Frédéric Boone: Cosmology and Space Conquest

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Any culture is built and organized around a representation of the world, its history and the place that human beings hold in it, what is called a cosmology. It is a response to the first questions raised by consciousness: where are we and what are we doing here?

In our Western culture, which has now spread over the whole world, „Science“ is in charge of producing the Great Narrative of the Universe.

Thus, cosmology is the name of a scientific discipline which is a specialization of physics.

In this conference I will remind some observations and the story of the Universe proposed by modern physics, then I will point out its limits and show how it is not really a cosmology. This discrepancy between our scientistic cultural heritage and the reality of what physical science is induces a confusion sometimes consciously maintained by the scientists themselves. The main idea of this conference is that there is a link between this belief in the possibility of a physical cosmology and our relationship to our planet.

The supposed epistemic Universalism of what is wrongly called cosmology implies a point of view from nowhere mainly inherited from the Galilean revolution, a „cosmic exile“, which naturally leads to the planetary exile promised by the space conquest.

Thus, becoming aware of the confusion between physics and meta-physics (and of the pivotal role played by the cosmological principle in this confusion) could once again liberate imaginations and allow Western humans to create cosmologies more anchored in the terrestrial reality. In doing so, it could be that the Promethean dreams of geo-engineering and space conquest (which are particularities of our culture) will fade away and that we will apply ourselves to return to ways of life more in tune with our earthly condition.