The prospect of human societies being made anew on other planets is a powerful recurring theme in popular culture and speculative technoscience. I explore what Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers to analyzing how the future is made and contested in present-day endeavors to establish humans as multiplanetary subjects. I focus on the case of Mars One—an initiative that aims to establish a human settlement on Mars in the 2020s—and discuss interviews undertaken with some of the individuals who have volunteered to be the first humans to live on Mars, drawing on STS work on futures and sociotechnical imaginaries and scholarly discussions of utopia. Seeing themselves as part of a project that would start to “establish what it means to live on another planet,” I discuss how interviewees talked about how sociotechnical relations could be remade in the future, both on Earth and on Mars, through the pursuit of this technoscientific project. I conclude that this project is an expression of a multiplanetary imaginary of human beings no longer subject to Earth—but, through sociotechnical inventiveness, able to live on other planets.
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Book
Vertesi, Janet Amelia;
(2015)
Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars
(/isis/citation/CBB001510006/)
Article
Sergio Urueña;
(2022)
Anticipation and modal power: Opening up and closing down the momentum of sociotechnical systems
(/isis/citation/CBB466032431/)
Thesis
Evan Moritz;
(2021)
Interplanetary Interventions: Performative Possibilities for Anti-Colonialist Visions of Mars
(/isis/citation/CBB298027979/)
Book
Conway, Erik M.;
(2015)
Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars
(/isis/citation/CBB001422612/)
Thesis
Vertesi, Janet Amelia;
(2009)
“Seeing Like a Rover”: Images in Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission
(/isis/citation/CBB001561212/)
Book
Lisa Messeri;
(2016)
Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds
(/isis/citation/CBB151926948/)
Article
Volland, Nicolai;
(2014)
Comment on “Let's Go to the Moon”
(/isis/citation/CBB001214667/)
Book
McMillen, Kelly R.;
(2000)
The Case for Mars VI: Making Mars an Affordable Destination
(/isis/citation/CBB000112079/)
Article
Bell, Jim;
(2003)
Once and Future Mars
(/isis/citation/CBB000300381/)
Book
Lambright, W. Henry;
(2014)
Why Mars: NASA and the Politics of Space Exploration
(/isis/citation/CBB001550039/)
Book
Hubbard, Scott;
(2011)
Exploring Mars: Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery
(/isis/citation/CBB001251289/)
Book
Zara Mirmalek;
(2020)
Making Time on Mars
(/isis/citation/CBB714285733/)
Thesis
Mirmalek, Zara Lenora;
(2008)
Solar Discrepancies: Mars Exploration and the Curious Problem of Inter-Planetary Time
(/isis/citation/CBB001561225/)
Article
Reichmann, Werner;
(December 2013)
Epistemic participation: How to produce knowledge about the economic future
(/isis/citation/CBB580792249/)
Article
Russo, Arturo;
(2011)
Europe's Path To Mars: The European Space Agency's Mars Express Mission
(/isis/citation/CBB001220818/)
Article
John Gardner;
Gabrielle Samuel;
Clare Williams;
(November 2015)
Sociology of Low Expectations: Recalibration as Innovation Work in Biomedicine
(/isis/citation/CBB250077809/)
Article
Jenny Andersson;
Erik Westholm;
(2019)
Closing the Future: Environmental Research and the Management of Conflicting Future Value Orders
(/isis/citation/CBB589179620/)
Article
Vertesi, Janet;
(2012)
Seeing Like a Rover: Visualization, Embodiment, and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission
(/isis/citation/CBB001250747/)
Article
Seungmi Chung;
Kun Hee Kim;
Yeseul Park;
Hyomin Kim;
(2021)
A Site of Bounded Imaginaries: Local Narratives of Buan after Protests against a Nuclear Waste Repository
(/isis/citation/CBB959012966/)
Article
Britt Paris;
(September 2021)
The Internet of Futures Past: Values Trajectories of Networking Protocol Projects
(/isis/citation/CBB589331477/)
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