2. The cultural and social conditions of space ethics

2.1 From the forbidden cosmos to extraterrestrials

Access to space has long been forbidden to humans, at least in Western culture, influenced if not dominated by the cosmology inherited from Aristotle and taken over by Christian tradition. Here, the world is divided in two: its sublunary part is occupied at the center by the Earth, a place of imperfection because it is perishable, ephemeral and chaotic; its supralunary part, that of the stars and divine beings, is called the cosmos because it is eternal, immutable, ordered and therefore beautiful. In this representation of the world, humans, as sublunary beings, cannot even...