[HN Gopher] Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multi... ___________________________________________________________________ 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"? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-11 23:00 UTC)