"Or will ignorance and indifference result in more space burials by well-meaning and bereaved families that will be experienced as desecration by many cultures on Earth?"
I think consideration of cultural differences is valuable if one respects the idea of democracy.
However, rights over lands and spaces beyond one’s home are as ridiculous as the current attempts at the appropriation of fetal rights by many American Christians.
This is not indifference to, or ignorance of, cultural rights — it’s a challenge to the idea that cultural rights or religious myths trump logic, reason, and science — as well as simple practicality.
The idea that a burial on the Moon is “desecration” because certain groups of people have incorporated a mythic conception of a celestial body into their culture … is as absurd as the idea of “blasphemy” in various religious dogmas.
How far would this idea of “desecration” go? Would it include Venus and the other planets visible in our sky — or to every other part of the universe? The whole idea is an affront to the Enlightenment, which to date is one of humanity’s greatest advances.
This is the crux of the issue since this is being cast as either insensitivity or unethical when instead it is an inherent incompatibility between cultures and their moral philosophies. There are many of us who feel a very deep moral imperative to fill the Universe with life and, in the case of life on this planet, with our death. People are going to go to the Moon, Mars, and far far beyond those. And they are going to take all of their cultural, moral, and ethical baggage with them. In some of those cultures they will want to bury their dead. One culture doesn't get veto the entire planet's access to and use of space.
"Or will ignorance and indifference result in more space burials by well-meaning and bereaved families that will be experienced as desecration by many cultures on Earth?"
I think consideration of cultural differences is valuable if one respects the idea of democracy.
However, rights over lands and spaces beyond one’s home are as ridiculous as the current attempts at the appropriation of fetal rights by many American Christians.
This is not indifference to, or ignorance of, cultural rights — it’s a challenge to the idea that cultural rights or religious myths trump logic, reason, and science — as well as simple practicality.
The idea that a burial on the Moon is “desecration” because certain groups of people have incorporated a mythic conception of a celestial body into their culture … is as absurd as the idea of “blasphemy” in various religious dogmas.
How far would this idea of “desecration” go? Would it include Venus and the other planets visible in our sky — or to every other part of the universe? The whole idea is an affront to the Enlightenment, which to date is one of humanity’s greatest advances.
"and sometimes contradictory"
This is the crux of the issue since this is being cast as either insensitivity or unethical when instead it is an inherent incompatibility between cultures and their moral philosophies. There are many of us who feel a very deep moral imperative to fill the Universe with life and, in the case of life on this planet, with our death. People are going to go to the Moon, Mars, and far far beyond those. And they are going to take all of their cultural, moral, and ethical baggage with them. In some of those cultures they will want to bury their dead. One culture doesn't get veto the entire planet's access to and use of space.