Beginnings

Six millennia ago in what is now Serbia, a woman was breaking down a deer that had been killed with a spear tipped with smelted copper. She did not think to herself: “Ah, how good it is to be alive now in the Copper Age, but the sharper knives they’ll have in the Bronze Age in the future would really help me saw through these ligaments.”

In the late 7th century B.C.E. on the Greek island of Lesbos, the poet Sappho wrote an ode to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beseeching her for help to pursue a lover. Sappho would not have placed herself in Greece’s Archaic Age, nor would she have known she was helping lay the groundwork for the flowering of art in the Classical Age. 

And in 1637 when the French philosopher René Descartes penned, “Je pense, donc je suis” — “I think, therefore I am” — he could not have predicted how the concept of reason in the nascent Age of Enlightenment would be challenged by novel subjects like artificial intelligences centuries later. 

Each of these three people lived in a particular “episteme,” a Greek word that delimits eras of knowledge and craft. Michel Foucault, another French philosopher, argued that every episteme is bound by incommensurable cultural codes. “In any given culture and at any given moment,” he wrote in 1966, “there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” 

Researching how people from prehistory to ancient Greece to Enlightenment Europe hunted, loved and wrote helps us structure the past. But a new era of knowledge does not cleanly follow on the heels of its predecessor. Earlier ways of thinking and creating are regurgitated unpredictably in later eras. Scholarly consensus about the precise moment at which one knowledge tradition gives way to the next only emerges after the epistemic dust has settled. Our retrofitted paradigms do not chart a linear pathway in time, but instead are metaphoric orders that have appeared, overlapped and recurred in the Western philosophical tradition for millennia.

The root of episteme, “histanai” — to stand — suggests that assigning past knowledge paradigms is a way to place ourselves in history. That exercise contextualizes present ruptures: the collapse of interconnected planetary ecosystems, the exploration of worlds beyond Earth and weirdly behaving matter from the quantum to the cosmological. Moreover, how we assemble the past — how we delineate epistemes materially and conceptually — inflects how we form the future. 

We can imagine those forms as a ladder, a sphere and a rhizome.

A Chain Of Being 

In a series of now-famous lectures at Harvard in 1933, the philosopher Arthur Lovejoy argued that for millennia, Western thinkers perceived their world through a “great chain of being.” In this ancient worldview, every possible kind of life or thing observed and imaginable scaled to the perfection of its form. In Aristotle’s “History of Animals,” for instance, a lion was superior to a rabbit, a sapphire was superior to sand. One entity shaded into the next, always in a hierarchical relation. Men and women both had teeth, but women had fewer. (He was wrong, of course, but you can guess what the insufficiency implied.) As Lovejoy summarized of Aristotelian biology, “Nature loves twilight zones.” 

The shape of this episteme — a hierarchical stack of concatenated entities — percolated throughout the ancient world and resonated for centuries. Thomas Aquinas reworked the chain of being in the Middle Ages for Christian theology. (Socrates’s daemons became Seraphims, an order of angel nearest to God; chthonic deities in the Greek underworld were translated to hell-dwelling devils.) Man remained in the middle: not ethereally perfect, but still master of the Earth and all its creatures. 

What became known as the scala naturae — the ladder of life — continued to shape Western philosophy. The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke cited the “magnificent harmony of the universe” in which beings “by gentle degrees, ascend upwards from us towards [God’s] infinite perfection, as we see [animals] gradually descend from us downwards.” The German philosopher Immanuel Kant even shuttled the scala naturae to outer space, writing that humans need not envy “the most sublime classes of rational creatures, which inhabit Jupiter or Saturn” because man could “find contentment and satisfaction by turning his gaze upon those lower grades which, in the planets Venus and Mercury, are far below the perfection of human nature.” 

But whereas Aristotle’s ancient worldview described preordained echelons of being (slaves were not fully human and women were not citizens), Locke and Kant instead envisioned radical political equality. For them, every man’s purpose was to fulfill his being and seek universal truths through reason. Enlightenment ideas became the philosophical base for toppling ancien régimes, separating the church from the state and ending slavery. 

