Work in Progress: Eschatological Value

Friday 07 April 2023

A new project has absorbed my interest in the past week. I mentioned in a PS to last week’s newsletter that For All Moonkind had announced the formation of their Institution on Space Law and Ethics at COPUOS, and I am affiliated with this institution. To make immediate use of this affiliation I wrote a 1,200 word blog post, “The Fate of the International Space Station,” now on the For All Moonkind website, in which I argue that the ISS should be preserved rather than deorbited. I had planned to write a post of about 800 words, but I ended up half again as long. Upon completing the blog post, I immediately starting working on the paper version of this argument. This draft is currently at 4,500 words, and will probably end up between 5,000 and 6,000 words.

Due to the nature of the argument, this is one of the most interdisciplinary pieces I have ever worked on, drawing upon sources in history, historic preservation, cognitive bias, space exploration, astrobiology, ethics, and axiology. At the moment, I have so many tabs open on my computer that it is barely functioning, but this is necessary for the large number of sources I am consulting.

In the blog post I identify three values that the ISS represents — historical, scientific, and humanistic or spiritual values. In the paper version, after a much more detailed discussion of historical, scientific, and humanistic values of the ISS, I am adding a final section in which I discuss what I call the eschatological value of the ISS. Here I am using a term freighted with a lot of associations that I can imagine that many would want to sedulously avoid (similar considerations apply to any discussion of spiritual values), but I find that, the older I get, the less I am interested in avoiding controversial associations, so I am at a place where I would rather grapple straight on with the theological meanings of eschatology. If I were to take up the argument explicitly, I would argue that the specific meanings of theological terms like eschatology and soteriology are (relatively) recent historical accretions that have attached themselves to aspects of human thought that can be traced back into the depths of our evolutionary psychology. Stripping away the most recent layer accumulated over the past couple of thousand years is only the beginning: we need to go further and deeper into the history of the mind.

What do I mean by eschatological values? “Eschatology” means the study of last things, which for some means personal eschatology, which in traditional theology concerned the individual’s fate after death, while for others it means the end of the world entire. This latter meaning expands as our conception of the world expands. The eschatology of the world once meant the events outlined in the Book of Revelation, whereas today the end of the world is, one could say, the purview of existential risk. Some use the term “cosmological eschatology” to identify the attempt to predict the end stages of the universe. On this basis one could further postulate a multiverse eschatology, which would study the ultimate fate of the multiverse, which, presumably, has a natural history of which the natural history of our universe is but a minor part. The values that characterize these end states, and the values of the processes by which we converge upon end states, are eschatological values. There is a sense, then, in which all values are ultimately eschatological values, as all values in some way or another attend the processes by which we arrive at the ends upon which we converge. I will leave that aside for the moment, but it may be an idea worth returning to at some point.

I started thinking about the ideas that I now assemble under the term “eschatological value” a few years ago when I started working on some ideas about the value of grave goods in tombs. Cross culturally we know that many peoples have interred a remarkable range of grave goods with their prestige burials, and some of our most notable museum displays today are grave goods. The most obvious examples that come to mind are Egyptian burials of Pharaohs and their officials (King Tut’s tomb, etc.), though it is also easy to name off a number of other examples, like the “Lord of Sipán” in Peru, the Siberian ice maiden, the Royal Tombs of Ur, and so on.

As a child I saw the King Tut exhibit when it came to Seattle in 1978, which was the first time in my life to see something truly ancient with my own eyes, and not merely in a photograph. It made a deep impression on me. A few years ago on a visit to Tokyo I had the remarkable good fortune to be in the city when the Bactrian Hoard was on display. I never imagined that I would lay my own eyes on this, but there I was, shuffling past the glass cases of gold artifacts, all of them former grave goods. As it turns out, my seeing the Bactrian Hoard was even luckier than I realized at the time. The treasure was discovered in 1978, but not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it disappeared. The treasure surfaced again 2003, but with the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan, the treasure has again disappeared. So I had an opportunity to see it during the brief window between 2003 and 2021 — less than twenty years. We cannot know if it will surface again. Perhaps it will; perhaps it will appear again long after I am dead. But I am truly grateful that I got to see this treasure in its brief period of public exhibition.

