space – The Duke Reader

Martian Chronicles

6 Feb 2024 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination, Robert Markley, Duke University Press, 2005.**

The relations between science and fiction have nowhere been any closer than on the planet Mars. The genre of science fiction literally began with imagining life on Mars; and some of its most popular entries nowadays are stories of how humans could settle on the red planet and make it more like the Earth. Planetary science originally took Mars as its object and tried to project onto Mars what scientists knew about the climate and geology on Earth. Now this interest for Martian affairs is coming back to Earth, as scientists are applying knowledge derived from studying Mars to the study of the Earth’s planetary dynamics. Mars’ image as a dying planet has been invoked to support competing, even antithetical views, of the fate of our world and its inhabitants: a glorious future of interplanetary expansion and space conquest, or a bleak fate of environmental devastation and human extinction. Science has not completely closed the issue on whether life has ever existed on Mars; but visions of extraterrestrial civilizations and space invaders have been superseded by narratives centered on mankind and its cosmic manifest destiny. This intimate relationship between science and fiction under the sign of Mars is now more than one century old, but shows no sign of abating. What is it in Mars that inflames people’s imagination from one generation to the next? Why has Mars attracted more interest than our closest satellite, the Moon, or than more distant planets in the solar system such as Venus or Saturn? Are there commonalities between the way our ancestors envisioned channels built by Martian civilizations and more recent visions of making Mars suitable for human sojourn? Will the detailed inventory of the Martian terrain brought back by satellite images and camera-equipped rovers put an end to our interest for the red planet, or will it rekindle a new space age with the colonization of Mars as its overarching goal? And how can our visions of planetary expansion avoid the pitfalls of colonial metaphors and Earth-based anthropocentrism?

Is there life on Mars?

Dying Planet explores the ways in which Mars has served as a screen on which we have projected our hopes for the future and our fears of ecological devastation on Earth. It presents a cross-disciplinary investigation of changing perceptions of Mars as both a scientific object and a cultural artifact. The persistence of the red planet in our cultural imagination explains its enduring presence on the scientific agenda; and the scientific controversies surrounding Mars have often fueled the imagination of artists and philosophers. Scientists still frequently resort to terrestrial analogies to describe Mars; and the study of Mars has encouraged scientists to think about the planetwide conditions necessary to sustain life, making Earth more of a Mars-like planet. For planetary scientists and science-fiction writers, Mars often acts as a bellwether, a harbinger of the ecological fate of the Earth. The image of Mars as a dying planet has an enduring quality: it indicates that the Earth may go the way of Mars and transform itself into a barren land due to resource exhaustion and environmental stress. To the question: Why Mars?, the author lists the reasons that has made the fourth planet in the solar system such an enduring presence in the scientific imagination. Since the invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century, Mars can be observed with a fair degree of accuracy. Dark patches on the surface, the polar caps that wax and wane, waves of darkening that spread across the planet from the poles toward the equator during its spring and summer months: all these observed phenomena have nourished rampant speculation based on analogies to Earth’s seasonal and hydrological cycles. In 1878, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) announced that he had observed canali (channels or canals) criss-crossing its surface. At the end of the nineteenth century, American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) forcefully defended the idea that these canals were built for irrigation by an intelligent civilization. For more than a half century, the canal controversy fueled speculations about an alien race which could enter in contact with mankind. More generally, the discovery of life on Mars or elsewhere in the universe would profoundly alter humankind’s perception of its place in the cosmos: the question: Is there life on Mars? is as important as Copernic’s questioning the place of Earth at the center of the universe.

