Fight,or flee,the future: Affect in contrasting responses against future collective death

Abstract

Sociologies of the future offer insights into how the future is apprehended by social actors and motivates their actions. Contemporary narratives of crises in the Anthropocene portray an increasingly likely future: one of future collective death. This article conceptualises collective death as a future that possesses both imaginary and material dimensions. I argue that future collective death generates various affective responses that prompt social coalitions to resist its realisation, and I exemplify it with two cases: Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation. I explore how futurelessness and grief motivate Extinction Rebellion's direct non-violent actions to fight against future collective death, while death anxiety and terminality drive Space Colonisation's attempts to flee from it. In doing so, I illustrate the role of imagination, affect and material means in configuring future-oriented socio-political action.

Introduction

A few years ago, I saw a black-and-white cartoon image. It portrayed a sinking ship and many members of the crew trying to stop the water from completely flooding the ship. The crew members kept calling for others to help. Meanwhile, a high-profile passenger (maybe a businessman, maybe a politician; he was elegantly dressed) loaded a lifeboat with his belongings. Hearing the call for help from the others, he just exclaimed, ‘To hell with this, I’m outta here!’, and escaped in the lifeboat. I found that image darkly humorous but also reflective of our reality and of the socio-political responses to the prospect of collective death.

The image's sinking ship represents the global polycrisis of unsustainability, marked by phenomena like climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss. The polycrisis undermines the ecosphere's capacity to sustain life (Böhm et al., 2015). The global scope of the polycrisis involves differentiated environmental impacts across the globe: affluent elites in the Global North are responsible for producing environmental harms, whereas populations in the Global South mostly lead sustainable lifestyles or even struggle to meet their basic needs (Ulvila & Wilén, 2017). As Farhana Sultana (2022) notes, disasters such as hurricanes, floods, sea-level rise, heatwaves and wildfires predominantly affect large parts of the Global South and marginalised communities in the Global North, increasing the number of deaths, displacements and losses.

The polycrisis is often linked to the narrative of the Anthropocene, one of ‘stocktaking of the already vast insecurities and losses brought about by exploitative relationships with earth and its inhabitants’ (Kelz & Knappe, 2021: 1). The narrative is not simply one of environmental crisis, but also of a global and civilisational threat. Scientific reports, such as the IPCC's Climate Change synthesis report (IPCC, 2023), warn of catastrophic consequences looming ahead if decisive measures are not taken. In this context, responses foreground the necessary character of urgent actions to manage the ‘complex civilisational crisis that includes every aspect of human life and region of the world’ (Chernilo, 2021, p. 18). The consequences of inaction are clear: collective death for humanity and multiple other species. The Anthropocene's polycrisis of unsustainability therefore reveals the very tangible likelihood that we are heading into a future of collective death.

The metaphor of the sinking ship in the black-and-white image raises an intriguing question in the context of the Anthropocene's polycrisis: why do different social coalitions perform contrasting socio-political actions when facing future collective death? The sub-field of sociologies of the future offers some insights by highlighting how affective dispositions towards the future and material resources underpin the actions of social coalitions (Bazzani, 2023; Coleman & Tutton, 2017; Groves, 2017). Exploring how different social coalitions respond when faced with an undesirable future – collective death, in this case – can illustrate how affective orientations drive each coalition towards contrasting courses of action when attempting to govern the future.

In this article, I conceptualise future collective death as a material-discursive future (Tutton, 2017), one that possesses imaginary and material dimensions that push forward its realisation, but also resistance to it. I argue that future collective death generates affective responses that prompt social coalitions to resist its realisation. I exemplify this with two cases: Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation. For Extinction Rebellion, I depict how future collective death induces feelings of lost futures and collective grief (Stuart, 2020). Future collective death also mobilises Extinction Rebellion's members to stop it from happening and defy the systems they deem responsible for its realisation (Weaver, 2022). In contrast, members of what I call ‘Space Colonisation’ assume the inevitability of future collective death. This produces anxiety of the inevitable future and motivates its members to escape from it and colonise space (Farman, 2022; Traphagan, 2019).

To ground my argument, I looked at archival material and media and press texts by each coalition, contextualising them with a review of the literature. For Extinction Rebellion, I relied on the books This is not a drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (Extinction Rebellion, 2019a) and Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside (Read & Alexander, 2020), which discuss the development of Extinction Rebellion and the perspectives of members long involved with it. I complemented the books with press releases and website texts by national chapters of Extinction Rebellion and official statements published by Extinction Rebellion Global (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2023). I also included statements given by Extinction Rebellion members to news organisations or to academic researchers (Extinction Rebellion, 2019b; Stuart, 2020).

