philosophers, the general formula is relatively simple. We analyze thinking, character, context, the moral ideas applied (rules, duties or virtues, for instance), the end pursued, and then we evaluate any consequences. What is startling to think about for the characters in The Expanse is that the formula is truncated, decapitated really—or at least missing a limb. “The end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from [us] in impenetrable secrecy.” In other words, despite our new scientific achievement, knowing whether our actions are right, wrong, foolish, or wise in this new universe of the seventeenth and twenty‐fourth centuries is impossible.
Avasarala understands this problem. She is nobody’s fool and wants to be wise. Her argument with Nancy Gao over the issue of whether to allow “a new gold rush” of humans into the Ring System shows her concern for the lack of knowledge and information surrounding any decision about the Ring. During their tense exchange, Avasarala warns that, like the Yukon before it, this gold rush will result in piles of body bags with “more fools ready to line up and take their place” (“New Terra”). This issue will eventually cost her the election to United Nations Secretary General—Gao’s hopeful view of the possibilities inherent in the Ring will sway voters. The tragedy of Avasarala’s political fortunes is that she will never know enough to make an informed decision on the meaning of the Ring System for human beings. She tries to be wise; yet, even as she recruits Holden to make the trip to New Terra, we can see Pascal shaking his head at the futility of it all. “The ends are hidden in impenetrable secrecy …”
What had changed in the universe for Pascal? Before Galileo and Newton, the prevailing understanding of the universe was that its purpose, the point of why anything existed at all, was so that human beings could live as rational beings who could find their way to God. We were the point. The universe was a small place centered on the earth and human life. It was a stage on which the drama of human life played out. God was understood to intervene directly at times in that drama. What is the point of life in Newton’s universe? Pascal writes, “When I consider the short span of my life absorbed into the preceding and subsequent eternity, memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis [like the memory of a one‐day guest (Wisdom 5:15)], the small space which I fill and even can see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I am terrified, and surprised to find myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? On whose orders and on whose decision have this place and this time been allotted to me?”4 For Pascal, this new sense of infinity makes everything we do and are seem random and capricious.
What is the point of an infinitely small human life in this infinitely large Expanse?
Is It Large Out Here? Or Is It Me?
Pascal’s concerns can be seen as a kind of existential agoraphobia—a crisis of meaning brought on by infinitely wide‐open spaces. In fairness to him, the problem is a deep and serious one—philosophically speaking. Miller, a child of the claustrophobic Ceres, has this agoraphobia written into his bones. It is not abstract, or philosophical, it is a concrete affliction that he feels. Yet, he still is able to overcome it to continue his quest to find the meaning of Julie’s life and her death. This is one reason why he, like Holden, is a quest‐hero in the series.
Miller’s quest really begins when he is fired by Captain Shaddid (“Rock Bottom”). Before that moment he had been doing (in a somewhat shoddy way) his job. He then became intrigued by the mystery of Julie’s disappearance, fell in love with the idea of her, and eventually found the object of his quest. Once he is fired, his decision to follow the investigation is his own. After searching Julie’s apartment, he hangs up his hat—a symbolic removal of the superficial Earth culture he emulates and a return to his authentic Belter self—and he commits to his quest to find the real Julie. Before leaving, he brings Julie’s necklace as a token with him (like a good quest‐hero). Then, the show gives us the irony of a Belter who hates space buying a ticket for a voyage into the infinity outside.
On the transport to Eros, Miller has a conversation with a Mormon missionary who has joined the 100‐year expedition on the ship that Fred Johnson is building for them (soon to be renamed the Behemoth). Miller asks him, “Nobody really knows what’s out there … Doesn’t that scare the shit out of you?” The missionary tells Miller that his faith is what sustains him in the face of the infinite unknown that he will confront on his journey. Miller responds, “You guys are gonna get on this big ship, ride out into the great beyond for 100 years. What happens when you get out there and there’s nothing?” (“Salvage”). Pascal’s confrontation with infinity occurs in his imagination. Miller has to literally step into it.
Miller’s courage in overcoming his fear of space is a good metaphor for the way the characters of The Expanse address their situation in the void. Some sci‐fi treats science as a kind of alchemy that can always be called on to decipher the unknown—problems are solved by mixing together just the right kind of particle and, like the fabled magical art that could turn lead into gold, return all that had been radically changed during the episode back to normal. (I’m looking at you, Star Trek.) The Expanse is different. It does not allow for neatly wrapped‐up solutions. How could it? When the ends of things are hidden in impenetrable secrecy?
Problems in The Expanse are solved by negotiating with the unknown. We see this idea in Holden’s series of negotiations with the mental projection of Miller. Holden is deliberating with an interstellar being that is itself unaware of the meaning of its own purpose, through a proxy that is generated by his own brain. That situation is, to say the least, complicated. Before Miller is liberated from the protomolecule, he is driven by the purpose inscribed in it. Like the Katoa hybrid in the lab on Io who cries out to Jules‐Pierre Mao that he “must finish the work” (“Triple Point”), Miller too feels driven to complete the protomolecule’s work—“the case,” as he calls it. He is focused on the protomolecule’s immediate goal—a goal given to it (and him) by an extinct civilization and situated within an overall plan that he does not know or understand. Holden could be forgiven for thinking that this endeavor is pointless and inconceivable.
However, Holden and the characters of The Expanse, even though they are adrift in the infinity of space, do not give up or lay down and die in the face of a universe in which their lives are so small as to be insignificant. Why do they struggle against injustice? Against an alien threat? Against each other? Where do they find the source of motivation for their actions? Are they simply unaware that their lives and goals are insignificant in the way Pascal understands the universe? It is not simply that they stoically endure this sense of their smallness in the scheme of things. They do something else; they assert themselves. They stand up and demand that they be heard and recognized as dignified. Perhaps Captain Camina Drummer said it best on the bridge of the OPA’s Behemoth as the ship entered the Gate, “We are Belters, nothing in the void is foreign to us. The place we go is the place we belong!” (“Intransigence”).
Freedom and the Sublime in The Expanse
For some reason, the infinity of The Expanse attracts us. The confrontation with infinity brings us a certain kind of pleasure. We feel awe, wonder. What is it about this experience that draws us to it? The look and design of the show indulges us in an experience of the sublime.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) understood the power and importance of this experience. For Kant, the experience of the sublime is the experience of something formless, something without limit. It is the experience of reason’s ability to understand being completely overwhelmed.5 The design of The Expanse returns to chiaroscuro again and again as