Our fascination with Mars stems from what Robert Markley calls the interplanetary sublime. According to Immanuel Kant, the sublime is the infinite object that reveals the sublimity of reason. The “starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” fill us with a profound sense of wonder and awe. The spectacle of Mars in science and in literature is indeed sublime and awe-inspiring. Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system. Its main valley stretches for three thousand miles, dwarfing terrestrial analogues and making the Grand Canyon seem “a mere crack on the sidewalk.” Its surface preserves landforms three to four billion years old that provide a window into a geological past that has long since disappeared from Earth. Orbital photographs show evidence of geologically recent lava flows, patterns of water erosion, and meteoric impacts that suggest a complex history of planetary evolution and climate change. The evidence of a once warmer and wetter Mars raises the question of planetary evolution and climate change. The study of Mars involves a multiplicity of sciences including geology, chemistry, hydrology, meteorology, and microbiology, as well as the still virtual disciplines of exobiology and terraforming. The exploration of Mars is a “fundamental science driver”: it pushes the frontiers of science further and provokes the imagination of scientists and writers alike. What we see in Mars also reflects “the moral law within me”: gazing at a distant planet makes our insignificance in the universe palpable. Whether humankind is alone in the universe or one of many intelligent species has profound philosophical and even theological implications. The loss of Mars’s atmosphere and the disappearance of water on its surface also bring lessons close to home: if the geological similarities between Mars and Earth have the same causes, then the history of Mars provides a window into Earh’s possible future. Doing comparative planetology, and understanding the dynamics of planetary climate change, therefore becomes the new rationale for going to Mars.

The planetary imagination

To twenty-first century observers, seeing canals on Mars is a bit like discerning a rabbit on the Moon: a figure of the imagination, a matter of folklore and cultural mythology. It is hard to realize that less than a century ago the issue of Mars canals was a matter of science, not fiction, filling the pages of scientific journals and the popular press. The idea of a plurality of inhabitable worlds has long been debated in speculative philosophy, starting with Greek philosopher Anaximander (610-546 B.C.). Based on observation and calculus, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) placed the sun at the center of the solar system, relegating the Earth to merely another orbiting planet. The Copernician theory provided the impetus for Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to describe precisely the orbits of the planets, although the German astronomer was “almost driven to madness” by the complexity of Mars’s orbit. With the development of the telescope in the seventeenth century, Mars began to be perceived as the most likely candidate in the solar system for harboring an extraterrestrial civilization. Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) and Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) published detailed images of the Martian surface that drew on terrestrial analogies: polar caps, “seas” and “oases” became familiar features of the Martian terrain. In the eighteenth century, the plurality of world hypothesis had been put on a sound scientific footing and was debated by scientists and philosophers alike. Mars’s surface was described with increasing precision, and almost all astronomers who had modern instruments at their disposal made observations of the planet. The mapping of Mars focused primarily on global cycles of temperature, hydrology, and presumed biological activity. But it was Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation of a network of lines on the surface of Mars in 1877 that sparked the most intense controversy. Schiaparelli himself was agnostic about what his canali signified: where they “channels” connecting what was described as oceans, continents, and islands, or “canals” built by an alien civilization?

Robert Markley devotes almost three chapters of Dying Planet to the canal controversy. Forcefully defended by Percival Lowell, it had all the ingredients of a great scientific controversy. It could be boiled down to a simple thesis (canals meant intelligent Martians) and integrated into a grand narrative of planetary evolution (canals were built to counter the desertification of a dying world.) Lowell’s theory operated within the bounds of accepted scientific practice (it used all scientific observations available at the time) and mobilized the rhetoric of scientific objectivity to challenge the values, assumptions, and methods of his opponents (whose refusal to envisage life outside of Earth was denounced as religiously motivated.) Part of the fascination with Mars stemmed from the implicit and explicit lessons which scientists and their readers drew from Lowell’s vision of an advanced civilization struggling to stave off ecological disaster. Lowell’s grand narrative of a dying planet found echoes in the emerging literature of science-fiction writers who mixed the literary genres of utopian novels, adventure narratives, and philosophical speculation. Although H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is by far the best known of the turn-of-the century science-fiction novels, it was by no means an isolated production. Wells’s novel offers a classic dystopian inversion of European imperialism: his blood-drinking Martians pose a horrific challenge to bourgeois complacency, even as they give shape to late Victorian culture’s masochistic fascination with its own demise. Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910) describes a more peaceful encounter between humans and a more advanced Martian civilization in his 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten, published in English in 1971 with a foreword by Wernher von Braun. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, traveling by rolling roads, and utilizing space stations. Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), a Russian physician, philosopher, and Bolshevik revolutionary, describes his Red Star (1908) as a collectivist utopia in the full throes of resource exhaustion and planetary decline. The vanguard socialism of the Martians is carved into the landscape of their planet, with the canals as both cause and effect of Martian collectivism.

