basis of what we know now, Martian soil is likely to prove an excellent medium for crop
growth, considerably better than most land on Earth, in fact.”<fnref n="56" /> Is this accurate? Must
we acknowledge this is what we too would say? As an expression of terrestrial faith in
the vitalist world building power of the word soil it is totally on pitch. But are these sta-
tements right about Mars or only about the planet in our language, only expressions
giving witness to what we learned when we learned the world “soil”?

One response is to say that we don't know, and won't, until we go. Another is
to say that we have reasons for doubt. No, more strongly: science may well claim that
the logic of terrestrial soil is inverted with respect to the surface matter on Mars.
Most Martian surface regolith is, as Simon Morden has pointed out, “contaminated
with chlorine-rich compounds called perchlorates at a level that is lethal to
humans.”<fnref n="57" /> If this is right, then Martian regolith would need to be artificially de-soi-
led before even having a hope of becoming soil, which would make it have exactly the
opposite essence compared to terrestrial soil, which soils naturally, and brings life
forth from soil. This alternate logic, call it (Martian “soil” = –(“soil”)) might actually
better reflect what we know about the historical telos or, to employ astrophysicist
Adam Frank's term, “the fate” of Mars.<fnref n="58" /> It would explain its trajectory from the Noa-
chian to the Hesperian to the Amazonian, from a planet that had surface water and
possibly life to one that by and large seems to no longer host it or be capable of hos-
ting it. That is not to be taken as a scientific claim about Mars, but one bearing only
on language, it is an application of the aversive, dialectical reasoning rooted in skepti-
cism as a guide to thinking about the ethics of what we might say.

Talk of Martian soil seems to consistently breed monsters. It promotes blind
astrofuturist optimism, an epistemic stance might be better replaced by one of humi-
lity or even the cultivated estrangement that emerges when passing one's time reflec-
ting on the screening of reality. Let us look now at Andy Weir's book (and the film)
*The Martian*. Both have been celebrated, for example by the literary critic Michael
Gormley, for a “well-researched approach to Mars missions” and the “realistic, hy-

<footnote n="56">56. T. S. Eliot, *Collected Poems, 1909-1962* (Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1976), 53. Zubrin, *The Case for Mars*, 212.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57. Simon Morden, *The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars* (London: Eliot and Thompson, 2021), 204. The same point is made in Sylvia Ekström and Javier G. Nombela, *Nous ne vivrons pas sur Mars, ni ailleus* (Lausanne: Editions Favre, 2020), 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58. Adam Frank, *Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth* (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).</footnote>
pothetical status” of the narrative.<fnref n="59" /> For Earthlings enthusiastic about the virtues of Martian soil, *The Martian* is thus a work of realism, a valid projection and screening of a possible state of being present on Mars. Yet this belief rests on the shaky logic of Martian soil. Consider the ex-alienating work done by soil in this key passage, an explanation of how Watney, Weir’s hero, “colonizes” Mars by soiling its soil, thus making life bloom on that stony ground:

> Once I get some Martian soil in here, I can mix in the shit and spread it out. Then I can sprinkle the Earth soil on top. You might not think that would be an important step, but it is. There are dozens of species of bacteria living in Earth soil, and they're critical to plant growth. They'll spread out and breed like ... well, like a bacterial infection. People have been using human waste as fertilizer for centuries. It's even got a pleasant name: “night soil.” Normally, it's not an ideal way to grow crops, because it spreads disease: Human waste has pathogens in it that, you guessed it, infect humans. But it's not a problem for me. The only pathogens in this waste are the ones I already have. Within a week, the Martian soil will be ready for plants to germinate in. But I won't plant yet. I'll bring in more lifeless soil from outside and spread some of the live soil over it. It'll “infect” the new soil and I'll have double what I started with. After another week, I'll double it again. And so on. Of course, all the while, I'll be adding all new manure to the effort.<fnref n="60" />

Weir gets Whitman's (or America's) usage of “soil” right. Which presumably means that these words feel right to us, even if the Martian regolith as seen by science can't support the narrative's weight. Which implies that Weir's realism derives from our planet and is indebted to our own narrow experience. Rather than reading this passage as suggesting that re-rooting our future on Mars is a realistic proposition, we ought to read it as precisely demonstrating the deep terrestriality of our language and so also the Earth's profound claims upon what we are inclined to imagine as reasonable or realistic.