For Space Colonisation, I delimited my research to the period 2013–2023 because it allowed me to access older statements regarding the motivations for colonising space while remaining attentive to updates in their vision. I looked at website texts and interviews given by leaders of the companies that comprise the Space Colonisation coalition, and complemented them with intellectual justifications in academic papers by Space Colonisation advocates (e.g. Green, 2019). For each coalition, I identified statements that displayed an affective valence when discussing future collective death, focusing on words like ‘destruction’ and ‘disaster’ for future collective death, and words like ‘guilt’ and ‘hope’ for the affective responses. This allowed me to illustrate how the actions of each coalition are underpinned by affective responses.

In illustrating how Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation respond affectively and practically to future collective death, I discuss how ideas about the future and their associated affective responses can either challenge or perpetuate a hegemonic social order. I suggest that key to configuring each type of response is whether a responsible party for future collective death can be identified and whether future collective death is seen as modifiable or as inevitable. By portraying contrasting approaches to the same future, I stress how imagination, affect and material means configure future-oriented socio-political action, transforming the future into a site of contestation.

Conceptualising future collective death

Future collective death refers to the mass deaths from catastrophic conditions in the planet that make it impossible to sustain life in the future. I adopt the term from Walter (2023), who elaborates on how ecological degradation and unsustainable lifestyles reframe the stakes that future death brings with it: instead of focusing only on our own deaths and the deaths of those we personally know, future collective death expands the scope to anticipating the deaths of billions of individuals and multiple species. This reframing leads Walter to argue that a new death mentality – the shared societal attitudes towards death – has emerged in Western countries, and that as 21st-century modern societies generate conditions that cause death, they also produce death anxiety, fear, grief and despair in their populations.

The future quality of future collective death refers to the foreknowledge that we will die. Bauman (1992) discusses how this foreknowledge brings with it an anguish that cannot be placated, even though our death seems remote. Bauman suggests that culture emerges to suppress the fear of death, its purpose being ‘about transcendence, about going beyond what is given and found before the creative imagination of culture set to work; culture is after that permanence and durability which life, by itself, sorely misses’ (Bauman, 1992: 4, emphasis in original). Culture drives personal and collective projects like forming a family, creating institutions and identifying with national narratives, which would diminish the fear of death by transcending the temporal boundaries of our lives (Menzies & Menzies, 2021). Projects of immortality – such as memorialising the dead with sophisticated technologies or aiming for eternal youth – similarly reveal the underlying affective responses to future death, from calm acceptance to anxious denial (Hurtado Hurtado, 2024). For Bauman (1992), death-defying projects are ultimately bound to fail, because they are rooted in the modern ambition of emancipation from necessity, which dismisses the constitutive nature of death for human life (see also May, 2009).

The collective character of future collective death, however, needs to be questioned. Collective death traditionally refers only to human death, disregarding the lives of other species who co-inhabit the Earth, and under this formulation future collective death becomes anthropocentric and colonial. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene requires that we think about the affected, silenced voices. For Anna Tsing, the voices include the members of humankind that do not fit under colonial Western portrayals of Man and multiple other species which constitute Nature (2015). Similarly, Donna Haraway asserts that the Anthropocene implies ‘immense irreversible destruction … not only for the 11 billion or so people who will be on earth near the end of the twenty-first century, but for myriads of other critters too’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 102). Remaining attentive to whose lives are included and mourned in the term ‘future collective death’ can reveal which social groups engage with the future in a way that merely reproduces the exploitative systems of the past and present and which groups can envision futures that challenge future collective death in a way that overcomes long-lasting problems.

Studying the collective responses when facing future modalities of death can be achieved within the domain of ‘sociologies of the future’ (Coleman & Tutton, 2017; Tutton, 2022). A first entry point to examine future collective death is with the concept of ‘image of the future’ (Bell & Mau, 1971). For Bell and Mau (1971, p. 24), images of the future depict optimist or pessimist portrayals of future conditions of societies, grounded in beliefs about the past and the present. Images of the future portray the future as belonging to the imaginary domain, that which socially constructs representations of social actions and structures.

