Policy: Space Travel and Defense
Contention 1 — Anthropocentrism
Sovereignty belongs to the human and only the human—Nature and God are dead, giving the human the sole power to define and decide life. The unknowable and invisible extraterrestrial is the only remaining challenge to human sovereignty, existing at the limit of this metaphysic.
Wendt and Duvall 2008 (Alexander Wendt, Professor of International Relations at the Ohio State University. Raymond Duvall, Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Minnesota. August 2008. Political Theory. “Sovereignty and the UFO.” http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/36/4/607.full.pdf+html JT) Few ideas today are as contested as sovereignty, in theory or in practice. In sovereignty theory scholars disagree about almost everything—what sovereignty is and where it resides, how it relates to law, whether it is divisible, how its subjects and objects are constituted, and whether it is being transformed in late modernity. These debates are mirrored in contemporary practice, where struggles for self-determination and territorial revisionism have generated among the bitterest conflicts in modern times. Throughout this contestation, however, one thing is taken for granted: sovereignty is the province of humans alone. Animals and Nature are assumed to lack the cognitive capacity and/or subjectivity to be sovereign; and while God might have ultimate sovereignty, even most religious fundamentalists grant that it is not exercised directly in the temporal world. When sovereignty is contested today, therefore, it is always and only among humans, horizontally so to speak, rather than vertically with Nature or God. In this way modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, or constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.1 Humans live within physical constraints, but are solely responsible for deciding their norms and practices under those constraints. Despite the wide variety of institutional forms taken by sovereignty today, they are homologous in
Sovereignty belongs to the human and only the human—Nature and God are dead, giving the human the sole power to define and decide life. The unknowable and invisible extraterrestrial is the only remaining challenge to human sovereignty, existing at the limit of this metaphysic.
Wendt and Duvall 2008 (Alexander Wendt, Professor of International Relations at the Ohio State University. Raymond Duvall, Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Minnesota. August 2008. Political Theory. “Sovereignty and the UFO.” http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/36/4/607.full.pdf+html JT) Few ideas today are as contested as sovereignty, in theory or in practice. In sovereignty theory scholars disagree about almost everything—what sovereignty is and where it resides, how it relates to law, whether it is divisible, how its subjects and objects are constituted, and whether it is being transformed in late modernity. These debates are mirrored in contemporary practice, where struggles for self-determination and territorial revisionism have generated among the bitterest conflicts in modern times. Throughout this contestation, however, one thing is taken for granted: sovereignty is the province of humans alone. Animals and Nature are assumed to lack the cognitive capacity and/or subjectivity to be sovereign; and while God might have ultimate sovereignty, even most religious fundamentalists grant that it is not exercised directly in the temporal world. When sovereignty is contested today, therefore, it is always and only among humans, horizontally so to speak, rather than vertically with Nature or God. In this way modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, or constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.1 Humans live within physical constraints, but are solely responsible for deciding their norms and practices under those constraints. Despite the wide variety of institutional forms taken by sovereignty today, they are homologous in