ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Gaia Goes to Mars: Ecology, Sociology, and Utopia in Michael Young’s Argo Venture, 1984-89

• In Event: Space, Science, and Imagined Futures

English Abstract

From 1984 to 1989, the influential British left-wing sociologist, Michael Young – author of the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto – led a project, the Argo Venture, to terraform and colonise Mars. Young was inspired by The Greening of Mars, by James Lovelock, the co-creator of Gaia theory, and Michael Allaby, the science journalist, which purported to show how Gaia theory could be applied to terraform Mars. Young was also reacting to the USA’s Strategic Defense Initiative, believing that European pacifists must colonise space ahead of American militarists. Young organised a group, including the astronomer Martin Rees, the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and TV producer John Percival to spearhead the Venture.

The Argo Venture took shape as two simulations: a computer simulation by the climate modeller Ann Henderson-Sellers, applying Gaia theory to the Martian climate; and a social simulation, led by Young, to study the experience of colonists by simulating a year-long mission on the Martian surface. The Venture, however, struggled to find funding, and so Young turned to securing funding through a reality TV show and a new national space museum, sited in London’s redeveloped Docklands area. The simulation would be housed inside the space museum and aired on TV. Neither of these funding sources materialised and the Argo Venture ground to a halt by 1989.

The project’s administrator, Tony Flowers, also ran Young’s Institute for Community Studies, a non-profit research institute that worked with working-class communities to effect political and social change. As Flowers struggled to keep the Argo Venture alive, he wrote how embarrassing it was to explain to his collaborators Young’s plans to abandon socialism on earth for utopia on Mars. In the end, therefore, the history of the Argo Venture is a history of how ecological and sociological theory inspired a socialist project that became rapidly untethered from the material concerns of socialism.

Author

• Jacob Ward, Maastricht University