How to prove a negative?

Until the 1930s, the canal thesis had enough currency within the scientific community to reinforce a widespread agnosticism about the possibility of intelligent life on Mars. Even as the canal builders retreated into science fiction, the idea of “primitive” life on Mars persisted. Lowell’s paradigm of a dying planet influenced scientific speculation about the composition of the Martian atmosphere, the character of its surface, and the nature of its putative life-forms. After World War II, advances in radiometry and the study of the infrared spectrum gave astronomers new tools with which to study Mars. As the intelligent life hypothesis became more and more improbable, scientists still deduced from the alleged existence of ice, water, and an atmosphere the possibility of vegetative life in the form of lichens and algae. It is hard to prove a negative: the inability to detect signs of life does not signify that life does not—or did not—exist on Mars. Even after the Mariner missions in the mid-1960s brought back photographs showing Mars’s barren surface as inhospitable to life, scientists speculated that oxygen might still be captured in the polar caps, and that bacterial forms of life may have existed in the past and might still be present. Evidence suggested that Mars three billion years ago was comparatively warm and wet. Did life exist in the very distant past on this more hospitable Mars? How had the planet died? Could micro-organisms survive in extreme conditions, as is the case in volcanic or deep sea environments on Earth? A whole discipline, exobiology, grounded on the premise that life may exist beyond Earth, concentrated on the search for signs of life and the study of habitable environments. The ambiguous results of the life-detection experiments conducted during the Viking missions which landed on Mars in 1976 led scientists to lobby for more sophisticated microbiology testings on future NASA landers. The search for life remains a crucial selling point for plans to explore Mars by sending automated rovers and, ultimately, boots on the ground.

In 1948, inspired by the novel of his compatriot Kurd Lasswitz, the rocket physicist and space scientist Wernher von Braun wrote the technical specification for a human expedition to Mars, The Mars Project. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the American astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan was the most vocal advocate of space exploration and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life. Again, he was inspired by the science-fiction novels he read as a teenager: a map representing Edgar Rice Burroughs’s vision of Mars hung on the hallway wall outside his office for more than twenty years. Just as the canals occupied the attention of a generation of scientists, Burroughs’s novels about John Carter and his adventures on the planet he calls Barsoom dominated the interplanetary fiction of the first half of the century. Literature inspired by Mars includes the good, the bad, and the ugly: for a Ray Bradbury and his Martian Chronicles (1950) or a Isaac Asimov’s The Martian Way (1952), how many pulp fictions or comic-book adventures featuring green aliens laying eggs and four-armed tetrapods shooting laser beans? As Robert Markley states in his introduction, “anyone who has read a lot science fiction realizes that much of it is pretty bad.” But the appeal of the genre lies elsewhere: “science fiction does not represent historical experience, but generates simulations of what that experience may become.” Ray Bradbury once said that “Burroughs has probably changed more destinies than any other writer in American history.” The same could be said about himself. Generations of adults (mostly males) had their formative years influenced by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Considering that space exploration lacks the support of vested interests outside of the aerospace industry, science-fiction novels created a constituency for sending missions to the red planet and beyond.

The Mars Society

Inspired by the Lowellian paradigm of a dying planet bearing the mark of ancient civilizations, classic science fiction was obsessed with the idea of intelligent life on Mars. More recent science fiction plays with the idea of bringing life and civilization (back) to Mars: by sending manned missions, establishing a permanent presence, and terraforming the planet. As an emblem of humankind’s interplanetary future, Mars is described both as a dead world that resists human effort to explore, colonize, and transform it and the site of humankind’s next giant leap in its multisecular evolution. These fictions are haunted by the dark underside of colonization and extractive capitalism, and often demystify the masculinist narrative of the conquest of space with a vision of failed social order and technoscientific hubris. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996), the settlement and terraforming of Mars is chronicled through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster. These plans to colonize Mars are no longer science fiction: established in 1998 by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin and backed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, the Mars Society, a nongovernmental organization, has set itself the goal to send humans to Mars and establish a permanent colony in the very near future. In an industry where NASA remains the most expensive game in town, the “new space” industry that operates on a “faster, better, cheaper” basis promotes alternative, low-cost ways of getting humans to Mars and sustain them while they stay on the planet. Robert Markley, who published Dying Planet in 2005, has reservations about the whole endeavor. In his opinion, the Mars Society’s vision of a new American frontier, or a new manifest destiny, “is founded on dubious or simplified readings of American history that repress both the human and ecological consequences of conquest and colonization.” As he concludes, “the ultimate challenge posed by planetary transformation is ultimately as much ethical as it is scientific.”