Separated by millennia, the ancient and the Enlightenment philosophers thus applied the metaphor of the great chain of being in different ways to order their world. The shape of the episteme was moldable. 

Cosmological Spheres

As centuries unfolded, different epistemic shapes bent to each other and intertwined. The vertical stack always intersected with circles and spheres. In ancient Greek philosophy, the Okeanos was a mighty body of water that encompassed the world. The Orphic Egg hatched the Phanes, the progenitor of all other goddesses and gods. Millenia later, the Greco-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy codified a geocentric model of the cosmos in which the sun, stars and planets ringed the Earth. In this hierarchy of circles, each object occupied its own plane and radiated outward from the Earth.

Even as mathematicians in medieval Persia pointed out anomalies in the geocentric model of the universe, European astronomers preserved Ptolemy’s rendering of it ad hoc for centuries. But in the 16th century, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s meticulous observations led him to dramatically rescale the universe toward the spherical. Swapping the rotation of the Earth with the rotation of the heavens, Copernicus’ dense calculations solved for the apparent motion of the stars and the retrograde motion of the planets. Earth was no longer the immobile center of the universe. The planet orbited the sun.

When humans first saw the Earth from outer space in the 1960s, the planet was reframed as a delicate sphere of life in peril. The scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis co-developed the “Gaia hypothesis” in which the planet’s biosphere was “an active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis.” Although controversial, the Gaia hypothesis continues to inform the concept of a bounded Earthly sphere, spurring environmental action and suggesting the need for a new planetary politics. 

Tentacular Rhizomes

Biologies and the biosphere increasingly co-shape and cross-pollinate each other’s interconnected futures, further interrupting past epistemes. Filaments of knowledge pop up unexpectedly, sewing themselves into surprising places. Ideas are dislodged from their original context and sprout in novel ways. Perhaps the current episteme is best rendered as a rhizome: a subterranean plant stem that can shoot out roots that grow, hydralike, even when snipped in two. 

The French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari plumbed the philosophical concept of the rhizome in the 1970s to describe systems without beginning or end, “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” The rhizome’s nomadism knits heterogeneous but connected nodes of knowledge from politics to language. 

Consider the massive Armillaria ostoyae in eastern Oregon that is fondly nicknamed the “humungous fungus” and thought to be among the largest and oldest organisms on Earth. It can send out what are called rhizomorphs, mycelian strands that ferry nutrients to distant parts of the organism. In its enormity and longevity, Armillaria ostoyae eludes both origin and finality, characteristics whose absences express the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.

The rhizome’s conceptual and material multiplicity subverts the scala naturae’s dictum that there is unique place for every creature and thing. Humans comingle with viruses and microorganisms (archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists) that live on and within us. They mold our actions, health, identities — indeed, our very DNA — prompting us to rethink what it means to be corporeally bounded individual humans.

The episteme of the rhizome emphasizes humans’ ineluctable entanglement with nonhuman others. The anthropologist Anna Tsing followed the matsutake mushroom, a delicacy that can’t be cultivated, only foraged in forests disturbed by humans. In the mushroom’s global rhizomatic journey, Tsing theorized the “patchiness” of Earth’s precarity under an extractive-capitalistic ethos of human domination over nature. The philosopher Donna Haraway described “tentacular thinking” with nonhuman others from spiders to tardigrades as “life lived along lines  —  and such a wealth of lines  —  not at points, not in spheres.” 

Patchy, tentacular orientations to lively others allow for multiple futures to simultaneously emerge, a rebellion against the strictures of the stack and the enclosure of the sphere. Interspecies encounters mutate what it is to be human and suggest how we might better care for others we’re enmeshed with. 

Mysterious Shapes 

In their radical decentering of human senses of time and space, the quantum and cosmological realms resist the imposition of a familiar epistemic geometry. We find disjuncture and mystery at the edges of scientific experimentation. What Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” is the bizarre phenomenon in which particles coordinate instantaneously, breaking the speed of light. An MIT team recently observed that even photons emitted from stars light-years apart are correlated. The particles are quantumly entangled but could hardly be more physically dislocated.  

