In Mining the Moon, I connected the Trump administration’s lunar-mining policy [1] to The Expanse and to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis – the promise of new worlds opened by the Ring Gates. Would the writers treat these planets as another American frontier, a crucible for expansion and exploitation? The first three episodes of Season 5 dropped, and the economic impacts are manifest. Businesses are closing on Mars as they abandon the terraforming challenges for the easier colonization of inhabitable planets. Admiral Sauveterre’s [2] farewell lecture at the Martian War College (“Churn,” Episode 2) crystallizes the pivot from civic purpose to imperial ambition:
Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act.
It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyze every possible obstacle and begin nothing.
Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers.
These were the words of Xerxes, Persia’s king of kings, though he probably spoke them in Old Persian.
[laughter]
History has borne out Xerxes’ wisdom.
The tactics of the battlefield have changed with the invention of the stirrup, the machine gun, the airplane, the Epstein drive.
Political and economic worlds changed when the Europeans colonized the New World and when Mars declared its independence and now, again, with the opening of the Ring Gates.
Every new invention or discovery alters the strategic and tactical landscape.
The doctrine of grand strategy is the way in which we face these changes without losing sight of our purpose, how we adapt to the new reality and remain faithful to our overarching goals.
In these lectures and workshops, we have considered the Ring Space as a radical alteration of the tactical, economic, and strategic landscapes, and I hope we have given each of you the insights to carry the dream of Mars from being a planet circling a lonely, single sun to a vision of humanity that can encompass a thousand stars.
Thank you all.
Carrying a dream as the embodiment of a culture. The land is transformed by the vision of the people who inhabit it, initially more than the environment shapes the culture.
The choice of Xerxes is ominous: he ventured great things and the result was defeated by the usually fractured and petty Greek city states. For Xerxes, I suspect the war was more an expeditionary campaign, but for the Greeks it was the defining moment. Squabbling and quarrelsome, the Greeks defied a hegemonic power: the hoplite soldiers and their Western Way of War allowed the numerically inferior Greeks to defeat the Persians. Herodotus recognized the importance of the events and his Histories are near the beginning of the Western Canon.
Herodotus saw in this defiance the birth of a Western habit: free men defending their polis through discipline rather than submission. His Histories stand at the threshold of the Western Canon for that reason.
Sauveterre’s invocation of Xerxes, then, reverses its own lesson. He extols boldness but forgets its cost: an irony that foreshadows the hubris of both Mars and the Belt. In the language of Turner’s frontier, expansion is always followed by exhaustion.
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[1] Trump’s Executive Order 13914 (Apr 6, 2020) affirmed U.S. support for private extraction of off-Earth resources. It is appropriate the Trump would legalize the mining of the moon – as if it were a simple extractive resource. To the ancient Greeks, the moon was associated with Artemis, the virginal huntress. The idea of ravaging the moon is sacrilegious rape to a classicist. Of course, there had been earlier egregious ideas:
In 1959, the U.S. Air Force commissioned “A Study of Lunar Research Flights,” (Project A119), which considered detonating a Hiroshima-sized explosion on the far side of the moon.
[2] The writers appear to be having some etymological fun with the Admiral’s name: Sauve = French “safe” + terre “earth.”
Protective Arts 