News that Rocket Lab, a New Zealand space company, has somewhat surreptitiously sent a 3ft-wide geodesic sphere into space – looking somewhat like an oversized Christmas tree bauble, has not met with unalloyed joy. Dubbed the Humanity Star, it is due to shine there for nine months (until it burns up in the atmosphere) – a “reminder to all on Earth about our fragile place in the universe”, as the company’s founder, Peter Beck, says. “It’s definitely a reminder,” agrees the astrobiologist Carl Scharf, “… because it’s infesting the very thing that we urgently need to cherish.”

We just can’t leave things alone, can we? Launching a fake star into the sky is just the latest in a line of recent appropriations of the natural world. From geohacking to remedy a climate gone wrong, to a surgeon tagging a living human organ with his initials; from contemporary artists installing sculptures on the sea bed or hatching butterflies only to watch them die in a vitrine, to strapping cameras to leopards’ heads, eagles’ wings or whales’ backs so that natural history documentaries can get an ever more sensational view, we are turning the world into a virtual version of ourselves. It is the ultimate act of anthropomorphism: to reconfigure creation in our own image.

For millennia of human history, any anomaly in the sky was taken as an ill-omen. A comet – by virtue of its unpredictability as a stella errans – a wandering star – induced feelings of instability and possible apocalypse. It’s why Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of the early 16th century, Melencolia I, showed a genderless angel peering up at a flaming meteor, as if stricken by what it portends. And it’s why stranded whales on North Sea coasts around the same time were read as similarly sinister events. Strangely enough, the mass stranding of 29 sperm whales on those same shores two years ago, in January 2016, has been blamed on unusual solar activity that caused their navigational systems to malfunction. The fact that the same activity has been responsible for recent vivid manifestations of the northern lights seems to turn myth into reality – bringing together the hugeness of the whale, the lights, the sea and the sky into one elemental augury.

Mr Beck, Rocket Lab’s wise man, has taken it upon himself to create his own sidereal epiphany. “No matter where you are in the world, rich or in poverty, in conflict or at peace,” he declares, “everyone will be able to see the bright, blinking Humanity Star orbiting Earth in the night sky”. Others might see it as a gesture of hubris, if not a kind of colonisation of that same shared space. It’s as if we feel affronted by the last wildernesses left to us – whether in outer or inner space. Indeed, Rocket Lab’s action stands in contrast to another disputed “blank” space, that of the Southern Ocean around the Antarctic, where Greenpeace is currently lobbying for international declaration of the largest protected area on Earth, to preserve its pristine seas from industrial-scale fishing and other depredations.

It is the ultimate act of anthropomorphism: to reconfigure creation in our own image

Little more than a century ago you could have looked up into the sky and seen nothing more untoward than a cloud or a bird. (It is telling that the words “avian” and “augury” share an etymological root.) Now the night sky is coursed with satellites and space stations and space junk, and by day it is scarred with aeroplane contrails – making life hell for producers of historical dramas – and the prospect of getting your deliveries by drone. Light pollution has blotted out the stars in most cities and towns, so most people won’t see the Humanity Star anyway. As the International Dark Sky Association says: “The natural night sky is our universal heritage.”

Meanwhile, new digital clouds fill the air, a legacy of Guglielmo Marconi’s invention. In 1920 the inventor of the radio claimed to detect signals from outer space, but even he could not have envisaged a world entirely encircled and connected by satellites that can pinpoint our every individual move. Rocket Lab’s project may be well-meaning, speaking to a global community, but it just contributes to the notion that we are pinned down, like butterflies, by technology. Is this flying disco ball offering us transcendence, or advertising our dominion?

I’d much rather agree with Mr Beck’s statement that “humanity is capable of great and kind things”. But I’m not convinced that the Humanity Star is one of them.

• Philip Hoare’s most recent book is RisingTideFallingStar