At the cosmic scale, only 5% of the mass and energy of the universe is baryonic or ordinary matter, the stuff of protons and neutrons, iPhones and blue whales. About a quarter is dark matter that defines how gravity shapes our Milky Way and other galaxies. The rest is a force still more bewildering: dark energy. Some cosmologists think dark energy could be the force accelerating the universe’s expansion. 

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva are whipping up particle beams to nearly the speed of light. The beams’ collisions peel back time, revealing a younger, hotter universe just seconds after the Big Bang. These experiments can’t be integrated into the classically organized, well-ordered universe, be that hierarchical, spherical or rhizomatic. Winking in and out of their manufactured existence, elusive particles could one day provide answers to many of the mysteries of quantum and cosmological spacetimes and plot the future of an increasingly dislocated universe.

Endings

A ladder, a sphere, a rhizome: Each epistemic shape has ordered concepts and materials to make sense of the world. There are other shapes, of course — the tree of life, a labyrinth, a pyramid. The practice of structuring past eras of natural philosophy reflects our present lens of knowledge.

Philosophers, scientists and historians retroactively place beginnings and ends on various epistemes, but sorting out each era’s fuzzy lines in real-time is a curious endeavor. In what we tend to think of as punctuated revolutions, knowledge dissemination takes time. Copernicus hesitated to publish “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” for decades, and the book did not send 16th-century Italians tearing through Padua declaring that the Earth orbited the sun. Even if dark matter were to be detected tomorrow, a full scientific appreciation of its contents, not to mention the ensuing cultural aftershocks, would take much longer. 

Past epistemic formations often resurface in surprising ways. Einstein shoehorned a “cosmological constant” into his theory of general relativity to reconcile it with astrophysical models. But he abandoned it years later when new observations suggested that the universe was expanding rather than static; he called it his “biggest blunder.” Recently, however, cosmologists have begun to reevaluate the cosmological constant, thinking it could help explain the mysterious force of dark energy. 

Epistemic fractures and reorderings do not mark easy passages from one dominant paradigm to another. They instead signify how we moderns mix metaphors that are stable one day and radically contested the next. “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective,” the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “But, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to outward world.” As we look outward, we sense future epistemes, shimmering over the event horizon of knowability, that have not yet taken shape.

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Consider a trio of moments of entangled spacetime:

Jan. 7, 2021, cyberspace and Washington, D.C.: A staggering 4,112 people die of the coronavirus in America, a new record. Elon Musk becomes the richest person in the world and reiterates his plan to leave Earth and start a colony on Mars.

Dec. 7, 1972, near-Earth orbit: The crew of Apollo 17, 18,000 miles from home and on their way to the moon, snap a photograph of Earth. Illuminated by the sun and nestled in the sable sea of outer space, the “Blue Marble” image becomes a resonant icon of humans’ dear and fragile life-filled planet. Earth’s denizens wonder: Are there other worlds beyond? Or is this the only example of life in the universe?

Nov. 7, 1957, Calcutta, India: Two prominent biologists, Joshua Lederberg and J.B.S. Haldane, meet for dinner. A month earlier, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. Lederberg and Haldane determine that a thermonuclear bomb detonated on the moon would be visible to Earthlings, and it would be so destructive it would spoil the possibility of finding traces of lunar life.

Lifted from three interspaced epochs of the ongoing Space Age — the COVID-19 pandemic, the environmental movement and the Cold War — those moments reveal how terrestrial troubles are entwined with hopes of discovering life, and of living, beyond Earth. As dreams to explore the cosmos curl skyward, fears and anxieties particular to each moment raise doubts not only about humans’ longevity on our home planet, but also about how we might inhabit and sustain life on other worlds as space-faring explorers. If humans self-destruct through nuclear war, poison the planet by churning out carbon into the atmosphere or fail to control a deadly virus, such events would preclude us from existing on Earth, living long enough to communicate with possible extraterrestrial beings and venturing to other worlds we might discover to be habitable.

Thus, fears of terrestrial apocalypse animate pursuits for life and living beyond Earth. But conversely, imagining how life (including human life) might exist in an extraterrestrial context, and seeing the planet from outer space, has driven imaginations of Earth’s possible futures — both hopeful, course-correcting pathways, but also escapist fantasies of extraplanetary colonization.

