Reflects upon the short period of geological time during which humans have inhabited the Earth, raising questions as to how much time the human race may have left on the planet, and what might happen after the human race—and even Earth itself—disappears.
On his Apollo mission in 1968, astronaut Bill Anders shot one of the most well-known photographs of the Earth—“Earthrise.” It became a symbol for the fragility of the Earth and an icon for the environmental movement that soon followed.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”
Stefan Helmreich’s foreword to a Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that the anthropology of outer space these days is a machine for chaotic and cosmic travel, chrono-synclastic infundibulation, and analogical involution, a wrinkle in the discipline and its companion fields that changes what can count as both the “environment” and the “humanities.”
In this introduction to their Special Section “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien,” editors Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar discuss the growing research on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology, and how the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Lisa Messeri concludes that outer space, far from being removed from Earthly matters, offers a different scale and perspective for examining technocultural relations.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Antonia Walford and Donnacha Kirk explore how taking physical cosmology and the entities that populate its fringes on their own terms might prompt anthropology to rethink what and how it thinks of life.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Istvan Praet focuses on the ultraviolet spectrum to examine how astrobiologists look at celestial bodies, planetary atmospheres, the skin, and the eye. He offers a reflection on how outer space can be apprehended from a humanities perspective.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, David Dunér scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research, particularly the last three factors of the Drake equation.