For Bell and Mau (1971), these images orient societies to make decisions that create ‘actual futures’. However, the authors speculate that human behaviour will significantly differ according to how central human action is to realising the content of the image, and optimistic images will foreground human action compared to pessimistic ones. Future collective death manifests as predominantly pessimistic: portrayals of future collective death depict untold numbers of deaths and societal collapse. Menzies and Menzies (2021) note that a pervasive sense of death anxiety, fuelled by contextual reminders of mortality, can manifest in Western societies through rampant productivism, consumerism and the desire to have offspring. Additionally, future collective death can paralyse people, making them deny the severity of the sustainability crises and preventing them from acting collectively to stop them.

Yet, multiple forms of collective action do emerge in the face of future collective death, which suggests that this paralysis is not predetermined. The maritime and fishing industries foresee business opportunities from the disruption of ecosystems in the Arctic (Frederiksen, 2019), while Fridays for Future denounces the capitalist class in the context of the polycrisis by saying, ‘Their profit is our death. Their profit is our suffering’ (Fridays for Future, 2022). This reveals a limit in Bell and Mau's (1971) theorisation of images of the future: they tend to homogenise their effect for societies, when in reality different social groups have competing agendas and images of the future, which they aim to realise in practice.

Social groups experience affective responses that compel them to stop future collective death and realise their preferred future. Factors that may influence a social group's affective responses include its history, its ontological assumptions about the world, its access to economic resources and its ethical sensibilities. Tutton (2022) argues that people's capabilities to imagine societal futures are intertwined with power relations that enable actors to prompt or limit social changes. Haraway, in turn, suggests that cultivating our response-ability – the collective ways of understanding ourselves and engaging with the world – develops an ethical sensibility that allows us to confront the crises of the Anthropocene in ways that stimulate ‘multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing on terra in ordinary times and places’ (2016, p. 114). The relevance of each factor in configuring a social group's affective response may vary according to the type of future being faced. Regardless of the most significant factor, the affective response fortifies social groups’ actions to face future collective death, allowing them to harness their material, social and imaginative resources. Different social groups can be expected to have different affective responses when facing the same future because the underlying factors mediate such affective responses and enable different courses of social action, leading to contrasts when confronting future collective death.

Future collective death is, additionally, a latent aspect of our present. The capitalist class, corporations and the lifestyles of the wealthy members of affluent countries deepen the polycrisis of unsustainability, which endangers the survival of humankind and untold numbers of species (Moore, 2016; Ulvila & Wilén, 2017). This suggests that future collective death does not pertain only to the imaginary domain but its conditions are also created in the present. Future collective death can therefore be characterised also as a future-in-the-making: processes shaped by uncertainty and difficult to predict outcomes (Adam, 2023). Actors in these processes aim to realise their desired futures and avoid undesired ones.

Different actors aiming to enact their desired futures can create socio-political conflicts on a material-discursive future –futures that are simultaneously driven by their imaginary dimension as images of the future and by their material dimension as futures-in-the-making (Adam, 2023; Bell & Mau, 1971; Tutton, 2017). This means that ideas about the future and their present enactments are sources of conflict. Groves (2017) illustrates this conflict with the environmental politics of anticipation. Focusing on a case of energy infrastructure planning in the UK, Groves describes how two different social coalitions – one constituted by technical experts in government and industry, and another by campaigners opposed to the project – possessed different ideas about the future of energy infrastructure. Each coalition opposed the other one. The campaigners’ coalition aimed to stop the enactment of the infrastructure project because they foresaw potential health and environmental threats. Groves’ account highlights how socio-political conflict can emerge from contested futures: different groups will act to realise their desired future or avoid their undesired one, coming into conflict with others who oppose their vision and act to stop it.

To summarise, I conceptualise future collective death as a material-discursive future that generates affective responses that compel social groups to defy this future. In its imaginary dimension, future collective death motivates actors to organise and perform collective endeavours that respond against this threat to survival. Simultaneously, its material and performative dimension reveals sites of conflict: some actors, inadvertently or intentionally, push towards future collective death in their everyday behaviours and strategic goals; others actively resist it and aim to stop future collective death from happening. Future collective death is thus also a future-in-the-making (Adam, 2023) and a site of socio-political conflict (Groves, 2017). By examining the affective responses of Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation, I illustrate how their ontological apprehension of future collective death (ongoing versus existential, partially preventable or inevitable) configures each coalition's affective response and, when combined with other factors (e.g. economic resources, ethical sensibilities), prompts their contrasting actions.

