Throughout the history of human thought, philosophers have realized something revealing: there exists a deep ontological wound in humanity because our experience of the world is mediated. The debate about what exactly permeates our existence and prevents us from directly touching what happens to us remains an open question. Some, like Kant, call what we experience a phenomenon, in contrast to the eternally unattainable noumenon. Others, like Descartes, outline the idea of an evil genius who could be manipulating our senses to the point that we doubt our own existence and before which we are completely defenseless. Even Plato located the essence of things in the Hyperuranion, a place inaccessible to mortals.

In these formulations, the body appears as a container for something other that inhabits it, but which cannot abandon or experience the world outside of the body. Could the body be a vehicle for navigating the twists and turns of existence? Or, perhaps, a way of being and existing in the world to which we constantly turn—always looking outward, or, as Husserl would say, our consciousness turned toward something that is outside of it and not it.

In the same way that our consciousnesses are always looking outward from our bodies, human beings have embarked on a new journey outside ourselves, outside the planet we have inhabited since our inception. Humanity is now traveling through an environment that has been dubbed “outer space.”

Our exploration of outer space opens up a debate, for there is no clear boundary between what is considered part of the Earth’s atmosphere and what lies outside this thin, invisible layer that protects living beings on planet Earth. It seems as if the gases and the magnetic field gradually blur together until the particles are increasingly overwhelmed by the vast nothingness. The Kármán line, established 100 km above the Earth’s surface, is the internationally accepted boundary between our planet and outer space.

Beyond this thin layer of gas that envelops our home in the solar system lies the absolute other. Here, human devices lose their capacity to function, no longer viable outside of Earth. The human being has to reinvent itself, rebuild itself, create bridges between what is its own and what is different, and interpret what they encounter out there so that it can be understood. Might this disrupt ontological categories?  

According to Aristotle, ontological categories indicate attributes of objects of reality. However, given that this reality is externally mediated by something that prevents us from accessing it in its totality, thinkers like Kant have suggested that categories are uniquely human, a lens through which we observe things. 

On Earth, in our shared environment and under known conditions of existence, these categories seem given and immutable, as though they were a condition necessary for our existence. But in an environment hostile to human life, like the vacuum of space, the extreme conditions of pressure, gravity, and temperature of a celestial body like Venus, or the icy and volatile world of a comet, it is worth asking how these categories might be disrupted or covered over by a layer of meta-reality composed of machines, data, and mediations. 

Let’s analyze some of the ontological categories in the context of space exploration. According to Aristotle, substance is that which remains in a thing despite changes; for example that which makes a dog a dog. The Soviet Union sent dozens of stray dogs to space before they risked sending the first human, the pilot Yuri Gagarin, who would become the first cosmonaut. After around a dozen attempts, they succeeded in improving the technology and support systems so that the animals could return alive. This was the first proof that a living being, one very similar to a human, could survive the once-unfathomable depths of outer space. Upon returning, these first living beings didn’t present any essential changes. However, in the time since these first forays into space exploration, we have managed to extend the duration of time spent in space to a little over a year. One of the most studied situations in the history of space travel has been the fact that prolonged time spent in space has biological and physiological effects on the human body, even after it has returned to Earth’s conditions. 

In one study conducted with twins, one twin spent almost a year in space while the other remained on Earth. It was found that the telomeres—a part of DNA that shortens over time as part of the natural aging process of cells, which lose some of these telomeres in replication—were longer in the twin who went to space. It would be risky to claim that the twin got younger, but the finding opened the door to questions about whether the passage of time in space has the same impact on our bodies as time spent on Earth. 

In addition to the physical effects, taking a human being into space raises new considerations  if we understand the human being as a being in the world, in terms of Heidegger’s postulation of Dasein [1]. Although Heidegger refers to a universal category, it is worth asking whether one can be in the world in the same way when confined to an sealed capsule or a suit that does not allow contact with the outside world, or protected with a hard shell that only provides us with data comprehensible to consciousness but impossible to experience with our senses. We will never know what it feels like for our skin to be exposed to a large amount of cosmic radiation, because attempting it would cost us our lives. We will have to rely on the instruments we have created, which are sensitive to certain impulses and interpret reality to warn us of danger. Could it be that that ship, that suit, or those instruments become part of our bodies, like a second skin without which it is impossible to experience the outside?

This brings us to the aesthetic experience, understood in its Greek origins as the study of what is sensible or perceptible through the senses. When contemplating the grandiose images of areas of the universe created from data transmitted by space antennae and telescopes, such as The Pillars of Creation [2], it is inevitable that we think of Kant’s postulate of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when experiencing objects or events of such magnitude that they could destroy the spectator. An example is the contemplation of a volcanic eruption, an event of almost immeasurable proportions for a human being, which reveals our vulnerability.

Without a doubt, imagining a first-person encounter with some of the events that physics describes in the universe—such as a black hole disintegrating and devouring everything in its path, or the violent merger of neutron stars, whose force can warp space-time—would be the culmination of this experience. However, we have access to these phenomena only through theory. For a century, they were formulas written on blackboards by Albert Einstein, and, more recently, the detection of a tiny anomaly that we interpret as evidence of these colossal events in places more distant than we can imagine.

It seems that the closer we get to the absolute other outside of Earth, the deeper the ontological transformation becomes. On the one hand, even as we try to distance ourselves from the most human planet to enter a universe new to our experience, we carry with us a thicker layer of mediation; the bridge that allows us to reach reality becomes longer, more robust, and more difficult to cross, filled with machines and data that are the only way to access this new reality. The other path would be a profound biological transformation that equips us with tools to withstand conditions different from those on our planet. In any case, space travel confronts us with an inevitable transformation of human experience, which could isolate us even further from reality or change our species completely.

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[1] Dasein is a German term meaning “being-there” or “existence.” In Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, Dasein is the place where the meaning of being is understood. Dasein is a concept used to understand human existence, being in the world, and being oneself. In Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, consciousness is a set of acts called experiences. Husserl describes the manifestation of things themselves, while Heidegger interpretively and comprehensively opens up the being of Dasein.

[2] Editor’s note: “The Pillars of Creation” is a photo taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope approximately 6500 light-years from Earth, in the Milky Way. These formations are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed. Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilares_de_la_Creaci%C3%B3n.