Which people matter the most?

Climate change in For All Mankind, Moon and The Martian

[SPOILER WARNING. Plot spoilers for all three seasons of For All Mankind, Moon, The Martian, and capitalism] 

At the end of 2019, I ran a retreat for climate writers deep in the Kent countryside. It was an idyllic, transformational weekend, during which actual magic happened. But one moment above all others stuck out for me. During a session discussing visions of the future one attendee said if we could keep everything as it is but get rid of climate change then everyone would be happy. 

She looked around earnestly trying to get everyone’s buy in. “That’s what we all really want, isn’t it? For everything to stay the same but climate change to go away”. 

I think about this moment periodically because no. No, that’s not what we all want. And assuming that it is speaks so much about, well, everything.

I was reminded of it again watching For All Mankind, Apple TV+’s alternative history space race series, season 4 of which launches in November. 

For All Mankind puts the Russians on the moon before Neil et al, and imagines the unravelling of history from there. So much is pure wish fulfilment territory: Roman Polanksi is arrested at the Canadian border while trying to escape. Leonid Brezhnev decides not to invade Afghanistan to focus resources on the space race instead. The Three Mile Island accident never happens due to technology developed for the new lunar base. John Lennon survives his assassination attempt but Pope John Paul II does not. The IRA finally get Margaret Thatcher (lol). 

Most importantly, nuclear fusion has a whole bunch of money thrown at it, becomes a thing that isn’t always 50 years away from being viable, and a great big deposit of Helium-3 is found on the moon, which in turn leads to super wholesome climate science pinup James Hansen testifying to the US Senate that global warming has slowed. Peachy keen, right? Weelllll…. Sort of?

Let’s rewind somewhat. In his famous essay The Climate of History: Four Theses, Dipesh Chakrabarty¹ says the anthropocene forces us to radically rethink what humans are capable of. 

“The wall between human and natural history has been breached. We may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one at the level of the species. And without that knowledge that defies historical understanding there is no making sense of the current crisis that affects us all.”

If our sense of our own agency needs a shakedown, so it follows that the scope of our imagination also needs some work; what we do and what we imagine are inescapably intertwined and if we can’t imagine the thing we’ve just done, well, we gotta buck up some. 

Hold that thought and let’s move on to two other big ol’ space films which are actually less about space and more about humans humaning humanly.

Duncan Jones’ 2009 bleak-ass-yet-beautiful film Moon describes a world in which human clones act as stand-ins for human sacrifice. Specifically, we see one human, Sam Bell, cloned endlessly and working the Helium-3 mines on the moon, naively under the impression that he’ll go home to his wife soon, that is until he discovers the truth of his existence. Back on Earth, the climate crisis, energy crisis, and food crisis are all solved. Fusion. Helium-3. Bosh! Done. 

Sam Bell is the tortured child from Ursula K Le Guin’s seminal story-slash-thought-experiment The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, which asks the reader: would you commit one innocent child to a life of misery in exchange for utopia for the rest of us? Of course, in reality this is a choice we all gladly make every day in exchange for 24 hour shipping. Click buy now and some povo warehouse worker has to piss in a bottle. Do we care? Turns out not so much. Sorry can we pause a minute? The delivery guy is at the door. 

In similarly themed person-stuck-on-planet viewing, there’s 2015’s The Martian. Matt Damon gets accidentally stranded on Mars and, famously, has to grow potatoes in his own shit. His crew mates invoke the best of all sci-fi tropes and slingshot around the Earth, making it back to Mars to rescue him before the science runs out. As an aside, competent people doing their job competently is absolutely my favourite space-based subgenre and I want more of it, thanks.

Here we have two films that can be considered diametric opposites of each other. In poop-tato world, people matter. In clone-land, they do not. 

In fact, in The Martian one person matters so much that an entire world’s worth of resources is thrown at the problem of bringing Matt Damon home from 140 million miles away. Sure, there’s a token ethical dilemma about whether it’s worth doing or not, but ultimately this is a hopeful story in which humans are fundamentally good and undertake good actions despite the cost. 

Conversely, Moon is a warning, a space fable if you like, asking us to consider what would happen if we fixed climate change with technology only, as opposed to, say, fixing it with a long deep look at what the fuck is wrong with us as a species. The conclusion it comes to is that the profit motive always takes over and we all happily go along with it, casually complicit in some light torturing. 

