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.
Gisli Palsson’s afterword for the Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that outer space matters for anthropology and, likewise, anthropology matters for those concerned with space politics and space research.
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.
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.
The first images of Planet Earth are taken by NASA astronaut William Anders, a member of the Apollo 8 team.
