Politics & Power Quote by Sarah Zettel

Zettel’s line is a scalpel aimed at the romance Americans still attach to “frontiers.” By reaching for the solar system and then yanking us back to the language of the American West, she exposes how exploration narratives are often less about science than about moral laundering: the thrill of conquest, scrubbed clean of the messy human cost that made the original myth possible.

The shock is in the bluntness of “no Indians.” It’s an intentionally ugly phrasing that mirrors the ugliness buried under the old story. The West wasn’t “empty”; it was emptied, then repackaged as destiny. Zettel is pointing at the psychological bargain that myth offers: if there’s no visible victim, the conqueror gets to keep the hero costume. Space becomes the perfect stage set because its inhabitants, at least in our current imagination, can’t contradict us, sue us, or haunt our national memory.

There’s also a warning embedded in the joke. If guilt is the only thing restraining the frontier impulse, removing guilt doesn’t remove violence; it removes accountability. The line reads like speculative fiction doing what it does best: taking a familiar cultural script and running it a few steps forward to reveal its operating system.

Written in the post-Apollo, corporate-space, “Mars as manifest destiny” era, the quote anticipates a future where the language of exploration is recycled to sell extraction, militarization, and prestige projects - with the comforting illusion that, this time, nobody gets hurt.