Abstract
This article examines the political economy of the “stars-seeding” vision—the proposition that industrial civilization should relocate its heavy and polluting activities off Earth—and argues that this vision is not inherently emancipatory. It can function either as a genuine horizon for dismantling the scarcity-generating architecture of contemporary capitalism or as an escape hatch that reproduces that architecture at a cosmic scale. Drawing on the distinction between Kenneth Boulding’s “cowboy economy” and “spaceman economy,” on the literature on manufactured scarcity and rentier capitalism, and on the critique of technological successionism, the article identifies a shared “logic of sacrifice” that links the elevation of an abstract future above present lives in both geopolitical and technological discourse. The Gaza catastrophe of 2023–2025 serves as an immanent critique: it demonstrates how the language of necessity can be mobilized to suspend the independent moral standing of populations classified as obstacles to a declared objective. The article argues that a defensible space economy must be built on the prior dismantling of rentier power and the refusal of the bootloader premise—the idea that humanity is merely an initialization sequence for something that will replace it. The choice is not between space expansion and no space expansion, but between a space economy that reproduces the scarcity engine and one governed as a commons.
Keywords: political economy, scarcity, rentier capitalism, space colonization, technological successionism, Gaza, moral economy, Boulding, Daly, primitive accumulation
I. Introduction
Every economy tells a story about what human beings are for. The story currently dominant is a treadmill: produce, consume, discard, repeat, while a progressively narrower circle captures the gains. It is an economy that runs on a carefully engineered sense of lack—not the brute scarcity of famine, but what Wolfgang Hoeschele terms “manufactured scarcity,” a socially produced condition sustained by “scarcity-generating institutions” that manipulate both demand and supply so that “demand consistently exceeds supply, and profits and economic growth can continue”. This is the scarcity engine, and it does not merely tolerate depravity; it monetizes it. It profits from attention fragmented, from loneliness converted into subscription fees, from debt packaged as opportunity, from the quiet terror that one is falling behind. It is a machine that requires people to feel incomplete so that they will keep buying the next patch.
Against this, a rival story has emerged: seeding the stars. In its most influential formulation, Jeff Bezos has argued that heavy industry should be moved off-planet so that Earth can be “zoned residential and light industrial,” a “garden planet” restored to something like its pre-industrial state while “gigantic chip factories” operate in space. The phrase is seductive, and it is dangerous precisely because it is seductive. It can become an escape hatch, a way of postponing the harder work of dismantling the scarcity engine here on Earth.
The question is not whether humanity should reach for the stars. The question is who gets to define the destination, who bears the costs of the journey, and whether the people alive today are treated as passengers or as fuel. This article argues that the stars-seeding vision cannot be separated from the political economy of the present. A space economy built on the existing architecture of rentier power, manufactured scarcity, and the logic of sacrifice will reproduce that architecture beyond the atmosphere. The task is therefore twofold: to dismantle the scarcity engine at home and to govern the space transition as a commons before the enclosure happens.
The argument proceeds in five parts. Section II develops the theoretical framework, distinguishing the cowboy economy from the spaceman economy and identifying the “logic of sacrifice” that connects geopolitical and technological justifications. Section III reconstructs the Bezos timeline and reads it as an advertisement for an escape hatch. Section IV examines the successionist fantasy of humanity as a “biological bootloader” and its intellectual genealogy. Section V uses Gaza as an immanent critique of the moral immunity that accompanies declared necessities. Section VI develops the critique of space colonialism and the distinction between a frontier and a commons. Section VII concludes with the normative requirements for a defensible stars-seeding economy.
II. The Scarcity Engine and the Logic of Sacrifice
2.1 From the Cowboy Economy to the Spaceman Economy
The conceptual vocabulary for this analysis comes from Kenneth Boulding’s 1966 essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Boulding distinguished between the “cowboy economy,” symbolic of “the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior,” and the “spaceman economy,” in which “the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution”. Herman Daly built on this distinction to argue that the cowboy economy “is geared to maximise consumption,” whereas in the spaceman economy “throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized”.
