Repository | Book | Chapter

Man's conquest and inhabitation of the space encounter a lot of technological aspects, technological solutions will not fail to answer. However, the latter will induce drastic situations which will lead philosophy and the human sciences to throw light on the stakes as regards the individual, society and human race. In such an experimental macro-laboraty that represents the space adventure, the hard and soft sciences have to find a common language allowing to deal together with the future of mankind.The narcissist omnipresence of technology generates an homogeneous subject who maintains to act in the interest of the individual, society and humanity. Enthusiasm is supported by the innermost conviction that it is lead by the idea of the principle of the Good of humankind.However, a Splitting of the thechnological monolithisra is to be observed, Tchernobyl being not the less representative name, in the nuclear field, neither Challenger in the spatial one. It is the reason why NASA, unwilling to limit its self-affirmative pulsions, organizing as a supershow the Shuttle departure although many negligences, among which some were well known, have been reported since, feit through a faulty act.In fact, technology is so abhuman that man is compelled to risk catastropher Just to surviveAs far as spatial conquest is concerned, the shock will be characterized by such a privation that it will constrain man to drastic changes in bis way of being and in his OrganizationIn other words, mankind neglected to think about his evolution: it is only now, at the time technique ought to ensure the future of the mankind and be only a tool for his well-being, that this question is facedHomo technicus and the soon to come "Spatiopithec" [1] are on the verge to lose Earth and Man without gettlng ready to think Earth and Man as lost objects.Psychoanalysis is well familiar with the idea of lost object -whether it be a physically elaborated reality by identification or a psychological one independent of any relationship to any real representation. Psychoanalysis may help us conceiving "Tele-Earth" and "Tele-man". Furthermore, it can also put inlight on the way mankind will develop in an environment characterized by microgravity and the loss of the verticality.Indeed, according to Freud, it is thanks to his verticalization that man owes his ability to elaborate his way of civilization. This evolution is observed together with an "unconscious organic repression" shifting from an erotic olfactory anal stage characteristic of the Homo period to an erotic visual phallic one.This raises the following question: will the exploration and inhabitation of the space lead not the erotic visual phallic stage to die at this determinant period of the "unconscious organic repression"?The consequences would then be more drastic. The erotic visual phallic stage being impregnated of the development of sexuality, its disappearance might be in the end of the sexuality itself and, then, by the dying out of the human species itself.Psychoanalysis concentrates on the following question: let us imagine that 'spatiopitecs' can survive and reproduce in space: will their lives not be devoid of authenticity? Are the necessary steps taken in order to prevent them to become "uninhabited inhabitants' of space?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2993-7_11

Full citation: