science

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, Salazar explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable, arguing that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers.

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.

In his comment on the Papal encyclical Laudato si’, Bruno Latour considers Pope Francis’s attention to the earth and the poor, and what this means for the Catholic Church.

In this issue of the The Voice of the Wild Siskiyou of Spring 1998, a quarterly newsletter of the Siskiyou Regional Education Project, Art R. Kruckeberg and Frank A. Lang provide information about the Klamath-Siskyiou bioregion, a unique place situated along the Pacific Ocean across the Californian and Oregon border. Further, they ask the question of “how to preserve this bioregion and all its distinctive ecosystems - in the face of ongoing resource extraction and other human incursions?”, and encourage joining the Siskiyou Project network.