Archive

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 3: Alternative Futurisms

The overview of this par­tic­u­lar pan­el, if you’ll notice in the pro­gram is called Alternative Futurisms.” And this, as should prob­a­bly be evi­dent by now is cen­tered on sci­ence fic­tion and the imag­i­na­tion. It real­ly has a pow­er to inspire and instruct us as we envi­sion the future, but it’s also long been a vehi­cle for myths of Manifest Destiny. And so, we want­ed to start today by talk­ing about the view­points of humanity’s future that are alter­na­tive to some of these main­stream nar­ra­tives, and how we might con­cep­tu­al­ize life off-world in rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ways.

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 2: Mars on Earth

Our sec­ond pan­el today…deals with the inter­sec­tions between Mars as a plan­et, a real phys­i­cal space, and the way that we think about envi­ron­ments in Earth his­to­ry. And nowa­days we know more than we ever have before about the Martian envi­ron­ment and some of the his­to­ry there. But as I men­tioned this morn­ing, in many ways, we’ve still just scratched the sur­face. And so, we want to look in this pan­el at what we can do to think about the explo­ration of oth­er worlds, or human beings liv­ing off-world, in light of the his­to­ry that we’ve had here on our own planet.

Becoming Interplanetary, Beat 1: The Right Stuff

In this first pan­el we’ll be talk­ing about how nar­ra­tives of space explo­ration influ­ence our mod­ern ideas about who can explore space, and what it means to real­ly have the right stuff, and how that mean­ing might evolve, and how we could change it.