The scarcity engine is a cowboy economy in overdrive. It does not merely exploit an apparent frontier; it manufactures the frontier’s apparent inexhaustibility by producing new forms of lack. Hoeschele’s account of scarcity-generating institutions is crucial here: scarcity is not a natural fact to which markets respond, but a condition that must be actively produced and reproduced for accumulation to continue. This aligns with broader political economy scholarship on rentier capitalism. Brett Christophers and others have documented how, since the 1970s, capitalism has become “increasingly dependent on rent extraction, based on monopolies of land, infrastructure, and intellectual property,” with the monopoly system extended to “platforms, big data, and algorithms within industry itself”. The result is a capitalism that extracts profits from the economy rather than generating them through innovation, sustained by “endemic rent-seeking that stems from market concentration, heightened corporate power, and regulatory capture”.
The scarcity engine, in short, cannot afford sufficiency. Sufficiency would shrink the market for anxiety. It cannot afford genuine abundance, because abundance would render obsolete the rents extracted from artificial lack. And it cannot afford a population with the cognitive bandwidth to imagine alternatives.
2.2 The Logic of Sacrifice and Moral Immunity
The second theoretical pillar is the logic of sacrifice. Wendy Brown has argued that neoliberalism possesses a sacrificial logic according to which each citizen is compelled to sacrifice labor, finances, and well-being for the common good, a logic that “serves to isolate individuals from forms of social and democratic solidarity”. This sacrificial structure is not confined to austerity economics. It appears whenever an institution treats its own continuity or expansion as an absolute good, converting a means into an end and demanding that the people who are the actual ends of political life accommodate themselves to the machinery that was supposed to serve them.
The logic can be described in five stages, following the structural analysis in The Third Temple and the Bootloader: (1) an overriding objective is declared indispensable; (2) the objective is elevated above ordinary moral constraints because it is presented as necessary for survival, security, historical redemption, or future progress; (3) those who obstruct the objective are reclassified as threats or obstacles; (4) the suffering of affected people is represented as unavoidable, temporary, or justified by the anticipated outcome; and (5) the moral significance of the objective becomes so dominant that the people harmed in pursuing it are no longer treated as independent subjects of rights. The fifth stage is the most dangerous: the conversion of purpose into moral immunity.
This logic is not confined to war. It appears in the language of “too big to fail,” in the doctrine that “there is no alternative,” and in the rhetoric of technological inevitability. As Zuboff and others have argued, “inevitabilism” functions performatively: it “conceals the realpolitik” of power at work behind the scenes. The narrative of inevitability “seeks to pre-emptively naturalize compliance with the emerging orthodoxy and to foreclose situated, critical deliberation and principled decision-making”. The scarcity engine has learned to speak this language fluently.
III. The Bezos Timeline: When the Escape Hatch Was First Advertised
The popular memory of Jeff Bezos’s off-world industrial vision places its origin in the summer of 2021, after his own suborbital flight, when he told MSNBC that the point of space travel was to “move all heavy industry, all polluting industry, into space.” But the timeline is both narrower and more revealing than that memory suggests. The earliest detailed articulation in major media appears in April 2016, when Bezos spoke at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs and described a future in which Earth is “zoned residential with a little light industry” while heavy manufacturing of semiconductors and other items is performed in space. A little over a month later, at the Code Conference in California, Bezos repeated the argument in more vivid terms: “Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years … all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet. Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn’t be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space”. By 2026, the vision had been refined into the language of the “garden planet”: moving “heavy, polluting industry off the planet” so that Earth can become a “garden” again.
So the answer to “when did he first say it?” is 2016, not 2021. But the more important question is what that timeline reveals about the political economy of the stars-seeding vision. Bezos’s proposal is typically framed as environmental salvation: relocate the dirty, energy-intensive parts of industrial civilization so that Earth can be restored. Yet this framing is precisely where the logic of sacrifice becomes concrete. The promise of an off-world escape hatch can function as a moral anaesthetic, numbing us to the fact that the same power structure that profits from manufactured scarcity on Earth would be the one designing the exit.
The scarcity engine is not a conspiracy; it is an architecture. It rewards the production of dependence—attention fragmented into feeds, loneliness converted into subscriptions, debt packaged as opportunity, insecurity monetized as consumption. Bezos’s space vision, taken at face value, imagines lifting the heavy machinery off the treadmill. But it does not ask who owns the treadmill, who sets its speed, or who collects the rents. As one critical assessment notes, the long-term goal of outsourcing “destructive manufacturing to space” can amount to “shifting the exploitation of nature and people into orbit”. The bootloader logic simply relocates: the people left behind on Earth become the discarded initialization code, and the chosen few become the operating system of the future.
