Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with geobiologists and astrobiologists, this paper examines how scientists theorize, handle, and sample aqueous matter - mud, slime, microbial mats - as sites where the intersection between the geo- and the bio- becomes legible.

Paper long abstract

In the 1990s, two fields emerged in parallel at the intersection of microbiology and deep time: geobiology, investigating the co-evolution of life and Earth, and astrobiology, asking how life might arise and persist on other planets. Over the past three decades, these two disciplines have leveraged on water as the meeting point between life and planet, organic and inorganic matter, geological cycles and metabolic loops. “Planets like Mars and Venus,” wrote geologist Peter Westbroek (1991), “have loose, rocky covering, whereas the Earth has muds, mats, soils, peats and sedimentary rocks. Slime is the glue that holds the biosphere together.”

Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with geobiologists and astrobiologists, this paper examines how scientists theorize, handle, and sample aqueous matter - mud, slime, microbial mats - as sites where the intersection between the geo- and the bio- becomes legible. The analysis combines ethnography, interviews, and archival materials to trace a genealogy of water-centered epistemic practices. Yet this paper also tells a counter-history: rather than exploring abstract and computational models of life, it follows scientists into muddy lagoons, hot springs, and intertidal zones on Earth. In doing so, it shows how the co-evolution of life and planets is imagined and experimentally grounded through the material politics of water and acqueous matter.