Guest: Konrad Szocik

PhD, Department of Social Sciences, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland

In his talk, Konrad Szocik presents some hypothetical vision of future space exploration, which may discriminate especially against women and people with disabilities. Non-gender binary people should also be added to this group. This is just one possible future scenario that may never come true. But it is by far the worst-case scenario. Adopting the perspective of feminist bioethics, he discusses selected mechanisms and contexts that may lead to the exclusion and discrimination of certain groups of people due to certain expectations and goals attributed to our future in the cosmos on the one hand, and to the humanity that would live in this cosmos on the other.

Konrad Szocik is a philosopher, bioethicist, and an assistant professor at the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow. From 2021 to 2022, he was a visiting fellow at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. His research interests include philosophy, the ethics and bioethics of space exploration, human enhancement, feminism, selected issues at the intersection of futures studies and technology, as well as climate change, population ethics, and the philosophy of antinatalism.

Bremen Human Space Exploration Seminar

The seminar takes place one Wednesday of the month at 13:30 CET/CEST online via zoom and consists of a 40-minute talk followed by a 40-minute discussion.

The zoom link for the meeting will be send via email to all registered members of the space-exploration mailing list. You can register here.