<footnote n="59">59. Michael Gormley, *The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene* (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60. Andy Weir, *The Martian* (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 14.</footnote>
In *The Claim of Reason*, Cavell remarked that “psychophobia” can mean “both ‘fear of one’s inner life’ and ‘fear of ghosts,’” explaining that “it can motivate intellectuality as well as anti-intellectuality.” He goes on to clarify that “philosophy can be the fruit, or work in the root, of either.”<fnref n="61" /> Shifting the language here a bit, we can say that philosophy can be motivated not only by ghosts but also aliens, and that philosophy explores the fear of encountering the planetarity of the self when confronting the alien. Accepting that there is soil on Mars conceals the alien, and in so doing denies skepticism and philosophy. The inclination towards skepticism is not to be understood as claiming Mars is unapproachable by the intellect, but rather as acknowledging that “the limitation of certainty” can also be seen as a kind of “knowledge.”<fnref n="62" /> Self-limitation matters here, because Mars on screen seems so available, so banal and present, that we may need to make poetical or philosophical efforts to remind ourselves that it is alien. Clark Ashton Smith, in a stellar example of weird place writing, described a pastoral scene in which a bizarre and literally metaphysical doubling of the ordinary objects in their presence becomes manifest, summoning up before his narrator’s eyes a landscape that is a “wraith-like projection of itself, the actual landscape leered with the same infernal and vampirish air which it had worn by day. But it seemed now that the place was no longer still—that it seethed with a malignant secret life.”<fnref n="63" /> Such writing opens the alien in the familiar, just as becoming aware of the screen, and our words as screen, helps us to see Mars with a haunting kind of doubleness. But then again what is needed for worrying Mars is *not* what is being done here. Ashton Smith’s alienation bears on what is indeed familiar, while we are not trying to render Mars alien as to keep it at its proper distance, given that the seeming reality of Mars is, for all intents and purposes, far less apparently horrifying than could have been imagined. Thus, wordings of that world need not embrace the language of dark fantasy, but they should in strategic cases heighten our sense of alienation. How to bring this about, and what this might provoke, are in Cavell’s words “philosophical investigations of the fact that we are earthlings.”<fnref n="64" />

<footnote n="61">61. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62. Ibid., 86.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63. Clark Ashton Smith, *The Dark Eidolon and other fantasies*, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 165.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 32.</footnote>
## 9) *Les Fleurs de Mars*

"A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying together form an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism."<fnref n="65" /> One could say that everything in the preceding runs contrary to the first part of Cavell's claim, at least to the extent that seeing screened stones on Mars may not necessarily justify the rightness of our inclinations to say what we would ordinarily say they are. Thus, and for this reason, Martian stones can become emblems of the truth of skepticism, of the fragile but also rich relationship between human reasoning in ordinary language and our limited but not lacking capacity to make and acknowledge judgments about alien worlds.

Let us embellish our stony emblem. The unnamed thing we glimpsed at the beginning of this essay is called a “Martian flower” by scientists. That figure is felicitous, a fine antidote to Martian “soil.” As the planetary scientist William Hartman once wrote, the first images of Mars nearly convinced researchers that a world that once was believed to be “teeming with life from pole to pole” was possibly a “geologically dead planet,” while subsequent images revealed that this was not a place in which “nothing ever happens” but rather one teeming with lithic history.<fnref n="66" /> Against this background of the happening of history without evidence of biological life the very idea that Mars brings forth flowers of stone has a kind of poetic justice. Consider that the flower has long been a figure for rhetorical flourishes in our terrestrial tongues, for example in L'Infortune's *Le Jardin de Plaisance et fleur de rhétorique* (Paris, 1500), or in this line from Voiture, an explanation of precisely how to use verbal flowers in the art of seduction: “j'employerais pour l'une d'elles, toutes les fleurs et toutes les graces de la rhétorique; et luy escrirais dès cette heure une lettre d'amour, si galante, qu'elle serait disposée, de m'escouter à mon retour.”<fnref n="67" /> The fact that the Martian flower is at once a figure and *le mot juste* brings emblematic satisfaction: it paradigmatically reflects a proper way of speaking of the alien, figuring our desire relative to the alien as fostering potentially self-deceptive language, and even offering

<footnote n="65">65. Ibid., 496.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66. William K. Hartmann, *A Traveler's Guide to Mars* (New York: Workman 2003), 1 and 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">67. Vincent Voiture, *Lettres* (1648), quoted in Danielle Bouverot, “La rhétorique à travers les siècles chez les écrivains de FRANTEXT,” *Verbum* XVI (1993): 9.</footnote>
indices with respect to how we might want to orient our judgment towards Martian objects as Earthlings: with a gaze that is aesthetic, disinterested, curious. With respect to this point, let us note that Kant, writing of terrestrial flowers in his *Critique of the Power of Judgment*, claimed that to the cultivated judge they are “are free natural beauties” appreciated for themselves and not for what they might contribute to knowledge or utility:

> Hardly anyone other than the botanist knows what sort of thing a flower is supposed to be; and even the botanist, who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste. Thus, this judgment is not grounded on any kind of perfection, any internal purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold is related.<fnref n="68" />

The term Martian flower, then, seen as a verbal projection of what we as terrestrials ordinarily call flowers onto the alien surface, can be said to orient us away from a teleological relationship to the objects on the planet in which all is valued for its availability to settlement or economic exploitation towards an attunement that is contemplative and appreciative, saying more and less than it appears to say. Martian flowers are a wonder and a beauty, and not just because we are able to see them on Mars viewed, but also for what they reveal to us about ourselves as Earthlings and the plurality of our language, starting with the debt, the soil, we owe to the planet for how and what we imagine to be the meaning of life.