Anticipations of worlds beyond Earth — places that might be (or might be made to be) habitable — are made possible by conceiving of Earth as both threatened and interconnected: The coronavirus’s march across the world reveals the viruses’ disregard for political borders, the environmental movement highlighted the fragility of the planet’s entangled life and the Cold War ushered in the concept of global nuclear disaster.

These threats have, in different ways, revealed how actions are never self-contained in global, networked systems. Each moment’s particular planetary anxieties — pathogenic, climate, nuclear — have animated and informed scientists’ pursuit of extraterrestrial life.

Annihilation

On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik I streaked across the sky. Touching off the “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the satellite represented the opposition between democracy and communism. “Artificial earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel,” the Communist Party’s official newspaper announced the following day, and “our contemporaries will witness how the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.”

Sputnik I was particularly visible from the southern hemisphere, where Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Joshua Lederberg happened to be traveling. A month later, on his way back to Stanford University, where he taught and researched, Lederberg passed through Calcutta to visit his friend and collaborator J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane had formulated the “primordial soup” model — how life could have originated from abiogenic materials on an ancient Earth. Both scientists looked forward to that night’s lunar eclipse.

Over dinner, Haldane — a “confirmed Communist” and “radical alternativist,” according to Lederberg — “gloated” that it was also the 40^th anniversary of the October Revolution, the event that had precipitated the formation of the Soviet Union. As a thought experiment, the two scientists wondered: What if the Soviets leveraged the symbolic occasion to plant a “red star” — a nuclear bomb — on the moon? Their back-of-the-napkin calculation revealed that it would be visible from Earth.

Of course, there was no “red star” that evening, and the U.S. astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, not Soviet cosmonauts, would be the first to land on the moon twelve years later, in 1969. But the conversation with Haldane about the possibility for off-Earth atomic destruction spurred Lederberg toward the study of “exobiology,” the search to detect and preserve life beyond Earth. As the U.S. and the Soviet Union’s space race accelerated during the Cold War, the National Academy of Sciences established the Space Science Board (SSB) to research outer space and to recommend policies to NASA. That group, which included Lederberg and other prominent scientists (among them a young Carl Sagan), worked to protect the moon and other extraterrestrial sites as scientific laboratories.

Looking ahead to possible NASA missions that would explore Mars and Venus for traces of life, a 1959 SSB report that Lederberg chaired transported Cold War fears of nuclear war on Earth to celestial bodies beyond. It warned that “the effect of introducing radioactivity on another planet where there may be entirely different levels of background radiation from those found on Earth could greatly influence any form of life found there.” Planetary concerns of atomic fallout migrated to unexplored sites beyond our planet.

In addition to nuclear radiation on other planets, the possibility of microbial contamination presented risks in the search for life beyond Earth. A spacecraft landing on Mars, for example, might bring terrestrial hitchhikers, risking a false detection of organic biochemistry that would muddle attempts to theorize the origin of life in the solar system and possibly the cosmos beyond. Throughout the late 1950s and the 60s, exobiologists’ reports urged sterilization protocols be taken so as to preserve possible “planetary biota” on Mars.

At the same time, exobiologists worried that possible Martian microbes might infect Earth; through incautious activity by either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, a “dramatic hazard would be the introduction of a new disease, imperiling human health,” as Lederberg wrote in 1960. This particular threat took center stage in Michael Crichton’s 1969 science fiction book (and subsequent film) “The Andromeda Strain,” in which a mysterious and fatal extraterrestrial microorganism appears in Arizona and threatens to end life on Earth. Merging apocalypses, the characters consider annihilating the infected laboratory with a nuclear bomb.

Civilian scientists’ goals to detect extraterrestrials were often at odds with those of the national agencies they answered to. While John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” speech mandated the priority of manned missions to outer space that would showcase national prestige, exobiologists advocated for international efforts to preserve (extra)terrestrial life forms. A 1961 SSB report suggested that the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together on sterilization protocols to “simplify the problem of protection against possible contamination of the planets and of the Earth.” The planetary struggle for political dominance, which threatened to plunge Earth into a nuclear apocalypse, was thus shaping extraplanetary pursuits.

