Space research is a human practice, and as such, it carries cultural values within. These are expressed more visibly in examples like the ones that I have been listing in the last few paragraphs. But a deeper and closer reading or appreciation of these and other examples will reveal the philosophical structures and principles that we use to relate to the universe at large. Not only will issues about the boundaries of geopolitics and astropolitics might then be revealed, but also, we may see more philosophical and aesthetic questions about our cosmic agency and role. These questions trouble space scientists as much as they trouble scholars working in the humanities and in the arts. In continental and analytic philosophy, for example, there are long-standing traditions of looking up to the stars as a way to address complicated questions about the meaning of being and knowing.

Indeed, the cultural dimension of space research is a bit more complex than outreach and science communication. Yet, why is it important today to think about space in cultural terms? In short: because we are in the cusp of an extraterrestrial cultural revolution.

Humankind has practiced outer space—that is, we have performed it—since time immemorial. Through science, philosophy and the arts, we have practiced extraterrestrial culture since the first time we took a star as a reference to life on Earth—Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo were all already practicing extraterrestrial culture. However, today extraterrestrial culture acquires a much more material potential. In an age of climate change and orbital trash, of planetary stewardship and satellite telecommunication, of interplanetary colonialism and orbital cosmopolitanism, the performativity of our extraterrestrial culture is no longer exclusively a projection for the future, but rather the pressing expression of the material relationality between us, our planet, and with the universe at large. How we enact space now is therefore a determinant factor in the ways in which we will continue to practice space in the future.

Today, we might have an ideal moment to reevaluate how space science is practiced, how it percolates into society at large, and how it determines and is determined by the cultures in which it is takes place. Today, thinking extraterrestrial-ly might no longer need to mean breaking the final frontier (aren’t we tired of breaking things?). Instead, an emphasis on how we, as terrestrial beings, are always in relation and interaction with the extraterrestrial beyond seems much more pressing. Even when human presence in the solar system seems to be an irrevocable tendency, the ways we start to practice that presence today will determine how we envision ourselves as planetary advocates for this Earth now and in the future. The discovery of gravitational waves has already demonstrated just how connected we are with the universe at large. What we do next will have a great impact on the ways we continue to conceive our planetary condition. Meanwhile, we can continue imagining what an extraterrestrial culture might look like.

Myself? I want to stage Waiting for Godot in orbit, and have Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye play Vladimir and Estragon. The play is a seminal work in the history of theatre in general, and an exemplary case of a genre called “theatre of the absurd.” This particular genre’s main characteristics are that the storyline is often circular and the characters live through a cyclical, almost nonsensical existence. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon spend the entire play waiting for Godot, whose complete identity we never really learn and who actually never shows up. The play has often been interpreted as a poetic representation of humans’ existential agony, and the search for a meaning in a world that may not have one at all. The end of the play encapsulates this: