the mind is not interested in what it has, in what is ‘here’ and ‘now’. It is interested in what it does not have, in what is ‘there’ and ‘then’.

The human mind lives in the imagined past and future. It is hardly conscious at all of a present moment viewed as an obstacle to reaching the greener grass of some ‘better’ moment ahead. We are not really ‘here’, we are not truly awake; we are lost in a dream of elsewhere and elsewhen. And so, we hardly even notice that the actual world in this moment is falling apart.

The distant is a blank canvas on which the mind projects its dream of perfection, and no canvas is more distant and blank than the journey ‘into the stars’. But the promise is hollow – the ‘amazing’ future eventually becomes the ‘uninteresting’ present and is replaced by some other blank canvas on which to paint some new dream. It is an endless process of self-deception and disappointment.

Real progress is that described by the decidedly ‘stationary’ Japanese mystic, Basho:

‘Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

‘Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.’

When we finally return home from our endless voyages into the imagined future and past; when we just sit, fully focused on the experience of being alive ‘here’ and ‘now’, an amazing adventure into the present moment begins. The world finally starts to become alive to us. For the head-trapped modern with a cardboard heart, the spring comes, the grass begins to grow.

This is unknown territory – we haven’t been ‘here’, ‘now’, since we were small children. We relax, truly, for the first time. A surge of unaccountable bliss – and something else, love – arises in our heart and lower belly. It seems impossible, just sitting, doing nothing – but there it is!

In this moment, thoughts of ‘progress’ seem utterly absurd – what more do we need than love and bliss? We become as glorious as any ‘star child’ in any science fiction fantasy.

This is the real journey. True progress involves returning from our ‘improvements’ to a new appreciation of the perfection that already exists.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… And The Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025.

Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com