Dusseldorf A look at the recent present is sobering. War in Ukraine: Countless people die every day. Climate: Storms sweep through the country, the consequences of the flood in the Ahr valley are far from gone. Corona: The incidence numbers just don’t fall, the virus kills people every day.
Crisis follows crisis, as if a biblical time of plagues had begun. Anyone who still remembers the hopes for New Year’s Eve 2019 shakes their naivety a little: the 1920s have so far been anything but golden. Advances in medicine, computer technology and aerospace conveyed a sense of optimism that now seems to be fading.
A sarcastic would say: “After all, life on Mars now seems more tempting than before.” The New Space Revolution wants to make colonies on the moon and Mars possible in just a few years. Just a few days ago, Elon Musk presented a date for the Mars mission: it could take place as early as 2029, 60 years after the moon landing. “Consciousness is a brief, flickering light in the darkness that we can’t let go out,” said the founder of aerospace company Space X.
Musk is serious about the justification for a colony on Mars. He often talks about how an asteroid could hit the earth. Also, the earth would be swallowed up by the sun in around 500 million years. These more abstract threats are being joined by concrete ones these days. In the Ukraine war, not a few people fear an escalation of the conflict and the use of nuclear weapons.
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Human civilization needs an outpost. But what will it look like? Will we make the same mistakes there as we did on Earth? Or live peacefully and frugally together?
In his new book “Wunschland”, the Furtwangen sociologist Stefan Selke investigates these questions and describes and analyzes numerous attempts at utopia by mankind.
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The longing for a new world is not new. The term utopia was coined by the humanist author Thomas More in the 16th century. The diplomat and poet Bartomeleu del Bene wrote the utopian poem published in 1609. Numerous science fiction novels such as “White Mars” deal with a colony on the planet. One of the two authors is Roger Penrose, who received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.
A vision of society, a better world: The utopians of the past founded “ideal worlds” apart from humanity. They tried it on a mountain in Switzerland or in the jungle in Brazil. They were often realized by financially strong supporters. In 1901, for example, the Belgian entrepreneur’s son Henri Oedenkoven founded the alternative group “Monte Verità” in Switzerland together with the German artist Ida Hofmann.
In 1928, the American car manufacturer Henry Ford built the ideal city “Fordlandia” in the middle of the Amazon region. For many years venture capitalist Peter Thiel pursued the libertarian-anarchist project “Seasteading”. He supported the idea of a “floating city” with $1.7 million, but threw it down in 2011, saying the project was “unfeasible”.
Stefan Selke: Desired country.
Ullstein
Berlin 2022
528 pages
26.99 euros
Musk is now dreaming of the “Mars City”, but he has said little about its structure or ideals. The Space-X founder prefers to talk about technical details. For example, 1000 Starships, Space X’s new giant rocket, are needed to build a colony with 100,000 people.
How Mars City is governed should be decided by numerous institutions such as the space agency Nasa. After reading Selke’s book, one thing is clear: Musk mustn’t have too much decision-making power.
This is shown by the lessons from the history of utopias. The powerful founding fathers, writes author Selke, all too often perceive their followers as mirror images. “The result: Anything that contradicts one’s own worldview is filtered out or forbidden.”
A whole series of utopias, “Fordlandia” or “Celebration” (the model city in Florida built by Disney in 1995) failed because of this. “Utopian models turn into repressive settlements quite quickly and mostly unintentionally,” says Selke.
Where utopias fail: too much and too little authority
But too little authority and too few rules can also become a problem. For example, “Monte Verità”, a utopian colony on a mountain on Lake Maggiore, collapsed because of this. The diet was vegan and salt-free, “air and light” were considered the basis for health.
Not only the diet, but also the clothing was unconventional, money was frowned upon, even spelling was tackled – founder Hofmann invented her own rules, in which all words were written in lower case, the written language should be more understandable and functional. In this way she wanted to get rid of “conventional prejudices of society”, as she wrote.
For a while the experiment worked. The people lived from their own crops in agriculture, and the colony also earned quite a bit through entrance fees and the sale of photos and postcards – the nude pictures of the residents caused a worldwide sensation. The writer Herman Hesse and the revolutionary Michael Bakunin were guests. The famous dance teacher Rudolf von Laban joined the group, and the free dance he developed there is still part of the curriculum today.
Unlike other colonies, there was no dominant leadership. However, latecomers shattered the initial balance of the social structure. Freud’s student Otto Gross founded his own group within the group, which promised self-discovery less through asceticism than through disinhibition – by which orgies under the influence of cocaine were meant. During a visit, sociologist Max Weber was irritated by “the extent to which an allegedly anti-authority mentor is accepted as a leader and guru in an allegedly anti-authority milieu”.
Monte Verità also fell into two groups: the “Fundis” and the “Realos”. The realists prevailed more and more. A sanatorium was built, which at first only served vegan food. But in 1909, guests were allowed to drink alcohol or coffee, and later to eat egg dishes and other foods. Double standards developed among the residents of the colony, even the closest associates of Oedenkoven secretly went to the surrounding bars. The group disbanded over time. In 1917, Oedenkoven and Hofmann turned their backs on Monte Verità, disappointed.
“The quality of the rules also determines the success of the desired country,” writes Selke. “Projects without reliable rules develop in the direction of anarchism.” It is an irony of history that both anarchists and autocrats let the colonies fail because of the same thing: “The ego of the utopians prevented collective learning processes,” writes Selke.
Space hostility has its perks
Space is a hostile place. This poses immense challenges for space travel and the establishment of a space colony: to be so well positioned technologically that survival is assured.
But the difficulties also have an advantage. Waste is not allowed outside the earth, everything is too precious – electricity, water, food, oxygen. “Frugality for everyone”, as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts it.
This has a beneficial effect on the community order, as astronauts report. Cooperation is everything, everyone helps as best they can. This spirit of cooperation prevails on the International Space Station ISS. Today it is still one of the few places where Americans and Russians work together – even if the project is endangered by the Ukraine war.
What brings astronauts together is not only the threat from outside – but also the “overview effect”, writes Selke. The sight of the earth as a distant planet, a completely new view of the worlds, has always had its effect. According to the sociology professor, the first photos of the earth from space were decisive for the environmental movement – the pictures like “Earthrise” or “Blue Marble” show how small and fragile the earth is in the gigantic universe.
From a distance, differences between people such as religion, origin or ideology become irrelevant. The view into the cosmos unites people. Astronauts report again and again about this impression that changed their lives.
So far, planning an expedition and colony on Mars or the Moon has mainly focused on the technical side. This harbors a soullessness that Selke fills with his book. Not only his hope is: “Mars City” could become a laboratory and role model for a truly globalized humanity – if one learns from the mistakes of the past.
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