Humanities in Space: Double Bind or Double Opportunity?

The new age of space conquest brings to the forefront questions that the humanities have asked since the first ages of space conquest. For law and philosophy, space now appears in particular as a place to think about in terms of human exploration and settlement, and occupation that is not degrading, unjust or contaminating. For poetry, literature and theater, space is now also a place to be reinvented, no longer as an imaginary and hypothetical frontier but as a place of everyday life. Here, the addition of these questions appears as a double opportunity for the humanities: not only are they asked to reflect on living together in a non-terrestrial environment, one of their essential subjects, especially in the creation of utopias and extraterrestrial civilisations, but it is from the most contemporary perspective, that of ethics, justice and sustainability, that this request is made. The renewal of the conquest of space thus once again confronts human beings with the challenges they faced when they discovered the Orient or America.