Social Studies of Space Science

24 Jul 20216 Feb 2024 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, Lisa Messeri, Duke University Press, 2016.**

Placing Outer Space When I heard Lisa Messeri had written an ethnography about space research, my first reaction was: what’s an anthropologist like her doing in a place like this? How can one study outer space with the tools and methods of social science? What is the distinct contribution of the anthropologist in a field dominated by rocket scientists and big bang theoreticians? What can the cosmos teach us about ourselves that is not grounded in hard science and space observatory data? To be sure, there is no anthropos to study in outer space, and other worlds are beyond the grasp of the ethnographer. The sociology of other planets remains a big question mark. So far, you cannot make participatory observation in space stations or conduct fieldwork on Mars. We may hire anthropologists, linguists, semioticians, and indeed all the help we can get when we encounter extraterrestrial civilizations and extraplanetary forms of life; but so far these close encounters of the third type remain the stuff of science-fiction novels and blockbuster movies. But on second thought, an anthropologist in outer space is not completely out of place. Anthropologists have always accompanied explorers and discoverers to the frontiers of human knowledge. They helped us understand alien cultures and foreign civilizations to make them less distant, and drew lessons from their immersion into other worlds for our own society. Anthropologists make the strange and the alien look familiar, and the “view from afar” that they advocate also makes our own planet look alien and unfamiliar. They also help us make sense of science’s results and methods, and have been a trusted if somewhat critical companion of scientific research and laboratory life. Science and technology studies (STS in the jargon) have taught us that natural scientists—contrary to a common prejudice—are never simply depicting or describing reality out there “just as it is”: their research is always characterized by a specific style and colored by the “scientific imagination.”

Bringing space down to Earth

An “anthropology off the Earth” therefore seems like the obvious next step for the discipline when humanity has entered the space age. And indeed, outer space is no longer the exclusive domain of what is usually designated as “hard” science. Today supposedly “messier” or “softer” sciences play an increasing role, exerting significant influence on how the extraterrestrial is portrayed and understood. A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Call it the “four S”: social studies of space science. What unites these efforts is that the many surprises you may encounter “out there” also tell us something about ourselves, here on this planet. Space science gives us access to something that surpasses humanity and yet simultaneously contains it. Astronomy doesn’t stand apart from more earthly pursuits. The quest for an Earth-like planet not only promises a better understanding of places elsewhere in our galaxy but also provides a mirror for examining terrestrial relations from a different perspective. Anthropology can contribute to bringing space science down to Earth by its firm grounding in participant observation, its twin process of familiarization and alienation, and its attention to dimensions that are not spontaneously considered by space scientists: inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity; legacies of colonial and imperial approaches; and terrestrial understandings of nation and nationalism. In a time of post-colonialism, gender equality, and trans-border flows, we must resist the language of “colonization,” “manned” missions, and “frontiers.”

I first used Placing Outer Space as a primer in space and planetary science. Before completing her PhD in MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society, Lisa Messeri took a Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, and is deeply familiar with the environment in which she immersed herself for her fieldwork. Focusing on planetary scientists as the main target of her ethnographic study, she describes the practices and techniques that allow them to transform planets from abstract objects into places full of meanings and considered from the point of view of potential habitability. Her knowledge of planetary science vastly exceeds the few nuggets I retained from junior high school and teenage readings. I was reminded that there used to be water on Mars, and that the Moon and the Earth were once one and the same. I knew about gravitational pull and orbiting ellipses that make planets dance around the Sun in a well-designed choreography. I had to update some basic facts such as the list of planets in the solar system: apparently, Pluto is no longer a planet (says who?, asks Messeri in a 2010 article.) I had vaguely heard of the existence of planets outside the solar system, but I was surprised to learn that the first detection of an extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star only happened in 1995. Before that, exoplanets were a conjecture deduced from statistical reasoning: considering the almost infinite number of stars in the universe, it is only logical that some may have planets orbiting them. By the same token, scientist also deduce the existence of Earth-like planets, and conjecture that a fraction of these planets can also support life. Some physicists speculate on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, and make a probabilistic argument about the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations that may be able to communicate with us (this is called the Drake equation and was first proposed in 1961.)