Extinction Rebellion: Futurelessness, grief, and fighting against future collective death

Extinction Rebellion is a socio-environmental movement that emerged in 2018 and brought together people to stop the climate and ecological emergency (CEE) – another name for the polycrisis of unsustainability – and demanded radical social change. Extinction Rebellion sees itself as a ‘decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly’ (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2023). It has three key demands: compelling institutions to communicate the danger posed by the CEE, promoting immediate action to stop the CEE, and ensuring that citizens make decisions collectively (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2023). Though international in scope, Extinction Rebellion faces critique for being too white and too middle-class, its tactics and discourse being problematic for ethnic minorities and populations external to the Global North (Berglund & Schmidt, 2020).

The prospect of future collective death underpins Extinction Rebellion's discourse. The movement affirms in its ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ that the CEE ‘will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear: this nation, its peoples, our ecosystems and the future of generations to come’ (Extinction Rebellion, 2019a: n.p.). Extinction Rebellion UK chapter foresees ‘the collapse of our globally interconnected network of civilizations, resulting in great suffering and the deaths of many hundreds of millions, and perhaps even billions, of people’ (Extinction Rebellion UK, 2023b). In the aftermath of COP27, Extinction Rebellion's South Africa chapter warned of the consequences of inaction in the present: ‘We are facing destruction of biblical proportions: fires, floods, famine, pandemics, climate hell on earth’ (Extinction Rebellion Cape Town, 2022). These statements illustrate how future collective death shapes Extinction Rebellion's envisioned futures, where extreme climate events ravage humanity, non-human beings and ecosystems.

For Extinction Rebellion, envisioned futures are inseparable from present conditions. Extinction Rebellion emphasises that ‘we are in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction (The Anthropocene Extinction). We are facing two equally critical issues – biodiversity loss and climate change’ (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2022). Emphasising the present status of the Sixth Mass Extinction suggests that Extinction Rebellion also apprehends future collective death as a future-in-the-making (Adam, 2023): the processes that will lead to the envisioned destruction, collapse and billions of deaths are already occurring. The movement mentions extreme weather events, emergence and increased spread of diseases, health threats from air pollution and intensive agriculture, water scarcity, food supply chain disruption and mass displacements as events that humanity is already suffering from (Extinction Rebellion UK, 2023a). In featuring these processes as present drivers of future collective death, Extinction Rebellion acknowledges that this future is modifiable, and future collective death (in the guise of the CEE) can be (partially) prevented if decisive actions are taken. This assumption motivates Extinction Rebellion's direct non-violent actions to force governments and corporations to act decisively on the CEE.

Facing future collective death elicits complex affective responses for members of Extinction Rebellion. Futurelessness (Tutton, 2022), the feeling that the desired futures are being foreclosed, manifests in how Extinction Rebellion members speak about the future. An Extinction Rebellion member from the UK interviewed by the BBC declared: ‘I do this [climate activism] because I’m really scared about what the future will hold … I worry so much for my children’ (Extinction Rebellion, 2019b). Stuart (2020, p. 491) substantiates how futurelessness occurs among other Extinction Rebellion members, as expressed in members’ statements such as ‘Personally, I have no hope. We have failed miserably. It is already too late’ and ‘There is a real sense of hopelessness … It's too late’.

Yet, for Extinction Rebellion, futurelessness also emphasises the political nature of the CEE and why collective action matters in the present. In This is not a drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, Sam Knights (2019: n.p.) stresses: ‘The future will not look like the present. We know that for certain. The rebellion will not happen under any one banner or any one slogan … To survive, it's going to take everything we’ve got. And everyone we know.’ Here, futurelessness is tied to the direct non-violent actions of Extinction Rebellion. For them, the desired future is lost, but not necessarily everything is lost. This reflects Tutton's (2022: 7) insight that futurelessness ‘can also form part of how less powerful groups frame their contentious politics’, with Extinction Rebellion striving to incite governments into action and stop negligent corporations from taking away all possible futures for humankind and the myriad species that co-inhabit the Earth.

Another prominent affective response in Extinction Rebellion is grief. Grief displays a temporal dimension when Extinction Rebellion members foresee that the meaningful losses of people, of species and of entire ecosystems will continue into the future. In this context, grief is experienced as anticipatory (Kelz & Knappe, 2021). This dimension of grief is visible when members of Extinction Rebellion try to balance their personal life with their knowledge about the likely consequences of the CEE: ‘I have great guilt about bringing a child into this world. What is their future going to be like? He could be dead in 20 years. I have to reconcile this’ (Extinction Rebellion member in Stuart, 2020, p. 492).

