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Short abstract

This paper offers a feminist reimagining of the futures of AI in astrobiology. Combining philosophy, critical theory, and speculative fiction, 'alliance astrobiology' envisions futures of human-AI transformation made possible by an active embrace of epistemic diversity in both humans and machines.

Long abstract

This paper offers a feminist reimagining of the futures of AI in astrobiology: the study of the origin, distribution, and evolution of life in the universe. The integration of AI in astrobiology has redefined the form and structure of knowledge production in this arena, transforming understandings of the cosmos through the interplay of human and machine knowledges. This paper seeks to ascertain the limits of this transformation when the field is envisioned through the lens of a non-biocentric feminist epistemology. From this perspective, epistemic evolution occurs when divergent forms of knowledges are brought into contact. In the era of AI, this demands not only an embrace of peripheralised human knowledges, but an embrace of the epistemic powers of the machine, an inhuman knower that expands access to reality through computational methods. This paper unifies feminist philosophy and critical theory with speculative fiction to envision 'alliance astrobiology': alternative futures in which the unification of divergent forms of human and machine knowledges are embraced to transform what the human can become. The task is not only to speculate on the possibilities of feminist technofutures, but to use such visions as a novel site for reflection, to critically analyse the architectures of inclusion and exclusion that characterise astrobiology today.