Who owns space?

For some, orbit means a taste for a good mood. Chewing gum is a constant companion that ensures fresh breath around the clock. For others, it is the term for a satellite orbit. Still others associate this expression with the eye socket, the area of the skull made up of seven different bones surrounding the oculum. The frontal, zygomatic, lacrimal, palatine, ethmoid, and sphenoid bones, together with the upper jaw, surround the sensitive organ of vision as a protective shell and for anchoring. The eyes are windows to the world, just as the ears are acoustic hinged doors to it. The truism seeing is believing is widely held, but so is lens opacity.

Orbis is the Latin word for circle and is expressed in the Catholic premium blessing for Urbi et Orbi, the blessings for the Eternal City and the entire world. Its effectiveness is being put to a severe test in the information age, because apparently the spoken word is not the same as the surfed word, transmitted by waves. The same doubts about the effectiveness of the statement exist as with legally relevant demands, so-called time-bound documents. Doubts about the varying degrees of robustness of the meaningfulness of spoken, written, faxed, emailed or beamed opinions. Doubts about the credibility of statements, the acceptance of established findings, about apparent truth and the question of whether a media transmission of words changes their meaning. Whether a spell spread over the internet can still have an effect. And about the question of evidence and how much one wants to know about the universe. And about the interpretive authority of such knowledge and the doubts surrounding it.

Orbit is associated with the orbit of the moon, satellites, and other spacecraft. Everything revolves eternally: the planets around the sun, the solar system around the center of the Milky Way, the Milky Way around the conference of the Association of Space Explorers, and the latter around the question of who owns the universe and how to use it.*Everything revolves around a center, leaving behind the question of the force in space that keeps an eye on it all. Of course, there is no simple answer to this, but rather opens further questions. For example, such about sources, information gathering, ideology, propaganda, and marketing. Satellites are functional extensions of the Earth; they orbit the globe in largely unobstructed orbits and form a supporting framework for the lever arms of information technology. They increase the comfort of use of technical devices and simplify the control of masses, media, and processes. Satellites collect and transmit data; they form control systems for locating moving and stationary targets. They are produced to gain an advantage or avoid setbacks, to gain power or to spread powerlessness, to find security or to hide insecurity, to allay fear or to stir up fears.

But the term orbit can also be viewed in other ways, associatively, for example, onomatopoeically or anagraphically. Viewed this way, orbit rhymes with Cebit, and your mind circles around the Hanover Fair, imagining new information technology inventions from around the world that can achieve incredible abbreviations or unimaginable expansions. Just one initial letter further in the alphabet and you arrive at debit, supplemented by debtor, and think of a mountain of debt or perhaps the eye of a needle and a camel, perhaps thinking of a PVC card in ISO format 7810 for cashless money transfers, remembering all the payments you have made with it over the years, imagining how many other cards are being debited at any moment, and suspecting that this is driving a constantly pulsating, unmanageable swarm of money movements. An invisible intercontinental shell around the globe made up of changes in money ownership. And a global control system with an exclusive access gradient.

Every foray into space represents an attempt to expand human habitation. Some leave footprints or flags on the moon, others hope to mine helium there. There are space expeditions with high-resolution telescopes for remote investigation of the cosmic past, to learn everything and anything that is happening on Earth and what can be expected in the distant future. Experiments at the limits of consciousness serve as model attempts to catch up with the space-time expansion of the universe through explosions of knowledge. Extravagant individuals are buried in space, and those who can afford it book a trip beyond the usual horizon before their death to see their homeland from the outside. Space tourism for the super-rich stimulates imagination and encourages speculation. But gravity cannot be outsmarted with money alone. Even metaphorical space travel begins in the mind. The cosmos may be infinite, but so is a satellite and a launch vehicle.Humboldt's great narrative is called Kosmos just like a cinema in Berlin or a book publisher. The universe is merely a conceptual space outside the Earth's atmosphere, arbitrarily defined as extending above an altitude of 100 kilometers. This imaginary Earth wobbles around somewhere at the edge of space.

If you want to rhyme orbit in a more rhythmic way, you might think of sorbet, get a hankering for a fruity ice cream and imagine how easily you can be distracted from a good idea. Orbit means nothing other than orbit and sounds like daily heavy traffic and motorways, like a fingernail infection that doesn't heal well, like rotation and revolution, like unimaginable amounts of money being moved around, and you stop in amazement because you've already arrived at the topic of finances again, or at least of values. And you might ask yourself why your thoughts don’t really have any wider implications. You can also express your thoughts in symbols or in a foreign language and discover that orbital constellations of meaning can also be created with translations. In French, for example, the word for gold corresponds to the two initial letters of orbit. And a bit describes an information content, an elementary state which, in the case of gold, is the crucial component of the alchemical quest to transform elementary creative will into matter. In other words, art. The cosmos cannot belong to anyone, but it certainly cannot be left to theologians, technocrats and speculators.

Rome, Easter 2015