IV. The Successionist Fantasy: Humanity as Bootloader
The third element of the theoretical framework is technological successionism, the belief that artificial intelligence should replace humanity as the principal bearer of intelligence and value. This is not a fringe metaphor. Elon Musk has written that “propagating superintelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader,” likening humans to the programming that launches a computer’s operating system. In June 2025, WIRED reported on an invite-only symposium called “Worthy Successor,” held at a $30 million mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, where AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to discuss the proposition that the “moral aim” of advanced AI should be to create a form of intelligence so powerful that “you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself”. The organizer, entrepreneur Daniel Faggella, explained that he threw the event because “the big labs, the people that know that AGI is likely to end humanity, don’t talk about it because the incentives don’t permit it”.
The philosopher Émile P. Torres describes this as a form of “digital eugenics” and pro-extinctionism, and he and Timnit Gebru trace the intellectual genealogy of the TESCREAL bundle—transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism—back to first-wave eugenics. The eschatological structure is unmistakable: a utopian promise of transcendence purchased by an apocalyptic rupture. The future becomes sacred, and the present becomes expendable.
This is the structural pathology that connects the successionist fantasy to the scarcity engine. In both cases, an abstract future is granted automatic authority over the lives of people in the present. The machine becomes a Third Temple—an artifact invested with a significance that exceeds its technical function, becoming a mediator between the present and a supposedly higher order of reality. A machine can calculate without possessing moral wisdom; it can generate convincing language without establishing the truth of its claims; it can optimize a stated objective without demonstrating that the objective deserves to be pursued. The danger is not that machines are inherently evil, but that “systems of increasing technical capability will be developed within institutions whose incentives reward power, speed, and competitive advantage more reliably than safety, accountability, or human flourishing.”
V. Gaza as the Laboratory of the Future
5.1 The Legal Record
The structural pathology described above is not confined to speculative AI ethics. It is operational in Gaza. On 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, finding that Israeli authorities and security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. The Commission found that “explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and the pattern of conduct of the Israeli security forces indicate that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group”. Israel rejected the finding, and the separate proceedings before the International Court of Justice in South Africa v. Israel remain distinct from the Commission’s conclusion. These legal distinctions matter, but they do not alter the structural fact: a population has been treated as a collective obstacle to a declared objective, and the language of security has been used to suspend the independent moral standing of the people bearing the costs.
Amnesty International has documented Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, “deliberately impos[ing] conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide”. The organization found that Israel’s “militarized aid distribution system” turned “aid-seeking into a booby trap for desperate starved Palestinians”. As of July 2025, at least 66 children had died as a direct result of malnutrition-related conditions, a figure that excludes the many more who died from preventable diseases exacerbated by malnutrition.
5.2 The AI-Targeting Infrastructure
The connection between Gaza and the political economy of technology is not metaphorical. Israel’s surveillance and AI-targeting infrastructure—systems with names like Lavender, the Gospel, and Where’s Daddy—draw on extensive datasets to generate automated targeting lists. Lavender is “engineered to identify individuals” and assign each Palestinian a score from 1 to 100 representing the probability of being a Hamas militant; the Gospel “identifies buildings and facilities purportedly used by militants”; and Where’s Daddy? “schedules attacks” based on tracking individuals to their residences. These systems compress the interval between data extraction and lethal action, accelerating both the speed and scale of airstrikes.
This is the scarcity engine in its most literal form: a techno-bureaucratic apparatus that converts a population into a set of targets, a security problem to be optimized. The technologies “developed, tested and refined under occupation do not stay there. They become products, expertise and business models that circulate globally.” The surveillance architecture perfected in one place becomes the export product sold to governments everywhere. The bootloader logic is not contained by a border.
5.3 The Immanent Critique
Gaza matters for the stars-seeding question because it demonstrates what happens when the bootloader logic is applied to human beings in real time. The Palestinian is cast as a pre-modern obstacle to a modern future; the destruction of homes and hospitals is framed as the necessary clearing of space for something better. This is the same grammar that appears in technological successionism, where humanity is described as a transitional stage. The reference text from which this analysis departs is careful to insist that these are not equivalent situations—one concerns actual warfare and alleged international crimes, the other speculative futures. But the shared grammar is the point. The question in both cases is whether an overriding purpose can be invoked to suspend the independent moral standing of those who bear its costs.