Grief also displays an ecological dimension when it foregrounds humans’ entanglement and shared vulnerability with other humans and non-humans. In losing them to the CEE, Extinction Rebellion members experience emotional pain and injury. Rupert Read, an early member of Extinction Rebellion, affirms that grief arises ‘from the depth of our interconnectedness, which could even be called our internal relatedness with one another, or our col­lective wholeness. Grieving arises because, contrary to the ideology of our liberal individualist society, we are not detached from one another’ (Read & Alexander, 2020, p. 48). Here, grief is articulated as having a political potential to challenge the systems that produce and worsen the CEE. Actions like the Red Rebel Brigade and ‘funeral parades’ seek public acknowledgement of the loss of human and non-human life, and how these losses are inseparable from political and societal structures, particularly capitalism (Kelz & Knappe, 2021; Walter, 2023).

Extinction Rebellion's direct non-violent actions, fuelled by futurelessness and grief, represent the fight against future collective death: they aim to stop it before it is too late and mobilise people both in specific countries and around the globe (Gardner et al., 2022). Extinction Rebellion's repertoire of actions – occupying public space, carnivalesque performances, blocking roads and airport runways, etc. – leads them into conflict with governments and multinational, capitalist corporations (Weaver, 2022). For Extinction Rebellion, future collective death is both a catastrophe in the future and ongoing processes in the present, which contrasts with the general indifference and denial of national governments and corporations. Here, Groves’ (2017) insight that specific representations and enactments of the future build social coalitions can account for the socio-political conflict revolving around future collective death. This manifests in the arrests of Extinction Rebellion members, but also in the increasing support of the movement as visible in new chapters being formed across the world. As time runs out and the losses mount, Extinction Rebellion seems to gain potency (Stuart, 2020).

Space Colonisation: Death anxiety, terminality and fleeing from future collective death

What I call Space Colonisation is a heterogenous set of groups and initiatives that seek to expand human activities – settlement, industrial extraction, tourism – to outer space. Its members are separate entities that do not comprise an organisational whole, as with Extinction Rebellion. Instead, they are united by shared ideological assumptions and interests, like the privatisation of spacefaring and outer space mining, as well as by similar resource flows and structural positions in capitalist relations. In Space Colonisation, I group together ventures such as SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, and the now-defunct Mars One, founded by Bas Lansdorp, among others. All rely on private capital flows but also on government support and changes to legislation (Deberdt & Le Billon, 2023). The members, groups and initiatives of Space Colonisation share affective responses towards future collective death that animate their endeavours.

Proponents of Space Colonisation regard future collective death as a background anxiety and motive for their endeavours. This anxiety is conveyed subtly through mission statements and official documents but appears primarily in interviews and social media. Blue Origin, the space exploration company founded by Jeff Bezos, states in its vision: ‘Blue Origin envisions a time when people can tap into the limitless resources of space and enable the movement of damaging industries into space to preserve Earth, humanity's blue origin’ (Blue Origin, 2023). The statement recognises a tension between industrial, extractive activities and the integrity of the Earth, and reducing this tension is necessary for Earth's preservation. Damage to ecosystems is subtly acknowledged as a threat to Earth and humankind. Jeff Bezos reaffirms this idea in subsequent interviews, when he states: ‘To do big things in space, we need to use in-space resources, and so the moon is great. The reason we go to space, in my view, is to save the Earth’ (Johnson, 2019). The idea of ‘saving the Earth’ reveals a background assumption that Earth is in danger, although this danger is never articulated clearly. Similarly, the president of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell emphasised in 2014 that ‘The probability of a significant [disastrous] event happening on Earth is very high’ and attributed to space exploration the possibility that humans can build a home in another planet (Lewis, 2014). In Shotwell's statement, future collective death appears as some catastrophic event, but its nature is never explicitly discussed.

The statements imply that, for Space Colonisation members, future collective death is a cosmic threat that endangers the survival of humanity. Responding to it would require the expansion of humanity beyond its initial terrestrial confines. Slobodian (2015, p. 95) proposes that death anxiety drives space colonisation, because ‘The concept of space colonization might give people a false sense of immortality to lessen their fears, in order to counter death anxiety’. When framed as necessary to ensure the survival of humanity, Space Colonisation acquires moral connotations. Proponents such as Green (2019) strongly advocate for colonising space by highlighting the qualities of human life and the moral responsibility to ensure humanity endures.

