I do not believe this is, or should be, about the Navajo Nation at all; it is much simpler than that. Should anyone be “allowed” to dump random crap on the Moon, Antarctica, Kailash, your neighborhood?
On the moon, surely it doesn’t really matter so much: not as if there’s an ecology to disturb?
My neighborhood, or indeed any inhabited part of the Earth, sure, no random crap thanks…
You’ve made two responses to me in the last few yours that do this - ascribe an opinion to me that is not the point I was making, and give a kneejerk rebuttal. I suggest you read more carefully. The point I was making here was to point out the hypocrisy of a dismissal of religious belief while engaging in other equally superstitious activity. There is no implication in making that rhetorical point that I think burial practices should always be dismissed as totally unimportant.
Here’s the other instance of you doing this. I was clearly speaking to the merits of a legal argument, not remotely suggesting that excessive force was used against Babbitt.
Look at it starting down at us. You think you’re better than us?
Yes. To this point, religion aside, why does one group’s desire to leave things on the moon trump another group’s desire to keep it clear? Because one group has the power to carry out its desires and the other doesn’t Are we still at “might makes right”?
I mean, I know the answer to that, but we know where untrammelled resource exploitation leads, so maybe we could try being better, or at least having a plan.
Of course, and that’s precisely why there’s an understandable reaction to want to show respect to Navajo values, since we have a history of disrespecting them in such an appalling way. My point is that this can lead to a kneejerk reaction and tendency to treat the Navajo nation as a monolithic block entity when any Navajo representative claims that something is a critically important Navajo belief. The reality is that Navajo people encompass just as a broad a range of belief as any other people - and in particular, in my experience they are on average no more superstitious than anyone else. After all we’ve done to fuck them over, is putting a few tiny capsules of bone on the moon really a priority anyone should be focused on? (Of course, I’m not suggesting that it would be politically expedient for Biden to make this point to Buu Nygren in quite so many words!)
Of course. The universe is a dead, useless waste without something to observe and interact with it. Life, and intelligent life in particular, is the only thing that gives the universe value. We’re the only ones in the neighborhood, so it’s up to us.
If I were to say that I consider the Earth to be sacred, and that I did not wish it to be desecrated by human remains, would that belief obligate everyone else to henceforth launch all human remains into space?
Surely, the Earth as a whole has the same status as the Moon as a whole. No single human nor human nation can lay entire claim to it, and no single human nor human nation can put obligations concerning it on any other.
Yes, i was wondering about that …
Here is a page showing stuff that’s up there … there’s tons of it !!!
Well, no; that’d be absurd.
You know, given my stated wishes about space.
1969, USA: The moon mission is a go. But what to do up there?
Astronaut: I for one am going to take a shit up there. Then I’m going to draw a smiley face in the dirt. With an arrow pointing to the steaming pile. Then I’m going do write Ha Ha FU.
Be careful.
[ruins joke] Who knew a fart could be heard in a vacuum? [/rj]
Well said. It leads to the path that I hope this rejection of the imposition of religious beliefs will be the future on Earth.
For centuries, certain religious groups have imposed their beliefs upon non-believers, which in this context include members of other religious groups. That should not be extended to space; it must, in fact, end here on Earth.
The statement from Celestis should be modified to substitute earth for space. Then disseminate that pledge and urge nations and organizations to adopt it as their own standard.
Everyone agrees the Navajo don’t own the moon and their beliefs shouldn’t bind anyone else’s.
Let’s flip it around. Who does own the moon? If the answer is that nobody owns the moon, then what right does anyone have to put objects there? I don’t know how we can even answer that question.
It seems justifiable to leave things that are instrumental to the pursuit of knowledge (measuring equipment, unusable spacecraft parts). Less so regarding items that can be construed as “marking one’s territory” so to speak, like a flag or parts of dead humans. It should be noted that AFAIK the Navajo haven’t complained about anything up until we started talking about storing human remains, so this is not exactly a knee-jerk reaction.
I can certainly understand the frustration of Native Americans. I would feel like, isn’t it enough that white people have taken everything in Earth from us, can’t we even look up in the sky and see something Americans haven’t pissed on and taken for themselves? While I don’t think that should be the controlling opinion here, I do think it should be considered with some respect.
Exactly. Every time I hear about someone wanting to graze their cattle for free on BLM land because “it’s public land” I ask “If it is public, why don’t I have the right to say keep your damn cows off of it.”
Maybe we should bury our nuclear waste in Bir Tawil. It’s the same principle.
Thank you for that high-effort answer. Which part of your linked article speaks to a country’s right to leave junk or bury people on the Moon? Are you implying that America now owns the Moon?
Flipping it around implies a false symmetry between the two things.
Restricting someone’s ability to do a thing should only be undertaken when there is a clear, demonstrable harm from that thing. Otherwise, it’s no one’s business but theirs. Since the only claimed harm involves superstitious nonsense, there should be no restriction here.
One day, far in the future, there will be enough people on the moon that we’ll have to revisit these things, and come up with property rights and other things so that people don’t trash it in a way that has an actual impact on people. But we are very far from that.
Not in this particular case, but there are other situations in a similar vein. Some Native Hawaiians are protesting a telescope on Mauna Kea. That it was purely scientific in nature was irrelevant to them, and they considered the whole mountain sacred.
Wow, tolerant much? I think, rather, that the harm here is purely notional, and thus mental / emotional rather than physical, but it’s still harm. There’s a degree to which people’s mental / emotional reactions to such things are their own issue and their own problem, but I don’t think it’s kind to characterize people’s cultural notions as “superstitious nonsense,” even if I (as a non-Navajo) am not taking the notion of spiritual harm seriously, and even if raise an eyebrow really high at the idea that all tribal peoples have similar notions about the moon.