Rights without Earth: Dynamics of the Nature/Law Chiasm in Outer Space

This essay orbits around an anthropological-cognitive question: who (and what) is the human being to whom human rights should be recognized and with reference to whom these rights are to be tailored in outer space or on other celestial bodies? It is commonly accepted that human rights are universal and therefore must also be applied in outer space or off-Earth environments. The question, however, is whether it is plausible to ontologically postulate the human being independently of its relationship with its environment. The answer provided here is negative. The terrestrial ‘human’ cannot be assumed to be identical to the ‘extraterrestrial human’. This conclusion is articulated from a relational and enactive approach to understanding what the body-mind unity is in the human species. Being—in this case, human being—cannot be considered as distinct from the relational-experiential dimension from which it gushes out in evolutionary terms. And since the evolution of human ‘nature’ is inseparable from the cultural activity of the species Homo sapiens, mediated by the use of language, extraterrestrial humans must be considered a cultural product. If by ‘natural’ we mean something eternal, immutable, ontologically predetermined once and for all, then the ‘human nature’ on which human rights and their application in outer space are based cannot necessarily be ‘unnatural.’ Conversely, from an enactive perspective, off-Earth naturalness is inescapably the consequence of what the mind-body unity does and will do. This draws a line of continuity and circularity between being and ought-to-be, between is and ought, which in outer space comes to the foreground with particular clarity. On the other hand, the exceptional environmental conditions in outer space should be considered as a laboratory for understanding the human condition on Earth. The extreme instability and precariousness of life in outer space demonstrate the adaptive import of human beings’ ability to communicatively universalize (to be intended as the ongoing process of universalis-ing) their experience through language and the interpenetrative relationship extant between cognition, end-oriented experiential disposition, interactional meaning-making and human rights self-reflexive practice. The answer to the initial question could therefore be: the nature of the human beings to whom human rights must be applied in outer space lies in the future that the above question calls on them to simultaneously mold and discover… including through a determination of the meaning of human rights and their application in outer space. This article aims to investigate this reflexive anthropological circle and its unfolding between Earth and the spaces beyond the sky.