For recent scholarship that addresses important practical steps to do this without replicating forms of extraction and harm, see Costanza-Chock, Design Justice.

Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 9.

Mbembé, Critique of Black Reason, 3.

Bangstad et al., «Thoughts on the Planetary.»

Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 161.

Mohamed, Png, and Isaac, «Decolonial AI,» 405.

«Race after Technology, Ruha Benjamin.»

Bangstad et al., «Thoughts on the Planetary.»

Blue Origin’s Mission.

Blue Origin’s Mission.

Powell, «Jeff Bezos Foresees a Trillion People.»

Bezos, Going to Space to Benefit Earth.

Bezos.

Foer, «Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan.»

Foer.

«Why Asteroids.»

Welch, «Elon Musk.»

Cuthbertson, «Elon Musk Really Wants to ‘Nuke Mars.’»

Rein, Tamayo, and Vokrouhlicky, «Random Walk of Cars.»

Gates, «Bezos’ Blue Origin Seeks Tax Incentives.»

Marx, «Instead of Throwing Money at the Moon»; O’Neill, High Frontier.

«Our Mission.»

Davis, «Gerard K. O’Neill on Space Colonies.»

Meadows et al., Limits to Growth.

Scharmen, Space Settlements, In recent years, scholars have suggested that the Club of Rome’s models were overly optimistic, underestimating the rapid rate of extraction and resource consumption worldwide and the climate implications of greenhouse gases and industrial waste heat. See Turner, «Is Global Collapse Imminent?»

The case for a no-growth model that involves staying on the planet has been made by many academics in the limits to growth movement. See, e. g., Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.

Scharmen, Space Settlements, 91.

One wonders how the Bezos mission would differ had he been inspired instead by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who wrote the short story «Autofac» in In it, human survivors of an apocalyptic war are left on Earth with the «autofacs»-autonomous, self-replicating factory machines. The autofacs had been tasked with producing consumer goods in prewar society but could no longer stop, consuming the planet’s resources and threatening the survival of the last people left. The only way to survive was to trick the artificial intelligence machines to fight against each other over a critical element they need for manufacturing: the rare earth element tungsten. It seems to succeed, and wild vines begin to grow throughout the factories, and farmers can return to the land. Only later do they realize that the autofacs had sought more resources deep in Earth’s core and would soon launch thousands of self-replicating «seeds» to mine the rest of the galaxy. Dick, «Autofac.»

NASA, «Outer Space Treaty of 1967.»

U.S. «Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act.»

Wilson, «Top Lobbying Victories of 2015.»

Shaer, «Asteroid Miner’s Guide to the Galaxy.»

As Mark Andrejevic writes, «The promise of technological immortality is inseparable from automation, which offers to supplant human limitations at every turn.» Andrejevic, Automated Media, 1.

Reichhardt, «First Photo from Space.»

See, e. g., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wayne Biddle’s account of von Braun as a war criminal who participated in the brutal treatment of slave laborers under the Nazi regime. Biddle, Dark Side of the Moon.

Grigorieff, «Mittelwerk/Mittelbau/Camp Dora.»

Ward, Dr. Space.

Keates, «Many Places Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Calls Home.»

Center for Land Use Interpretation, «Figure 2 Ranch, Texas.»