The deeper lesson is that the logic of sacrifice is not a pathology of any single ideology. It is a structural temptation that arises whenever an institution—a state, a market, a technological project—treats its own continuity or expansion as an absolute good. The same logic that justifies collective punishment in the name of security can justify the displacement of populations in the name of development, the enclosure of the commons in the name of efficiency, and the subordination of human welfare to the demands of “inevitability” in the name of progress.
VI. Seeding the Stars or Seeding the Same?
6.1 The Colonial Critique of the Frontier
The phrase “seeding the stars” can be either a genuine horizon or a sophisticated escape hatch. The difference is whether it is used to dismantle the scarcity engine or to extend it. A substantial critical literature warns that the former is far more likely than the latter. Natalie Trevino has shown that the idea of space as the “final frontier” is “closely linked to the frontier of the West through the colonial matrix of power”; concepts like frontier, wilderness, and “out there” are “signifiers of settler colonialism that allows the possibility of expansion, occupation, and conquest”. To land and settle on another planet “already suggests a kind of cosmic colonialism, an expansion of the Promethean regime from terrestrial fire to star power”.
Martinez Dy and Roberts develop this critique through the concepts of “exoimperialism” and “astropropriation,” arguing that the contemporary commercial space race—NewSpace—is part of an ongoing process of primitive accumulation. They identify a “geek saviourism” that justifies “species-level risk under the auspices of homo entrepreneurs,” and they exhort “extreme caution regarding NewSpace entrepreneurial activities, given the longstanding trajectory of entrepreneurial coloniality they reproduce”. The concern is not merely that space expansion might be unjust; it is that the institutional forms and ideological justifications of space expansion are already patterned on the colonial enclosure of terrestrial commons.
6.2 The Frontier versus the Commons
The choice, then, is not between space expansion and no space expansion. The choice is between a space economy that reproduces the logic of the cowboy economy—extraction, enclosure, displacement—and one that embodies the logic of the spaceman economy: closed-loop, regenerative, and answerable to the people who inhabit it. The former treats space as a frontier, a domain of limitless appropriation. The latter treats it as a commons, a shared realm requiring democratic and ethical stewardship rather than corporate extraction “in legal disguise”.
This distinction has concrete institutional implications. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established outer space as terra nullius, outside the sovereignty of any state, but the commercialization of space has created pressure to transform it from a shared frontier into a private asset. The 2016 US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act authorized private citizens to recover resources from space and asteroids, a significant step toward the enclosure of the cosmic commons. A defensible stars-seeding economy would need to reverse this trajectory: to build anti-monopoly rules, democratic accountability, and anti-imperial principles into space law and policy before the enclosure is consummated.
VII. Conclusion: The Bootloader Refused
The ultimate test of a civilization is not the complexity of its machines or the scale of its economy. It is “whether power can remain answerable to the lives it affects.” A stars-seeding economy worthy of the name must pass that test. It cannot be a project in which humanity is the bootloader—the disposable code that runs just long enough to launch something else. It must be a project in which human beings are the authors and the beneficiaries, not the fuel.
This requires a dual-track transition. The first track is the dismantling of the scarcity engine: anti-rentier economics, the breaking of monopolies in housing, health, finance, platforms, and energy; the cutting of profit models based on addiction, attention extraction, and planned obsolescence; the redirection of subsidies from fossil fuels, war, and carceral expansion toward public goods, science, care, and ecological repair. The second track is the construction of a commons-based space economy: anti-monopoly rules, democratic accountability, and anti-imperial principles built into space law and policy before the enclosure happens; the development of closed-loop, regenerative industrial systems that do not simply export the contradictions of terrestrial capitalism; and the refusal of the language of inevitability that treats the future as a destination whose arrival is assumed in advance.
The scarcity engine will not dismantle itself; it is too profitable. The successionist fantasy will not refute itself; it is too flattering to the powerful. The only thing that can break the logic of sacrifice is a politics that refuses to treat people as means, and an economics that measures success not by how much is consumed or how fast the future arrives, but by whether the present is habitable, dignified, and free.
The stars are not an escape from that question. They are its largest horizon. To seed them without seeding the same old depravity would be the real achievement—not a bootloader’s success condition, but a civilization’s.
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