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The Off-Earth Atlas is a guidebook to the extraterrestrial from a social science perspective. Bringing together forty entries by social scientists, anthropologists, artists, and interdisciplinary thinkers, the book explores how humans build social worlds in relation to the sciences, infrastructures, imaginaries, myths, and shifting presence of Outer Space.
Inspired in part by the playful speculative spirit of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the atlas examines not only what humans do off-Earth, but also how such endeavours transform the ways we inhabit and understand life on our own planet. It is precisely this movement of going off-Earth - and returning - that the collection seeks to capture.
As anthropologists, the editors are all, in different ways, concerned with how space - as physical realm, technical configuration, and conceptual category - shapes human meaning-making. What kinds of relationships are being formed with the Moon, Sun, stars, and planets? How does thinking about life on other planets, humans surviving beyond the limit of our atmosphere, mining the Moon, or praying to the heavens, change our ideas of the human, spiritual, or material worlds we inhabit?
The collection brings together diverse perspectives on territories, infrastructures, cosmologies, life, law, technology, art, and planetary futures. Rather than presenting Outer Space as distant or purely technical, the book argues that space is already deeply entangled with everyday social, political, ecological, and cultural life on Earth.
Combining critical scholarship, visual materials, speculative reflection, and interdisciplinary dialogue, The Off-Earth Atlas offers a new way of thinking through and with Outer Space.
The book will be of interest to all who have an interest in outer space, and to those who have never really thought about it.
Dr David Jeevendrampillai is an Anthropologist of Outer Space. His interests include the politics of place and belonging, community, the future, technology and modernity, the body, and late liberalism. He is a lecturer at The University of Manchester, UK.
Perig Pitrou is an Anthropologist, and a CNRS senior researcher at the Maison Française d’Oxford. He leads the team “Anthropology of Life” in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France.
Delphine Mercier is curator of UCL Ethnography Collections, London. She works on the different modes of engagement with objects and on the diversity of knowledge they produce.
Istvan Praet is an anthropologist based at Durham University,UK. He has a dual interest in indigenous and scientific forms of knowledge. In the past decade he has focused on astrobiology, planetary science and outer space studies.
Victor Buchli is Professor of Material Culture at University College London. He was Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project ETHNO-ISS: an ethnography of an extraterrestrial society: the international space station.
Contents
List of Figures
Editor Biographies
Acknowledgements
Forward
Samantha Cristoforetti
Introduction: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Social Studies of Outer Space
David Jeevendrampillai and Perig Pitrou
A Curatorial Note
Delphine Mercier
TERRITORIES
Territories: Outer Space as the Other Place
David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai
Thinking with Atlases
Teresa Castro
The Geopolitical Economy of Space Mining
Rory Rowan
Outer Space in the South African Karoo
Davide Chinigò
Stories from an Alaskan Space Port: Local Issues at a Gateway to Space
Mia M. Bennett
Martian Picnic: Report from an Artist-in-Residence on the Uk’s First Analogue Space Research Mission
Sarah Fortais
Outer Space Driftwork
Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski
Territory in Space Law
Alban Guyomarc’h
Meet the Atlas of Our Age
Julie Michelle Klinger and Romain Richaud
No Politics in Space
Tim Corballis
He Moʻolelo no ke: A Conundrum of Hubris
Kalei NuʻUhiwa
LIFE
Life, Reconfigured: Seedling Biospheres
Istvan Praet
The High-Tech Spaceships of Earth’s Deserts
Elie Danziger
Biosocial Rhythms, or What Time Is It on Mars?: Behavioural Neurogenetics and Extraterrestrial Cafés
Aaron Parkhurst
Ascensions
Luis A. Campos
The Scales of Plant Experiments in Low Earth Orbit
Paola Castaño
Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Space
Joffrey Becker
Beyond the Biosphere as System
Valerie Olson (in Conversation with Istvan Praet)
Circular Aquaculture and Food Security: From Earth-Based Systems to Lunar Bases
Cyrille Przybyla
Voyage to Corona
Federico de Musso
No Longer Human? Evolutionary Considerations for Outer Space
Kathleen Bryson
The Mars Jar
Jordan Bimm
INFRASTRUCTURES
Infrastructures of Daily Life and Outerspace
Victor Buchli
Affordance Futurism: Envisioning Orbital Infrastructures
William Stewart in Collaboration with Artist Mary Yacoob
Space Wrench: A Starting Point for Off-Earth Manufacturing and Scalable Infrastructure
Jane Davies
Preparing Internet Infrastructure for the Next ‘Solar Storm'
A. R. E. Taylor
Bringing the Future Down to Earth: An Oral History of Cimon, the First Artificial Intelligence Created for Low Earth Orbit
Pepijn Deroo
Stories from the Edge of the Universe
Makar Tereshin
Blockchain in Low Earth Orbit
John C. Vernaleo
Why Before How: Crafting Better Futures Using Space
Lynn D. Harper
How to Collect Micrometeorites in Your Yard
Travis M. Harper and Lynn D. Harper
Photon Infrastructures: Mediating the Universe Through Astronomy
Paddy Edgely
On the Road to Terra Nullius?
Matjaz Vidmar
TITLE
George Henry Longly
COSMOLOGIES
Cosmologies in the Big Picture
Perig Pitrou
A Dialectical Cosmogram: Caetano Veloso in Jail and in Orbit
John Tresch
Cosmo-Logics: Exploring the Imaginal Terrain of Outer and Inner Space
Nicholas Campion
Making the Cosmos at Home
Catriona Howie
Saints and Cosmonauts
Jenia Gorbanenko
Astronomy, Religiosity and Navigating Different Cosmologies
Lauren Reid
Columbus and European Cosmology
Giles Bunch
Transhabiting Mars: From Mexico to the Red Planet in a Speculative Key
Anne W. Johnson
Celestial Buddha
Fabio Gygi
Placing Stars in Urban Jeju
Hae-Seo Kim
The Kumulipo, a Cosmogony Prayer to Sanctify Chiefs
Kalei NuʻUhiwa