Finding exoplanets

These dreams and speculations, what Messeri calls the “planetary imagination,” have always animated space research. What is new with modern planetary science is that now these theoretical musings can be backed by hard numbers and observations. Scientist have embarked on a quest to find Earth-like worlds and environments that may be conducive to life on other planets. This is an almost impossible task: Lisa Messeri compares it to spotting a firefly with a searchlight when you are in the East Coast and the searchlight is in California. And yet, since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1995, more than a thousand exoplanets have been confirmed at the time of Messeri’s writing. A more recent estimate indicates that more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered “confirmed.” However, there are thousands of other “candidate” exoplanet detections that require further observations in order to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real. Messeri explains us how this detection and confirmation process works. Telescopes collect starlight and measure how the flux or energy output of a star changes over time. Applying several filters, and separating signal from noise, astronomers are able to detect a U-shaped dip in the light curve: this is the signature of an exoplanet, the sign that a planet has passed in front of a star and has blocked a minuscule fraction of the star’s light. Further tinkering with the data allows the researcher to estimate the distance of the planet from the star and its approximate mass and density. These measures will tell you whether this planet is “habitable,” whether it is made from solid rock and able to sustain water. Based on spectrum data, you can even speculate about the existence of an atmosphere and its temperature. But for the moment, finding and describing an exoplanet is as much a work of science as an art of persuasion: you have to convince colleagues that the squiggle in the data that you detect is indeed the signature of a celestial body. Young scientists-in-training have to learn how to see a stream of data as a planet, as a world. It is the ability to conjure worlds that reinforces the community of exoplanet astronomers. Their faith unites them in the pursuit of the holy grail: the discovery of a planet just like our own orbiting a star like the Sun.

Because of rapid advances in detection and computing technologies, almost all data are digital in observational astronomy nowadays. As a result, its practitioners have become more akin to number crunchers than skywatchers. As Messeri notes, “inspiration might strike while gazing up at the night sky, but the real work happens in front of a computer, and discourse is dominated by methods of data processing and analysis.” In daily conversations, the feeling of excitement comes not from speculating about habitable planets but from marveling over how “clean” the dataset looks. Exoplanet astronomy increasingly relies on space-based telescopes that beam large streams of big data back to Earth. But despite this transition to a remote model of observation, researchers still find it useful to travel regularly to observatories built on mountaintops in exotic locations. Messeri accompanies an exoplanet researcher and her PhD student to the Cerro-Tolol Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in central Chile. Habiting a mountain observatory, even on a temporary basis, is justified on several grounds. It anchors astronomers into the history of their discipline, as old observatories in lower altitudes are often turned into space museums. It is a rite of passage into the profession for aspiring researchers, and generates social interactions and face-to-face collaboration between members of the same epistemic community. It allows astronomers to tinker with the equipment and to interact with technicians. And as Messeri notes, “being at the observatory affords one of the few chances to remember and reconnect with the awesomeness of a dark sky.” Going to faraway places on top of mountains reminds astronomers that the ultimate goal of their quest is to inhabit another world. It is also, in a way, a voyage of conquest and annexation. In conversation with Peter Redfield’s Space in the Tropics, an ethnography on the French space program in French Guiana, the author explores how observatories are “situated in a landscape with multiple histories and ties to the local, even if there are actions (intentional or not) that seek to exclude the local.”