## 10) *Astroculture for Growingups*

There is a much-quoted phrase from the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”<fnref n="69" /> To

<footnote n="68">68. Immanuel Kant, *Critique of the Power of Judgment*, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">69. Quoted in Dave Williams and Elizabeth Howell, *Why am I Taller?: What Happens to an Astronaut's Body in Space* (Toronto: ECW, 2002).</footnote>
space colonization enthusiasts the above may seem to run contrary to this prediction. But that is to misread me. I am making no predictions about any possible future on Mars, nor am I claiming that Mars is ghoul haunted and ought ever to be described as such. My claim is that part of growing up into an age in which we can understand ourselves in terms of what lies beyond the planet is discovering how to deal with the new worlds on our screens, and part of this involves also thinking about the degree to which we ourselves, and our languages and the lines of argument that they elicit, are not universal but planetary.

This essay is only fragment from what would be a critique of planetary reason. But I doubt that one could do more than make local headway on a broader critique at present. The “of” here joining “critique” and “planetary” needs to be understood as articulating what Hans Blumenberg called the “subtle paradox” of the subjective and the objective genitive, the fact that at present, any critique that we might make of the planetarity of our reason as it is expressed in ordinary language is carried out within and by that same and ambiguously limited planetary reason and language.<fnref n="70" /> For Earthlings on Earth there is no escaping the occasional planetary provincialism of our ordinary language, there is at best a carefully reflected acknowledgement of this fact and a careful practice of probing the limits of our projective capacities. Planetizing our reason, becoming aware of the degree to which our own senses of what makes sense keep us from appreciating alien worlds and even our own planet, amounts to finding ways of cultivating our distance from alien worlds even as we come closer and closer to being present on at least some of them.

Writing when he did, not in the age of Space 2.0 but in the post-Apollo mo-
ment, Cavell lacked a sense of the urgency of self-alienation. “The fact that we are in a
given place on Earth is as utterly contingent as the fact that we are on Earth. The fact
that we are in one place at any given time is as necessary as the fact that, once on
Earth, we are until the end earthling.”<fnref n="71" /> But the question arises as to whether in an
age when Mars is screened, we can feel content to think we understand the meaning
of being an Earthling without a deep engagement with what is not of the Earth. More
to the point, it is increasingly clear that achieving an understanding of what it means

<footnote n="70">70. Hans Blumenberg, *Phänomenologische Schriften 1981-1988*, ed. Nicola Zambon (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">71. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 180.</footnote>
to be on the Earth, and to be an Earthling, matters politically and ethically. Insofar as we live in the Anthropocene, in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as our planetary age, our understanding of our own planet and its plight is deeply entangled with our understanding of other planets and other planetary systems, with grasping the differences and similarities between the planetary telos that fostered our soil that which yielded Martian regolith. In light of the weight of this planetary comparative on our understanding of ourselves as historical subjects, we now see the future of life on this planet as menaced, and so some are dreaming, and acting on the dream, of becoming multi-planetary. By 2030 astronauts will have returned to the moon, this time with plans to build a permanent base. Space entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk claim we will be landing on Mars by 2050. Expressing their appreciation for the value of these projects, William MacAskill and other Long-Termist philosophers argue we are morally obligated to invest in colonizing Mars and the solar system.<fnref n="72" /> This is serious talk, it bears on how we inhabit the Earth and how we act relative to other earthlings. But as talk, as moral philosophy expressed in ordinary language, it ought to be evaluated via a critical account of the planetarity of that same ordinary language.

Whether we will be earthlings to the end remains an enigma, but we can now, by exploring the projections of ordinary language into alien contexts, identify bewitchments cast on our thinking by the terrestrial bias of language as it encounters alien worlds. Carrying out this critique, discovering the ways in which our expansion beyond the limits of the Earth can throw us back on our criteria and so demand that we grow and cultivate ourselves and our language in its planetary and extra-planetary dimensions, coming to know where it is universal, where it as terrestrial, and also where it requires reformulation into a sometimes alienating tongue, can help to orient us towards not only possible futures but towards a keener awareness of our limits and dependencies, our debts and oversights, our reality as simultaneously self-reliant and other-enwhirled. This extraordinary ordinary task seems to fit perfectly within philosophy, or as Cavell called it: “the education of grownups.”<fnref n="73" /> Or perhaps better, the education of growing ups, for if we have, at least with respect to the horizon across which we can felicitously or infelicitously project our ordinary words, left our

<footnote n="72">72. William MacAskill, *What We Owe the Future* (New York: Hachette, 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">73. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 125.</footnote>
cradle behind, we have not achieved maturity, but only found ourselves within a new
circle, a new and enigmatic occasion for posing a question asked by Emerson and ta-
ken up by Nietzsche and Cavell: “Where do we find ourselves?”<sup>74</sup>

<footnote n="74">74. Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, 342.</footnote>