The cosmic representation of future collective death is also linked to what Abou Farman (2022) calls ‘terminality’. In terminality, ‘death is considered final and continuity in any form is never guaranteed’ (Farman, 2022, p. 30). Terminality comprises an ‘epistemic and affective regime, a way of thinking, feeling, and being that orders collective ideas about what can or cannot be done in relation to the end of things’ (Farman, 2022, p. 38). The affective regime includes feelings of concern and alarm at the magnitude of the threat, as well as despair at the possibility that it is too late to avoid future collective death. Farman (2022) notes that terminality combines ideas of progress with those of destruction, as expressed by Elon Musk when arguing in favour of colonising space: ‘I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species’ (Musk, 2017). Musk's statement illustrates how spacefaring visions promoted by Silicon Valley are haunted by catastrophic visions of the failure to innovate but simultaneously push forward technological innovation with the goal of shaping the world (Torres, 2023; Tutton, 2021).

Space Colonisation locates future collective death within a terminal imaginary, ‘through which collective life is understood, researched and experienced in relation to extensive and existential endings, as predicted by science’ (Farman, 2022, p. 32). The techno-scientific basis for future collective death in terminal imaginaries includes theorisations on the finiteness of the universe (Hawking & Hertog, 2018), intergovernmental assessments that warn of irreparable damage to the Earth and its ecosystems (IPCC, 2023) and civilisational risks driven by artificial intelligence (Neri & Cozman, 2020). Unlike in Extinction Rebellion, where visions of disruptions in ecosystems would cause the death of humans and non-humans, future collective death for Space Colonisation can take any form, because it is apprehended as an ever-present existential risk and not as a biophysical and political-economic present condition. Hence, the current processes that would lead to future collective death are less central than existential visions of the end of humanity. Future collective death within Space Colonisation therefore operates more as a pessimistic image of the future (Bell & Mau, 1971) than as a future-in-the-making (Adam, 2023).

Despite discursive indications that Space Colonisation is necessary for the survival of humanity, its various projects instead offer an escape only for the economic elite and techno-scientific experts. Valentine (2012) documented how billionaire space entrepreneurs, American Libertarians, engineering graduate students, policy advisors and consultants congregate in professional space conferences, where they share their ideas and find business partners. Additionally, Platt et al. (2020) found that young adults today feel they would be unlikely to become the first generation of colonists on Mars because of the foreseen high ticket prices for extraplanetary travel. This is why Space Colonisation projects have been argued to only provide ‘survival of the richest’ (Rushkoff, 2022).

Moreover, Space Colonisation projects worsen one of the existential risks that its members are trying to flee from: the CEE, which Extinction Rebellion activists fight against. The material resources for Space Colonisation, its testing sites, and its launches from Earth and re-entry into orbit require matter and energy use that rely on extractive practices and produce carbon emissions (Deberdt & Le Billon, 2023; Rushkoff, 2022). Space Colonisation and its members comprise an escapist social coalition in confronting future collective death. In attempting to build the projects that allow them to elude death, they become a social actor in a structurally conflicting position with the climate activism coalition (of which Extinction Rebellion is a member), because their projects directly harm natural ecosystems (Groves, 2017).

Fighting or fleeing the future? The governance of future collective death – and beyond

Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation illustrate two contrasting responses when social groups confront the prospect of future collective death. Extinction Rebellion fights against future collective death with mobilisation and contentious political action, whereas Space Colonisation flees from it by planning, investing in and building the sociotechnical environments that would make spacefaring projects a reality. Both movements additionally represent different forms of affective apprehension of the future. For Extinction Rebellion, future collective death comprises an ‘emergency present’ in the form of the CEE, where ecological damages accumulate and become part of the harmful conditions vulnerable populations have to endure (Anderson, 2017). Futurelessness and grief, the affective orientations of Extinction Rebellion towards the CEE, motivate political action to stop this emergency. For Space Colonisation, future collective death is an existential risk to be managed and avoided, which configures the affective responses of death anxiety and terminality, and drives Space Colonisation supporters to expand their capitalist ventures to space. As Delanty (2021, p. 28) notes, ‘The perception of the uncertainty of the future has also been a key factor in capitalist dynamics, making innovation possible’, and Space Colonisation aims to realise capitalist techno-utopias for humanity to escape death (Tutton, 2021).

