Paper short abstract:

Envisioning longer stays in outer space will require creating multispecies ecosystems. This opens existential and ethical questions of how to include and dwell with non-human others in contained spaces.

Paper long abstract:

« It's not a plant, it's a hazard. » A nuclear engineer voiced this concern during work to qualify astronaut Don Pettit's companion species - « a space zucchini » - on board the International Space Station. It stands as a reminder of the technical logics of containment that prevail in spaceflight.

Envisioning longer stays in outer space - whether on a spacecraft or on another planet - will require programs that create multispecies ecosystems. But this opens existential and ethical questions of how to include and dwell with non-human others in contained spaces. Drawing on interviews with space architects, astronauts, microbiologists and biologists actively preparing current and future human presence in space, I will argue that "ecosophical" aspects of human life (Naess, 1990 ; Guattari, 2014), e.g., understandings of the fundamentally interrelational nature of life, are currently treated only as technical problems. I will address changes in traditional western human-centered rationality (Plumwood, 2002) that dwelling with non-human others will require, as the idea of « shared living space » comes into conflict with the technical ethos of control and rationality that has prevailed in space design and mission planning thus far.

This presentation, which is part of a PhD. in philosophy project on ecologies and ecosystems in outer space aims to hybridizing philosophical inquiries and the fabrication of concepts with ethnographical methods. Anthropological approaches of outer space such as Debbora Battaglia's (2016) and Valerie Olson's (2010), and wider multispecies ethnographies are resources mobilized to engage further with those extra-human and extra-gaian worlds.