In Paweł Frelik’s essay Climate Fiction as Science Fiction² he talks about the distinction between using science fiction as “a prediction as opposed to a tool for thinking.” That is, stories are modalities in which we can explore ideas, rather than guidebooks to which the future should adhere, and we should worry less about ideas of genre or compartmentalising and more about the actual ideas in our stories. Similarly, in Staying with the Trouble, Queen of WTF Donna Haraway presses the importance of how we think: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.” 

It matters in Moon that capitalism is still the driving idea behind society because it allows us to blithely torture one man into infinity. We can assume capitalism in The Martian even though it isn’t discussed, but it isn’t important because the idea we’re being asked to think with is the idea that people are important, that one person - any person - matters regardless of anything else.

Between these two films sits For All Mankind. Where Moon and The Martian offer a binary view of people versus capitalism, FAM is a show about things. About sexism, about racism, about homophobia, about money and power and capitalism and behaviour and the inherent confusion of existence - all facets of the fundamental sickness that allows climate change to even exist in the first place. It’s a complex show grappling with complex problems, which makes  the casual handwaving of climate change seem disappointing at first. What the writers are offering us, as a tool for thinking, seems like little more than a shrug. 

When Chakrabarty says we need to expand the scope of our agency, when Frelik says stories are tools for thinking, when Haraway says the ideas we use matters, they are really talking about understanding the interconnected nature of things. 

To simply wish to do away with climate change but keep the world as it is really means we want to keep the abuse but do away with the bruises. I can keep on punching you as long as I like and you’re never going to lose a tooth - how cool is that? 

It’s a depressing vision of the future and an even more depressing indictment of us as a species that we’re often so terrified of change, so deeply entrenched in capitalist realism, that the ideas we are using to think other ideas with are often so limited. The truth is we can’t simply deus ex machina our way out of climate change, in stories or otherwise, and at this point we have to do everything in our power to find even the tiniest chink of light to help us break free. 

But like I said above, FAM is a show about things. Its creator Ronald D Moore is perhaps most famous for his work on Star Trek (I will fight to the death about how clever this show often actually is) and the Battlestar Galactica reboot (same same same same). Because of this, the series is often yet unofficially considered a Star Trek prequel, which makes the FAM world one on its shakey way to a sort of utopia. We know where we’re going, and that’s a future in which money, scarcity and poverty do not exist. So FAM can’t actually be simply handwaving climate change. Instead, it seems to be saying that fixing this particular problem is one wobbly step on a path of many wobbly stepping stones. There are many more problems to come and guess what? A lot of them revolve around capitalism. 

Season 1 goes in hard with the simple failures of capitalism as the Apollo 23 mission explodes on the dock, caused by Nasa outsourcing parts to the cheapest available manufacturer. Flight controller Margot Madison uses this to her advantage and blackmails her way to her first major promotion. Season 2 begins with her, now director of Nasa, unironically quipping “capitalism! It works!” in response to a conversation with an army general about getting basic equipment approved by the Pentagon, versus Nasa’s increasingly privatised income. 

But if season 2 is about the political tension of a Government-funded space programme, season 3 is a deep critique of neoliberalism. Nasa, despite being a public property, has become largely privately funded through the selling of technological innovation and director Margot Madison pushes for privately owned competitor Helios to be nationalised, ostensibly in the public interest but really because she doesn’t like the competition and almost has the power to get rid of them. 

Season 3 is set against a backdrop of angry mobs protesting the loss of their jobs in the oil and gas industry. The petrochemical industry going into a tailspin is a cheering thought, but on a human level those people should absolutely be furious - you simply cannot be left jobless in a capitalist world. And while the politicians play political football with the Jobs Bill, actual (fictional) people are starving and becoming homeless. 

Here we see that getting to the root of climate change is an onion-peeling task, always another layer to contend with on the way to the centre, and one that makes your eyes sting at that. When we peel back the threat of climate change, another problem comes into focus, then another, then another, until the real problem comes to the fore - that, fundamentally, the world we have is one in which people don’t matter.

If Moon and The Martian are binary opposites of possible futures, then For All Mankind is the slow construction of a future on a spectrum, knocking back one reckoning after another, wobbling around in constant trial and error, demanding that we keep plumbing the depths of what our reality actually is, about where we actually are, in order to tell new stories and create new ideas, to radically expand the scope of the storytelling imagination and to find the real ideas that we need to start thinking with. Except for the Danny and Karen bullshit. That storyline can die.

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1. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Dipesh Chakrabarty

2. On Not Calling a Spade a Spade: Climate Fiction as Science Fiction, Paweł Frelik