The contrasting approaches to future collective death reflect Farman's argument that ‘fears, reactions and preparations for doom and survival are structurally and materially differentiated by population, access to resources, and geography’ (Farman, 2022, p. 43). Extinction Rebellion aims to awaken hitherto negligent governments and corporations to the dangers of the CEE and the high likelihood of future collective death, hoping to preserve Earth as an inhabitable space for current and future generations. Nonetheless, it also primarily represents the concerns of urban, middle-class groups in the Global North. The CEE discourse does not sufficiently engage with the realities of indigenous groups and Global South populations, who have long experienced life-threatening situations by the extractive, exploitative dynamics of global capitalism (Sultana, 2022). Space Colonisation represents the interests of a much smaller group: capitalist billionaires. Driven by a modern mindset that seeks to escape death through science and technology, but also by the desire for ever-increasing profits, they invest in outlandish projects – gene modification, immortality, seasteading cities and fortified bunkers – intended to placate their death anxiety and terminal affects while consolidating their societal grip (Bauman, 1992; Hurtado Hurtado, 2023; Rushkoff, 2022).

Similarly, the actions of each social coalition reflect different approaches to taking risks, mediated by social-structural inequalities (Zinn, 2023). Extinction Rebellion members risk repudiation, surveillance and arrest, but they continue with their direct action and contentious politics because they respond to a climate and ecological emergency that threatens the lives of all living beings on Earth. The risks taken by members of Space Colonisation are primarily financial: they continue investing in extraplanetary projects and lobbying for legislation changes, knowing that not all of the projects will succeed, but those that do will represent progress in their escape from future collective death (Deberdt & Le Billon, 2023; Zinn, 2023).

The contrasting affective and practical responses from Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation have important consequences for the politicisation of future collective death. Extinction Rebellion politicises future collective death by accounting for the global scope of the CEE in discussing water scarcity and mass displacement. Extinction Rebellion thus accentuates the differentiated impacts of future collective death: the Global South and marginalised social groups are likely to suffer the worst effects of the CEE (Sultana, 2022). Second, as Walter (2023, p. 672) notes, the CEE expands the scope of death ‘from humans to animals to all species. “Collective” death refers to not only a plurality of humans but also the entire collective of species.’ The fact that future collective death implies multi-species death challenges purely anthropocentric concerns, and accounts for affective responses like ecological grief in members of Extinction Rebellion.

In contrast, Space Colonisation adopts an anthropocentric stance by privileging humankind in its preservation quest. Green (2019, p. 36) argues that the first ethical priority out of all priorities is to ensure that humanity exists because it is the only species capable of practising ethics. But because the Space Colonisation discourse primarily reflects the interests of elites (Traphagan, 2019), it excludes people who live in precarity and do not conform to Western descriptions of Man, as well as non-human life forms that make the world alongside us and create the conditions for more life to emerge (Tsing, 2015). Moreover, Space Colonisation depoliticises future collective death. Its members formulate solutions for the far future, where humans continuously escape the shadow of death, instead of stopping the imminent biophysical causes that make future collective death a likely reality.

Importantly, both social coalitions also outline forms of governance for the future that can emerge if future collective death is successfully confronted. Extinction Rebellion's ecocentric values seek to protect nature and preserve it for future generations (Papadakis, 2000). To do so, the movement fosters a regenerative culture – one that ‘is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity’ (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2023). This culture is sustained on three principles: self-care, people care and planet care (Westwell & Bunting, 2020). Such a culture would be counter-hegemonic: it would oppose many premises of contemporary Western societies that stimulate economic growth and continue energy-intensive production and consumption. Additionally, the movement envisions and performs the style of politics it desires for the world after stopping the CEE – one that is non-hierarchical, participatory and would enable democratic decisions in citizens’ assemblies (Berglund & Schmidt, 2020; Westwell & Bunting, 2020).