I personally, then, have enjoyed the opportunity to have a glimpse of the past afforded by grave goods, but that was not their intended purpose. If grave goods had fulfilled their intended purpose, they would have remained perpetually in the earth, along with the dignitary with whom the grave goods were interred. If we think of the most famous case of the elaborate Egyptian tombs, filled chock-a-block with what we would call art treasures, we have to remember that these grave goods were purposefully designed and fabricated to be put into tombs and never seen again by a mortal eye. Their intended axiological trajectory was a uni-directional insertion into eternity — the eschatological equivalent of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, which we launched into the cosmos, never to return. While Egyptian civilization remained viable, the great tombs, known by all to contain great treasures, had an official royal necropolis seal, and there was a bureaucracy tasked with periodically visiting the tombs and examining the seals to ensure that no one had broken into them to steal the treasures inside. The tomb robbers knew about these periodic inspections, so they dug tunnels into the tombs and robbed then without disturbing the official seals. What made King Tutankhamen’s tomb such a sensation is that, while a minor tomb, very little had been taken from it before Howard Carter found it; the grander tombs had been plundered of everything of value thousands of years before.

We can exhaustively explain the historical, scientific, and humanistic value of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft in naturalistic terms: while passing through the solar system they returned data to us which has allowed us to better understand the other planets in our solar system, and the plaques that are attached to the Pioneer spacecraft, like the gold records attached to the Voyager spacecraft, are there in case some ETI happens upon these time capsules — technological equivalents of sealed ancient Egyptian tombs. There is a perfectly reasonable sense, then, in which Pioneer and Voyager were intended to be opened, and not to remain sealed for all eternity. In this sense, then, we have an exhaustively naturalistic account of what we did and why we did it in regard to planetary exploration. But what we cannot explain is the impulse to do so, and its close resemblance to our ancestors’ practice of including grave goods in tombs.

Some of this parallelism can be explained by the deep mechanisms of evolutionary psychology mentioned above, but where the parallelism breaks down, and we starkly face a very different conception of the world — and, more the point here, a very different conception of value and its place in the world, its natural history, if you will — as seems to be the case with the greatest tombs of ancient world. Not only were they not intended to be opened, they were explicitly intended never to be opened. For those who planned and constructed these tombs, knowing that they had been violated would be to know that they had failed in the only task they had set themselves.

Let us formulate a thought experiment to see the comparison with our own naturalistic conception of value. It is unlikely that any human eyes will look on the Pioneer or Voyager spacecraft ever again. However, it is not impossible that in some spacefaring future human beings might catch up to these artifacts, capture them, and maybe they would disassemble them and display them in a museum, as we have disassembled King Tutankhamen’s tomb and have laid out the various parts of it in glass cases in museums. As part of the generational cohort that has launched the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft on a one-directional journey into deep space, with no plan to retrieve them, how would we respond to them being found, disassembled, and displayed? Presumably, we share many or most of the values of those who designed, constructed, and launched Pioneer and Voyager. You can ask yourself: how would you feel? I haven’t taken a poll on this (this might be a good opportunity to do some experimental philosophy), but I think that very few people would feel that this ultimate destiny for Pioneer or Voyager would constitute a violation of their mission or purpose. I certainly can imagine that there might be some people who would say that it was the intention of the builders that these spacecraft fly outward from Earth unless and until found by some ETI, if any ETI should find them, or should be there to find them. Would this feeling be strong enough to condemn their capture and display as a violation of their purpose?

Pioneer and Voyager have already fulfilled their purposes of scientific investigation of the solar system. If the plaques and the golden records constitute a further purpose, a second purpose for these missions, then their purposes are only partly fulfilled, and retrieving them and displaying them in a museum would abort this secondary mission, which would then forever remain unfulfilled. However, after a sufficient amount of time has passed — say, just for comparison, an amount of time equivalent to that between the construction and the modern discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, which was more than three thousand two hundred years — our valuation of the second mission might change, and it might seem entirely justified to capture the spacecraft, return them to Earth, and put them on display in the year 5224.

