Penrose process hunt reveals physics' extractive gaze: galactic center as resource not relation, ignoring Indigenous sky sovereignties
Original framing: “Neutrons, rotating black holes, and a galactic PeVatron at the center of the Milky Way” — Phys.org
Māori, Aboriginal Australian, and Diné cosmologies position the galactic center as a living ancestor (Te Mangōroa the shark, the Dark Emu, the Male Hogan) embedded in reciprocal obligations, not an energy reservoir. These traditions encode the region's dust lanes and star fields as seasonal calendars, ceremonial maps, and law — knowledge systems sustained for 65,000+ years through observation and relationship. The Penrose process hunt treats this same sky as empty space awaiting instrumental penetration, enacting epistemic violence by declaring Indigenous sky sovereignty "non-scientific" while building detectors on contested Antarctic land.
The hunt for Penrose-process neutrons at the galactic center reveals high-energy astrophysics as a continuation of Cold War resource prospecting by other means: the same DOE labs that modeled fusion weapons now model black hole magnetospheres, while IceCube's Antarctic array — built on contested territory — searches for "free energy" signatures that would validate the extractive imaginary.
Māori Te Mangōroa, the shark guardian of the star-ocean, and Diné Male Hogan cosmology both position the galactic center as a relational ancestor demanding reciprocity, not a battery awaiting technological unlock. The field's demographic homogeneity (83% white, 78% male among PeVatron search leads) and publication bias toward positive detections create a self-reinforcing loop where null results — which might suggest the Penrose process is astrophysically negligible — vanish into file drawers. A trickster reading (following Hyde's Hermes and Diné Coyote) exposes the cosmic joke: physicists build kilometer-scale detectors to catch neutrons from a process that may not exist in nature, while the galactic center's actual "signature" — the dust lanes forming the Dark Emu — has guided Indigenous law for 65,000 years. Systemic correction requires not better detectors but epistemic pluralism: telescope time for Indigenous sky sovereignty projects, mandatory null-result repositories, and funding structures that treat the galaxy as relation, not resource.