Space Colonisation, however, would simply expand the frontiers of current capitalist and extractive regimes to outer space. Blue Origin's development of a space station planned for business and travel illustrates this, which the company says ‘will open the next chapter of human space exploration and development by facilitating the growth of a vibrant ecosystem and business model for the future’ and will eventually ‘open multiple new markets in space’ (Blue Origin, 2021). Similarly, Deberdt and Le Billon (2023) suggest that profiting from extraterrestrial mining constitutes one of the most potent illustrations of capitalist expansion in the Space Colonisation imaginaries. For Space Colonisation, then, the future of humanity in outer space appears strikingly similar to current capitalist and market-based relations on Earth, which they profit from. Space Colonisation therefore reproduces the hegemonic order in its visions of escaping future collective death.

The contrasts between Extinction Rebellion's and Space Colonisation's approaches to confronting future collective death raise a key question: why do some social coalitions adopt a more contentious and counter-hegemonic style of politics and governance, while other coalitions aim to maintain the current hegemonic order and societal dynamics in increasingly expansive projects? Though the answer partly resides in which coalitions benefit from the existing ideology, I posit that a more nuanced answer should account for how each coalition understands future collective death (as an ongoing process of ecological destruction versus an existential risk), how they respond affectively to this understanding, and whom they deem responsible for it. Extinction Rebellion members experience futurelessness by seeing future generations and non-human beings endangered by capitalist corporations that continue exploiting the Earth and by negligent governments that delay decisive actions. Similarly, the deaths of humans and non-humans elicit grief, which creates a profound sense of loss and injustice. Extinction Rebellion therefore aims to do everything in its possibilities to avoid further losses by disrupting capitalist and neo-colonial dynamics (Stuart, 2020; Weaver, 2022). But Space Colonisation does not attribute future collective death to any specific cause or actor. Death anxiety and terminal affects arise because future collective death is an existential threat that can collapse the capitalist relations that sustain the members of Space Colonisation. Hence, expanding capitalism becomes a natural inclination under the framework of Space Colonisation: the wealthy members use technology to exert their agency, extend their privilege, gain the illusion of control over the cycles of life, and escape from the very crises they create (Rushkoff, 2022).

The contrasting responses of Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation ultimately represent a dispute over desirable futures in the face of future collective death. Extinction Rebellion's affect of grief cultivates the response-ability to live and die in a damaged Earth, but also to act generatively with others to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). Its desired future consists of creating regenerative societies that survive the CEE, alongside non-humans. Space Colonisation members, conversely, are affectively driven by death anxiety to avoid facing the consequences of exploiting the Earth and its inhabitants, attempting to flee and build techno-capitalist societies in outer space. The task remains to protect and remember the lives silenced by anthropocentric discourses and to cultivate stronger ethical and affective linkages with them that enable us to forge new, collective world-making projects (Banham, 2024; Tsing, 2015). Only this way can future collective death be transformed into a just, flourishing, multispecies future.

Conclusion

In this article, I have conceptualised future collective death as a material-discursive future, one that depicts the deaths of humans and non-humans as images of the future, but is also manifesting in the polycrisis of unsustainability in the here-and-now. Future collective death underpins the actions of both Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation, two different social coalitions that aim to resist it, because it provides them the affective drive to perform their actions. Extinction Rebellion members perform direct non-violent actions to force negligent governments to act on the climate and ecological emergency and disrupt the dynamics of capitalism that they deem responsible. In contrast, members of Space Colonisation aim to build extraplanetary projects that would allow them to escape future collective death. These contrasts portray how the interaction between the social coalitions, their ideas about future collective death, their affective responses and their present actions can either challenge or perpetuate the hegemonic order. Extinction Rebellion seeks to create a regenerative culture that cares for its members, people and the planet at large, whereas Space Colonisation aims to expand the frontiers of capitalism to outer space.

The two cases presented here illustrate how imagination, affect and material means configure future-oriented action. In presenting these cases, I have shown how the same the future – in this case, future collective death – is a contested site of socio-political action. And this contestation occurs simultaneously in the imaginary dimension of images of the future (Bell & Mau, 1971) and in the material dimension of futures-in-the-making (Adam, 2023).

While I relied on archival material and media and press texts to characterise future collective death as imagined and reacted to by Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation, future research could elaborate on how each coalition understands its courses of action in response to future collective death (Bazzani, 2023). This would hold the potential to add a strategic dimension to social action, and elaborate more on how affect, imagination and strategy co-constitute one another (Olson et al., 2024). Other lines of inquiry could expand the empirical base on how other social coalitions respond to the prospect of future collective death, and further discuss the extent to which affective and practical responses are structurally and materially differentiated (Farman, 2022; Groves, 2017). This would advance empirical studies on the future as a contested site of socio-political actions.