Overview:
The Navajo Nation says their faith makes it unacceptable for anyone to send human ashes to the Moon. How far should the rest of us have to go to respect religious taboos about death?
The history of space exploration is littered with failures.
NASA makes it look easy, but the harsh conditions of space and extreme demands of rocketry have brought many missions to grief. A case in point: Peregrine, a lunar lander built by the private company Astrobotic in partnership with NASA. It blasted off on January 8, but after separation from the booster rocket, the spacecraft suffered a “critical” fuel leak and had to be abandoned.
Peregrine carried a variety of scientific instruments, as well as art and mementos. It’s one of those that sparked a controversy.
Specifically, the lander carried cremated ashes and DNA from deceased people, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. The private company Celestis, which offers this service, advertises it as “lunar burial”. But some people aren’t happy with the idea:
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said that allowing the remains to touch down there would be an affront to many indigenous cultures, which revere the moon. “The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren said in a Thursday statement. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”
“Navajo Nation’s objection to landing human remains on the moon prompts last-minute White House meeting.” Kristin Fisher, CNN, 6 January 2024.
Please note, Nygren wasn’t merely suggesting that Native Americans would refuse to send their own ashes to the Moon. That would be fair enough. Instead, he was saying that no one should be allowed to do this because the Navajo believe it’s sacrilegious.
What we do and don’t owe Native Americans
What complicates this discussion is that we owe a very real debt to Native Americans. I’m in favor of making amends for the historic injustices committed against them. We need to demolish toxic religious ideas like “manifest destiny” and the “doctrine of discovery”, in the name of which so much evil was committed.
I’m in favor of returning the land that originally belonged to Indigenous nations, until it was taken from them by a government that disregarded preexisting claims and even its own treaties. The Land Back movement is a fitting restitution for this ongoing theft.
However, this is a different order of claim altogether. As we see all too often—although usually from more politically powerful faiths—it’s a demand not for restitution or fairness, but for special privilege based on religion. We shouldn’t allow some people’s faith to dictate what others may do.
Not everyone sees lunar burial as a desecration. The reason to send human ashes into space is because it’s a symbolic act of reverence. We do it to honor those who loved the cosmos, who taught us about it and helped us to appreciate it and respect its majesty. Just as you might bury a sailor at sea, or scatter the ashes of a mountaineer in a place they loved best, we pay tribute to people who dreamed of space by sending them back to it.
If Native Americans see things differently, that’s their right. However, not everyone shares Indigenous beliefs about how human remains should be treated and what counts as respectful disposal versus desecration. It’s not right to let the opinions of one group dictate the actions of others.
Overlapping taboos
For example, when New York state legalized natural organic reduction, a.k.a. human composting, the Roman Catholic church lobbied vigorously against it. They believe that Catholic beliefs about proper disposal of the dead should be binding on everyone. That’s unacceptable in a secular, pluralistic society.
As another example, the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism believes that both fire and earth are sacred elements which would be polluted by corpses, so they oppose burial and cremation. The Zoroastrian solution is to leave bodies out for vultures and other scavengers. Meanwhile, many Orthodox Jews believe that bodies should be buried intact, without harvesting usable organs. Both groups can choose that for themselves if they wish; but I would oppose any attempt to make either of those the law for everyone.
Because there are so many different, overlapping taboos, if we tried to respect the beliefs of every religion, it would be almost impossible to do anything. Every faith in the world would hold a heckler’s veto over everyone else: not just science or exploration, but what books we can read, what art we can look at, how people can dress, what children can learn about, what jobs adults can hold, what kinds of health care people should be allowed to receive. Since dealing with mortality is one of the primary purposes of religion, death is a particularly thorny hedge of prohibitions and rules.
That principle holds true here. On the one hand, this is a low-stakes dispute if anything is. No one needs to be buried on the Moon. It’s a luxury for the famous and the wealthy.
On the other hand, lobbying for privilege over an entire celestial body can’t be described as anything but hubris. With all due respect to the Navajo Nation, the Moon is not their historic homeland. Again, there are real and grave injustices that have been inflicted on Indigenous people, but this isn’t one of them.
If a religious or cultural group said that the Moon was sacred to them and would be profaned by human touch, and therefore we should shut down the entire lunar exploration program, would we have to do it? Obviously, that would be absurd.
No one owns the Moon, and that’s as it should be. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 confirms this understanding. It establishes that outer space can be freely explored and used for peaceful purposes by anyone, and that no nation can claim sovereignty or exclusive dominion over any celestial body.
Landing human ashes on the Moon harms no one. Even if you think it’s silly, tacky or in bad taste, there are no people living there, no native lifeforms to disturb, no ecosystems to damage, no air or water to pollute. It’s as harmless as a footprint, just a little bit of rearranged dust. There are graver problems down here on Earth, and we should all reason together to solve them.