Earth-centrism and post-colonialism

Other aspects links exoplanetary science to a post-colonial enterprise. Finding an exoplanet is by definition an Earth-centered enterprise: an habitable planet is defined as a planet that offers an acceptable environment for human beings. The “habitable zone” circling a certain category of star is defined as a region in which a planet would receive neither too little nor too much heat, and where liquid water and an oxygen atmosphere could be sustained. Due to Earth-centrism and other speciesism bias, we cannot conceive of a place conducive to life that would be devoid of these elements. The vision of Mars as a terrain for exploration and discovery also remains clouded by an Earth-centric bias. In two chapters, Messeri describes how Mars scientists transform the Earth into a Martian kind of place by simulating habitat into extreme desert environments, and how they help to bring Mars down to Earth by mapping its rugged terrain with the help of satellites images and the pictures taken by the Rover missions. By stating that “humanity’s new frontier can only be on Mars,” the Mars Society, which funds the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert, is reinvigorating the rhetoric of exploration, the frontier, and colonization that reminds us of “how the West was won” and populations subjected to the logic of empires. In an age in which a proliferation of new space ventures look set to explore and exploit outer space in the interests of those who are capable of sponsoring such efforts, Messeri warns us about “the inherent hierarchies and exclusions that come with place-making practices.” But she also notes that space exploration, including commercial space flight and space tourism, is in a large part “orthogonal to profit,” and underscores that “the aim of this book is not to unpack the white, American, imperial subtext of invocations of exploration.” Taking the discourse of planetary scientist at face value, she prefers to insist on the moral element that comes with the perception of our place in the cosmos.

As noted earlier, anthropology, with its habit of making the unfamiliar familiar and of looking at our earthly condition from afar, is a welcome companion to space science and the quest for habitable planets. By positioning the Earth as one planet among many on which humans might be capable of living, social studies of outer space can help us to make sense of what it means to be on Earth. The planetary imagination is sustained by the effort to envisage what it is to be like in other worlds. The Mars mission in the Utah desert prepares astronauts to the condition humans could face in a Martian colony. Earth is being transformed into a laboratory of sorts, where scientists experiment with life on other planets. In the process, astronomy is becoming a fieldwork-based science, not unlike anthropology itself. Fieldwork is grounded in a notion that “being there” is a valuable and telling experience, and scientists trained in geology can pierce up a narrative about Mars based on the shapes of dried-up rivers, the tumbling of craters, and the presence of rock concretions. The 3D-mapping of Mars shows the Red Planet on a human scale and allows the user to “see like a rover” by navigating the landscape in an immersive experience similar to the one offered by Google Maps. These open-source maps and user-friendly interfaces assume and thus disseminate an inherent worthwhileness in studying other planets, and act as a recruiting and advocacy tool for NASA. Turning Mars into a place on Earth, and preparing to make an earthly place out of Mars, also helps us to understand our own planet in unfamiliar terms. Earth is literally made alien when seen from outer space, as in the famous Blue Marble image made from the Voyager-1 spacecraft that ushered a new ecological consciousness about the finite resources of our planet. As Messeri notes, “the most prominent legacies of the space age are not prolonged human presence in space and exploration of nearby planets but a new way to observe and study our own planet.” Similarly, the quest for an Earth-like planet is not driven by the hubris to conquer other worlds, but by the belief that humans will finally feel less cosmically alone.

Place-making and being out of place

Lisa Messeri’s distinct contribution in Placing Outer Space lies in her analysis of the role of place in planetary science and astronomy. Drawing from insights ranging from critical geography’s conceptualization of space as a social, historical, and political phenomenon, to Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit, she finds that place-making is central to the work of outer space scientists who transform infinite space into a definite place to be. As she argues, place “is not just a passive canvas on which action occurs but an active way of knowing worlds. Even when place is not self-evident, as perhaps with invisible exoplanets, it is nonetheless invoked and created in order to generate scientific knowledge.” Place transforms the geographically alien into the familiar, and helps us to imagine other planets as habitable worlds. Place is more than a given category; it is a way of knowing and of making sense. It involves the four processes of narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting that are used by scientists to imagine themselves in other worlds. The author sees an irony in the tension between the urge to see planets as places and the increasing sense of placelessness that we experience on Earth. Astronauts and space scientists increasingly spend time away from office or from home, turning a seat and a laptop in a conference venue or in an observatory into a working environment. The need to inhabit a physical space is declining just as the desire to detect a habitable planet is on the rise. With remote access to the Internet and data stocked in clouds, our mode of being seems increasingly disconnected from place. And yet, place is where we long to be, the destination that invites us to make ourselves at home, on Earth as it is in heaven.