[HN Gopher] Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multi...
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       Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multispecies
       Spaceflight (2017)
        
       Author : drdee
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-04-08 18:16 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (read.dukeupress.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (read.dukeupress.edu)
        
       | wombatmobile wrote:
       | > Now that humans had successfully defied the strictures of
       | planetary life by techno-scientifically engineering ways to live
       | beyond its bounds, the possibilities for subjecting the natural
       | world to total human control seemed boundless.
       | 
       | Really?
       | 
       | > ... the machinic and biological relations attendant to
       | spaceflight--whether real or imagined--yield a disjunctive
       | meeting point between the quotidian practices of daily cabin life
       | and the historical processes of erasure deployed to enact
       | particular techno-culturo-imperial fantasies.
       | 
       | Oh...
       | 
       | > Underpinning the rhetorical bravado of the preternatural
       | cowboy-astronaut are a host of interspecies and sociotechnical
       | maintenance practices that sustain a biologically feeble human in
       | the extreme, and extremely threatening, environment of outer
       | space. Indeed, as Peter Sloterdijk reminds us, "perfect
       | smoothness" is only possible in idealization, while in reality,
       | "the rough and the real converge": considered through its
       | practices, the history of spaceflight becomes one riddled with
       | precarity, instability, and fallibility.
       | 
       | Isn't that why NASA invented "space food sticks"?
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-11 23:00 UTC)