Lunar colonization race exposes colonial extraction models: Who benefits from 'sustainable' moon missions?
Original framing: “Will future missions to the moon be sustainable? It may depend on whom you ask” — Phys.org
The 'space race' replicates 19th-century colonial resource grabs, where 'discovery' justified extraction (e.g., British East India Company’s opium trade, Spanish silver mining in Potosí). The 1967 Outer Space Treaty’s vague language on 'common heritage of mankind' has been weaponized by powerful states to claim lunar territory via 'scientific' bases. Historical parallels include the 1884 Berlin Conference, where Africa was carved up by colonial powers—now, the moon is being carved up by the same geopolitical actors.
The lunar colonization narrative is a microcosm of Earth’s extractive pathologies, where 'sustainability' is redefined as perpetual growth for a technocratic elite.
Indigenous cosmologies and Global South perspectives reveal this as a continuation of colonial violence, not a departure from it—echoing historical patterns from the Berlin Conference to the Outer Space Treaty’s loopholes. The scientific consensus on lunar toxicity and the absurdity of helium-3 mining (a speculative resource) underscore the folly of treating the moon as a corporate playground. Yet trickster figures like Hermes and Eshu remind us that the moon’s 'emptiness' is a cultural construct: it is already full of meaning, memory, and resistance. The path forward requires dismantling the geopolitical-military-industrial complex that frames space as a frontier for domination, replacing it with a framework of reciprocity—where lunar resources are governed by those who have stewarded celestial bodies for millennia, not those who seek to extract them for profit. This demands binding treaties, Indigenous leadership, and a radical reimagining of what 'progress' in space could mean.