Gaze-scaling: Planets as Islands in Exobiologists’ Imaginaries

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, scientists and engineers in the U.S. chartered a new field, exobiology: the search for organic life beyond Earth. Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, led exobiologists in framing a powerful sociotechnical imaginary for the emergent discipline, one that envisioned planets as islands. That vision followed long traditions in natural science, literature, and geography in which islands had been posited along dueling edges: fragile, bounded sites that required preservation, but ones that also been staged as bountiful, inviting exploration, even exploitation. From Lederberg's archive, other historical sources, and astronautical accounts of seeing Earth from above in the Space Age, the conceptual duality of islands – as enclosed and expansive – transferred to how exobiologists considered their solar system. Planets, including Earth, came to be imagined as biospheres to be preserved, but simultaneously as sites that could possibly underwrite humans' future colonization. Such speculation was supported by a rich visual culture of technologically animated perception, from Apollo 8's Earthrise photograph (1968) to Mariner 9's (1970) televisual images. Scaling the gaze of planetary science from Earth to extraterrestrial sites, exobiologists' planets-as-islands imaginary forecasted a cosmic archipelago of interconnected life in the post-World War II era.

KEYWORDS:

• Planets as islands
• sociotechnical imaginary
• cosmic archipelago
• exobiology
• Space Age
• gaze-scaling

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the co-editors of this special issue, Mascha Gugganig and Nina Klimburg-Witjes, who organized the panel ‘Island Imaginaries: From Repositories to Experimental Labs’ at the annual 4S meeting in Boston, 2017, from which that paper originated, and who shepherded this piece to publication. Thank you to Rebecca Lemov whose comments as a discussant at that panel shaped this article. I am grateful to geographer Phil Stooke who explained to me how planetary photomosaic globes are made, and to Caltech and JPL for allowing the photographs of the globe-making process to be reprinted here. I also thank the paper’s anonymous reviewers, and David Kaiser, Stefan Helmreich, Sally Haslanger, Robin Scheffler, and Richard Fadok of MIT for their valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This group evolved from the Contamination by Extraterrestrial Exploration (CETEX) Committee.

2 ‘Nix Olympica' translates to ‘Olympic snow’ in Latin, and is the former name of what is now called Olympus Mons on Mars.

3 The photomosaics were described as ‘fish-scales’, a playful yet inadvertent reference to both the ocean and scaling.

4 Seeing Earth in this way helped spur a nascent conservational movement on Earth.

5 This view anticipated the later Apollo 11 mission in which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually Moon-walked.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship program; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; and MIT; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; History of Science Society and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Fellowship in Aerospace History (grant no. 80NSSC17M0062).

Notes on contributors

Claire Isabel Webb

Claire Isabel Webb earned her Ph.D. from the MIT's History, Anthropology, and Science,Technology, and Society (HASTS) program. She is currently a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles in association with the University of Southern California. Webb is also a Research Associate with Breakthrough Listen at U.C. Berkeley. Her research interests include feminist applications to the history of, and current projects about, outer space and the search for life beyond Earth.