Let us formulate another thought experiment to place eschatological value in another light. Suppose that there is an elaborate Egyptian tomb that has not been discovered — for the sake of argument, we will say that this is the tomb of the High Priest Herihor, which may still exist in its intact state — and suppose that this tomb remains undiscovered in perpetuity. Further suppose that this tomb is contained in an exceptionally solid block of stone, and it remains intact over the coming billions of years as the Earth’s surface rearranges itself due to geomorphological forces. After our sun dies, and the Earth begins to break apart, a bit of the crust with Herihor’s tomb breaks off and floats off into the universe, its Royal Necropolis Seal still intact as on the day it was closed by the officials and workers who made it. This tomb is now on a proper trajectory to eternity, and it could conceivably endure to the end of the universe — the personal eschatology of Herihor, and the social eschatology that was the context in which he was interred, have now coincided with cosmological eschatology. This places Herihor’s destiny in a naturalistic context, which was not the presupposition of those who constructed the tomb, but I think we can still meaningfully ask if Herihor’s tomb has performed its function by conveying Herihor into the physical equivalent of eternity.

Our concept of the nature of the universe has changed significantly between the time if Herihor and ourselves; the universe in which Herihor was launched on his trajectory to eternity effectively no longer exists, though the tomb may still exist to represent the intentions of its builders. How are we to properly interpret their intentions in a universe known to be quite different from that presupposed by the ancient Egyptian architects of Herihor’s tomb? We can turn this question around on ourselves, returning to our earlier thought experiment about the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft: suppose that the universe is not as we suppose it to be when these spacecraft were launched. Suppose, for example, that the correct answer to the Fermi paradox is the Zoo Hypothesis: we are being watched and contained without our knowledge. Under these circumstances, the spacecraft that leave our solar system might be retrieved (as soon as they cease their telemetry) by the ETI in charge of quarantining our solar system. Thus these spacecraft aren’t really sent out into the void of interstellar space in the way their builders intended. Or suppose instead that the correct answer to the Fermi paradox is the “leaky embargo” scenario, in which we are quarantined, but imperfectly, so that some things get through. Suppose, then, that one of the Voyager spacecraft makes it through the leaky embargo, and is picked up by some ETI salvager who frequents quarantined planetary systems. This is the salvager’s lucky day of encountering a forbidden alien artifact, which is then auctioned off with fake provenance papers. Now, I don’t really take either of these scenarios seriously, but they point to a serious issue: the scientific understanding of the universe in the year 5224 is not likely to be the same as our contemporary scientific understanding of the universe, so that anyone recovering Pioneer and Voyager sufficiently far into the future would face a problem not unlike our relationship to grave goods.

These, as I see it, are some of the problems of eschatological value, and the further problem of the destiny of the ISS — i.e., the cosmological destiny of the ISS, its axiological history on cosmological time scales — which I will propose in the paper I am working on, will be another problem of eschatological value. There are many other related problems. Dinosaur bones have aesthetic, historic, and scientific value for us as human beings. For the dinosaurs, these bones have the same kind of immediate value that one’s own endoskeleton has for any one of us — what shall we call this? Visceral value? Existential value? A hundred million years ago this object that is a dinosaur bone had an existential value to the dinosaur of which it formed a part; today, this same dinosaur bone has aesthetic, historical, and scientific value as a museum display. However, as a fossil it could be argued that this is not the same bone as was in the dinosaur.

We have plenty or more recent remains — say, of Pleistocene megafauna — that are not fossils, but real bones. The value of that bone changes radically over time; if the bone is crunched up and digested by some predator, then it ceases to exist and its value disappears. This is the sense in which I say that values have a natural history; the individual human being has an axiological natural history; an Egyptian tomb has an axiological history; the ISS has axiological history; the planet entire has an axiological history; the universe entire has an axiological history. Each of these axiological histories is nested inside the next most comprehensive axiological history. When an axiological history reaches its end, there we have the problems of eschatological value. And all of this is an appropriate meditation for Good Friday.

I’m not going to put all the above into the paper I’m writing; in the paper I will only touch on the idea of eschatological value. However, I want to think more about the distinctive problems of eschatological axiology, and perhaps give the idea a more extensive exposition elsewhere. Over the past couple of years as I have participated in several online space ethics events, I started a notebook exclusively dedicated to space ethics, filled that, and started another. Now I have a series of notebooks focused on space ethics, which is already a useful resource, since I try to write down all my space ethics ideas in this one place. At the end of last year I started collecting past notes on some of the above ideas on grave goods, realizing their applicability to space ethics, which involved going back to recorded notes from 2018 when I first started to work on these ideas. At that time I had no name for the particular kind of axiological problems I wanted to examine, but now with “eschatological value” I have hit on something that I like, and which (though some will disagree) I think it pretty intuitively tractable.