As they considered Earth and extraterrestrial sites of possible life (Mars’s subsurface, Venus’s atmosphere and even, possibly, the moon’s dust) in tandem, exobiologists began to imagine interconnected, but distinct, planetary wholes. Linking Earth to planets beyond, two exobiologists wrote in a 1961 report, “The planets of the solar system are part of a whole — in their origins, in their present states and in their futures.” Such exercises that forecasted other worlds soon came to intersect with growing concerns about the fragility of our own planet.

Interconnection

Amid the persistent threat of nuclear apocalypse that defined the Cold War era, exobiologists began to call for planetary protection protocols for both Earth and extraterrestrial sites — concerns that became increasingly aligned with a burgeoning consciousness about humans’ harmful activities on Earth. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” introduced the idea that synthetic chemicals, especially pesticides — which she argued should be called “biocides” — were fundamentally altering life on Earth. The ensuing environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s culminated in the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and made “the environment” a widespread public concern, fortifying the concept that life systems were interconnected, malleable and fragile.

Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” often advocated for ecological issues and featured images of Earth from space on its early covers, from a mosaic made of satellite photos to Apollo 8’s “Earthrise.” Images of Earth from outer space cast it as a planetary whole, one that was both precious and under increasing peril. From above, the planet’s dynamism and liveliness, found in swirling white clouds layered over placid blue oceans, was contraposed to the Stygian blackness of space. The void circumscribed and encircled Earth, framing it as an enclosed and lively gem.

Apollo 11’s “Blue Marble” photograph especially embodied the environmental movement’s push to consider the Earth as an entangled system whose longevity should supersede politics and profit. As the scholar Sheila Jasanoff put it in a 2001 paper, “subordinating as it does the notional boundaries of sovereign power in favor of swirling clouds that do not respect the lines configured by human conquest or legislation,” the Blue Marble image became a “fitting emblem of Western environmentalism’s transnational ambitions.”

For biologists exploring the conditions and contexts of life beyond Earth, the planetary whole constructed by these images was fertile ground for theory and experiment. Take James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory, which articulated the idea of Earth as a self-regulating organism. Later, in the early 1990s, the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona created a closed ecosystem of various biomes (among them, mangrove, rainforest and savannah) meant to simulate the construction of habitable environments in future missions to colonize other planets.

In a 1979 SSB report, scientists drew inspiration from Earth’s interconnected biosystems as they sought to understand how life might function not only in the closed environment of a spacecraft, but also on other worlds that humans would colonize. Seeking to approximate “the only ecological system that is certainly self-regulating” — that is, “Earth itself” — the scientists struggled to transport what they viewed as the overwhelming complexity of intertwined factors (species adaption, variation in temperature, reaction to stress) to the environment of a spacecraft.

To tackle what they called the “ecological uncertainty principle,” the scientists recommended a completely closed system that mixed “natural” components (Earth’s gravity, atmosphere, an environment that would produce complex molecules) with “artificial” ones (human control, forced adjustments to chemicals). As they put it, “The appropriate conceptual picture of a space station is an array of separate apartments for vegetation, animals and humans for chemical processes, each with its own optimum light, temperature and atmospheric requirements, but with interconnecting links and storage facilities.” Predicting how mammals would thrive and even reproduce in space, the report suggested that such research would have “obvious implications for the feasibility of eventual colonization of space.”

The Earth as a self-regulating organism was a blueprint not only for how to imagine spacecraft, but for how to imagine (extra)terrestrial worlds as well. The concept of “Spaceship Earth” — a term popularized by American author and inventor Buckminster Fuller — described the planet as a confined and sensitive biological system, bearing passengers from humans to microbes who depended on its continuity as they braved the sea of space. Could Spaceship Mars soon join this planetary fleet of life?

