Making history cosmic, making cosmic history: Waking up to the richness of life’s potentials beyond Earth, or, how consequence and contingency became astronomical in scope

Abstract

Abstract This is a history of the idea that space and survival are conjoined. Specifically, it traces the emergence of the suggestion that pursuing long-term survival beyond Earth might be good, not just for humanity but for the cosmos at large. Suggesting this was dependent upon science’s steady expansion of ‘the horizon of history’ or that spatiotemporal arena wherein genuinely directional history is acknowledged as operating—such that there can be true firsts, irreversible lasts, permanent impacts, and irrecoverably lost opportunities. Ultimately, making history cosmic in scope enabled speculations that life could ‘make cosmic history’ by spreading itself to the stars, persistently making the cosmos a richer, more exuberant place. This would be a historic, consequential change for a universe in which this hasn’t already happened and might not reliably happen otherwise, given that true history doesn’t accommodate an infinity of opportunities.