Beyond Human Space Exploration To Post-Human Space Exploration
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract
Is human space exploration really so worthy that, as Peter Diamandis once put it, “[w]e need to be willing to take risks…at the beginning of space exploration,…”? (TE 2017) This positive view on human space exploration can be contrasted with the opposing one by Frank Close, who observed instead that “the received opinion among scientists is that it [human space exploration] is a waste of money.” (TE 2017a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human space exploration (in relation to transferability and non-transferability—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no transferability without non-transferability (and vice versa), to be explained by the “transferability-nontransferability principle” (and other ones) in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human space exploration is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to human space exploration)—such as astrobiology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, astronautics, space technology, geology, astroecology, astrogeography, science fiction, economics, psychology, robotics, artificial intelligence, political science, sociology, philosophy, technological studies, cultural studies, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human space exploration (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between transferability and non-transferability (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-human space exploration) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human space exploration (in relation to the dialectic relationship between transferability and non-transferability—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.