The International Space
Station is an instance of multiculturalism at work given that diverse
scientists from around the world work together there. The Space
Station could very well serve as the cultural melting pot that
earthly places strive to be. Yet one could wonder whether the
prolonged detachment from earthly territory and community would
obscure the astronauts' views and understanding of their own earthly
cultures. Without increased awareness among astronauts of their own cultural
activities such as festivals, the Space Station suffers like other
multicultural places where the limited knowledge of one's own culture
is disguised as openness and a listening stance towards the cultures
of others.
Like
multiculturalism's main goal on earth, the Space Station version of
multiculturalism is also turned towards the finding of and
communicating with aliens, in this case, outer-space aliens. However, the worst discrimination and stereotyping of
aliens takes place among astronauts in the effort to find them, as
all astronauts share their racist jokes and supposed “neutral
observations” about aliens, inspired directly by their more earthly
racism against earthly aliens.
What
must occur in the International Space Station is the inclusion in its
confines of the earthly aliens, the marginalized and rare races and
ethnic minorities of earth itself. The earthly aliens often have
their own ways of understanding outer-space and could very well
contribute to the locating of and communicating with outer-space
aliens. In Nepal we sometimes have a single remaining
person who knows how to speak a certain marginalized ethnic language,
and such a person could be included in the International Space
Station team to utilize his/her rare knowledge on the cosmos.
Earthly
aliens would more deeply understand the situation of outer-space
aliens just discovered given that both are “too different” for
the majority of earth's people. There would not be a discriminatory
attitude in either party when they discover one another, and hence no
cause for war between humanity and aliens. The thrust of
the encounter between earthly aliens and outer-space aliens would be
on sharing cultural processes and objects of one another, to cement a
friendship beyond exclusion and discrimination by the earth's
majority.
With the inclusion of
earthly aliens in the Space Station as the first
post-multiculturalist step, the astronauts could thereafter engage in
cultural activities like festivals in the International Space Station
itself, in order to not just read and talk about their cultures as
distant from them but actually recreate and relive the cultural activities and share
them with astronauts and aliens alike.
The Space Station could then be cast as a cultural hub, and even
attract outer-space tourists, and could even one day be beyond a UN “World Heritage Site” to become known as a “Universal Heritage
Site” for its positive work in preserving and spreading the universe's cultures.
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