Escape

When Tesla stock surged in January this year, the company’s CEO (and SpaceX founder) Elon Musk surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world. Now worth $195 billion dollars, Musk pinned a past tweet to his account as pro-Trump insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol building:

That a single billionaire imagines he might divide his personal fortune to ameliorate terrestrial problems and establish an extraterrestrial colony speaks not only to the staggering inequalities wrought in the maw of late capitalism, but also to the ideological shifts in how humans have approached space exploration since the Space Age. If Lederberg and Haldane represented divergent political paradigms of the Cold War era, yet nonetheless sought to engage their international colleagues for basic science research, Musk’s SpaceX has reshuffled the hierarchies and priorities of space exploration: individualism over nationalism, money power over patriotism, adventure or even salvation of the few over the dreams of the many.

Late capitalism’s increasing privatization and commercialization of space promises off-world living to the uber-rich. SpaceX, which bills itself as building “the road to making humanity multiplanetary,” is testing and perfecting the “Starship” spacecraft to take private passengers to Mars by 2026. Commercial flights that would flirt with the lunar orbit might cost tens of millions of dollars. SpaceX and its ilk — Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin — could provide vehicles to leave a troubled or toxic planet to colonize Mars or, later, some Earth-like planet beyond the solar system.

Hatched in the Anthropocene to “solve” apocalypses, such survival projects are what anthropologist David Valentine calls “exit strategies”: neoliberal, capitalist-driven projects that seek to make space profitable and to establish off-world colonies — havens from the perils of Earth. Yet they raise the question: Will humans transport terrestrial troubles to outer space?

Plans to privatize space are becoming a reality as a third new specter of peril, the novel coronavirus, rips through global health systems, disproportionately sickening and killing those already more vulnerable. More than 2.4 million people have died so far, and recent mutations are further complicating global efforts to control its spread. Thwarting national borders, the virus is a leaky and fluctuating problem that demands planetary cooperation.

Past apocalypses are colliding with the present: Fears of dying from a potent microscopic virus recall exobiologists’ anxieties of decades past that previously latent alien microbes might colonize the lush environment of Earth and end life as we know it. Looking ahead to the Viking missions that would explore the surface of Mars, Carl Sagan wrote in 1973: “Precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage.”

In another recapitulation of apocalypses past, Musk has laid tentative plans to bring atomic bombs off-world, terraforming Mars to transform its environment for human habitability (a plan that NASA has dismissed). In response to challenges to his “Nuke Mars!” tweet in 2019, Musk indicated he would need 10,000 atomic bombs to thaw the planet’s ice caps. Doing so, he predicts, would trigger the release of greenhouse gasses that would create an atmosphere, and solar reflector satellites would heat the planet.

Also consider Musk and geneticist Craig Venter’s plan to print bacteria and other organisms on Mars to aid this process; others have suggested that microbes would be “primary colonists and assets, rather than serendipitous accidents, for future plans of extraterrestrial colonization.” Projects to establish human life off-world, now, have inverted historical fears that nuclear bombs and microorganisms would destroy (extra)terrestrial life. Instead, they have been reimagined as tools to make other worlds habitable.

That future of life is far from guaranteed. A recent astrophysics paper postulates that even while simple life forms in the Milky Way are probably common, the emergence of one technology-using species will be tempered by another’s self-annihilation: birth and death in a cosmic equilibrium. Here, the concept of the self-regulating biosphere of Earth, in which life is maintained in homeostatic balance, extrapolates to our galaxy.

Strange resonances continue to animate the concepts of annihilation, interconnection and escape here on Earth. The coronavirus moves from host to host, shadowing human plans to create enclosed biospheres (spacecraft, glass domes) to sustain life as we travel through space. Russia named its COVID vaccine Sputnik V, pointing like its namesake to power gained through science and technology. The conception of Gaia, a self-regulating biosphere, propels a sense of interdependence between Earth and the greater cosmos. Now, billionaire kings of our techno-capitalist society reimagine terrestrial assets, both monetary and organic, to aid their fantasies of escape off-world.

Hopes for human futures — both on Earth and off — represent not only an enduring projection of space, but a projection of time. Extending human habitability to outer space requires learning to live more carefully and sensitively as a species whose longevity is interlocked with others. The planetary and the extraplanetary remain in ongoing conversation and negotiation as they continue to redefine what life is on Earth, and what it could be in worlds beyond ours.

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