Our Stardeath Drive:A space criminological imagination of Astrothanatos

Despite being a young, emergent field of study, space criminology has become strong at analyzing the possible risks of carrying harmful human behaviors, such as domination, exploitation, and environmental destruction, into outer space, using a prospective space criminological imagination. This article enriches that space criminological imagination by positioning humankind itself as an inherent risk to outer space. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic sociology, space expansion and the ambitions behind it will be space criminologically imagined as shaped by our death drive, more precisely our stardeath drive: our Astrothanatos. This fundamental, all-too-human force drives repetition, domination, and (self-)destructive behavior, which, when combined with technological capacity and interplanetary reach, could scale our destructive patterns far beyond Earth into outer space. This paper will problematize Astrothanatos by specifically focusing on its presence within contemporary space expansionist choices that could potentially affect (extraterrestrial) life and the cosmos across millennia. Understanding these dynamics is crucial if we want to avoid extending our destructive tendencies beyond Earth.