A ViewPoint by Ursula Werner
I’ve been paying a lot of attention to outer space lately. Each time the planet we live on coughs up a strange new weather phenomenon – a hurricane in North Carolina, wildfires outside Hollywood, snow in New Orleans – I wonder how long life as we know it can continue on Earth. Whenever I’m in this climate doomer headspace, I pull on my favorite, though admittedly disheartening, sweatshirt: “There Is No Planet B.”
Some people – mostly billionaires, it turns out – disagree with my sweatshirt’s message. They don’t think Earth is all that this universe has to offer humans. They are certain we can resettle elsewhere once we’ve depleted the resources of our planet. Elon Musk wants us to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos wants us to build space stations to orbit Earth and fly through the solar system.
I happen to know that Jeff Bezos has had his space station plan for a long time, over 40 years. Long long ago, when he and I were teenagers in love, we occasionally went sailing on my family’s modest sailboat. And by “modest,” I mean manual winches, Coleman stove, giant ice block for food refrigeration – a far cry from the 417-foot yacht Koru Jeff now sails around the Mediterranean. At night, we’d lie on the foredeck, holding hands and looking up at the sky. Inevitably, Jeff would talk about our future home on a space station, where we’d be living with the rest of mankind. And I’d say, “Oh no, no, thank you very much. I’ll be quite happy here on Earth, in my tiny hut on a Caribbean beach.” (As if I, who almost threw up on Goofy’s Wild Ride in Disneyworld, would ever be able to tolerate zero G.)
Maybe it’s that memory, maybe it’s the past personal connection, that makes me pay more attention than most people to Jeff’s outer space plan. Elon’s, too, now that the two of them are living in lock step, dining together with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sitting side-by-side at the presidential inauguration, while Trump reminds Americans that it’s time to “drill, baby, drill.”
Jeff’s company, Blue Origin, is actively at work putting together a commercial space station called Orbital Reef, touted as a “mixed-use business park 250 miles above Earth.” Elon plans to use his company SpaceX’s reusable space vehicle – creatively-named “Starship” – to transport humans to Mars and deposit them on its surface. (I love it that SpaceX admits that the experience will be “a little cold” for those transplanted Earthlings. The average surface temperature on Mars is -85° F.)
Call these plans far-fetched, or call them visionary, if you like. There’s no doubt that there are a slew of technological and logistical obstacles – some of them huge and likely prohibitive – involved in sending people off to settle outer space. But there’s also something rare and exciting: the opportunity to start over.
Because Star Trek is right: space is the final frontier. Assuming humans can survive out there (admittedly a giant and unproven assumption), they’ll be on their own. Far beyond the reach of existing governments, settlers in space will have the freedom to organize society however they choose. And they’ll have the benefit of thousands of years of human experience on Earth to inform that choice.
Wouldn’t it be nice if they took some guidance from a prophet of the first century, a man who also called for a new society – one based on tolerance, equality, and love? Jesus of Nazareth was neither the first nor the last spiritual visionary to embrace these simple and transformative social principles. But he was definitely more open-minded and forward-thinking than other men of his day. That might be because he was an extraordinary man. But it might also be because he hung out with women.
Scholars agree that among the disciples who followed Jesus around Galilee was a group of women devoted to him and his beliefs. The most influential of these was Jesus’s closest confidante, Mary Magdalene. If Jesus was on Earth to teach humans how to live a better life, Mary Magdalene and her female cohort offered daily examples of what that alternative looked like. “Tend and befriend,” rather than “fight or fly,” was their instinct when encountering someone “different” or “other.” Their focus was connection, not domination.
But Jesus came late to the party. By 1 A.D., four thousand years into the adventure that was human civilization, patriarchal structures and powerful hierarchies were already firmly established. A loving, egalitarian society didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving the Roman war machine.
Two thousand years on, we haven’t made much headway as a society in adopting Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s ideas. I’ve come to believe that it would be easier to start from scratch than try to reform the unequal and frequently unjust world we live in. But how do we get to “scratch” when there are almost 200 nations and 8 billion people on Earth?
Outer space may be our best chance at “scratch.”
The problem is, Jeff and Elon – our outer space chauffeurs – are billionaires interested in making money. Their vision of what will happen in space centers is built on commercialism, not humanitarianism. Perhaps indicative of where their social consciences lie, both Jeff and Elon have decided to support a politician who is a convicted felon, who believes in Us and Them, who chooses vengeance as a governing policy. Hard to imagine either of them focusing on the establishment of a kinder, gentler society, especially with that politician looking over their shoulders.
If only they would take a moment to step back and look at the long-term picture. If only they’d re-engage in the kind of thinking that Jeff once embraced, when he buried The Clock of the Long Now, a project designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Because if we are thinking about settling outer space, now or over the next few generations, it’s high time to start planning. Time to gather some of society’s deep thinkers and spiritual teachers, men and women, to begin the process of charting a more humane and benevolent future for humankind. Time to dust off our faith and imagination, ready them both for a giant leap, a far bigger one than Neil Armstrong contemplated.
Imagine a world that is truly egalitarian, where “otherness” and “difference” are celebrated, not feared. Where everyone’s first question each morning is, “Whom can I help today?”
A world with less gravity.
A world with more light.
The kind of world Jesus and Magda would recognize.
© 2025 by Ursula Werner and Christian Feminism Today.
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