Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the legacy of the Nazi regime's exploitation of the night sky in the 1949 novel 'Project Mars,' written by Wernher von Braun. It questions the ways in which the idea of the 'post-planetary' can attract imaginaries of annihilation.

Paper long abstract:

The secret state police in Nazi Berlin [the Gestapo] exploited the urban night to launch home invasions because operating under darkness minimized the likelihood of encountering resistance. Assembling lists of ‘political enemies,’ including but not limited to German Jews, communists, and homosexuals, they sought to apprehend victims in the midst of slumber, caught unaware and unable to evade detention and deportation. Darkness formed the foundation for the practice of systematically collecting innocents and served as a means to keep the extent of state surveillance and terror hidden from the wider public through reduced visibility.

At the same time that the regime was intertwining its arrest culture with a planetary cycle, it was funding research at astronomical observatories in Berlin to surveil, collect, and catalogue celestial phenomena as part of its program of space exploration, which included the development of new weapons technologies. While the regime exploited the night sky to consolidate power on Earth, so too did it “look up” with the megalomanic ambition of transforming the solar system into a future sphere of influence. This paper assess Nazi ambitions to occupy, regulate, and expand authority into darkness through a rather unlikely source: a failed science fiction novel written by SS rocket scientist Wernher von Braun four years after the collapse of the Third Reich. It demonstrates that the imagined idea of ‘total power’ was by no means limited to the terrestrial and could even outlive the dictatorship itself.

Paper short abstract:

B2 had two aims: better understanding of Earth’s life-support capacity, and its application to bioregenerative, off-planet inhabitation. This paper analyzes emergent tensions between Ecological, Earth Systems, and Engineering approaches to constructing Cabin Ecologies, and B2’s surprising outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

Biosphere 2’s “Human Experiment” [B2] was the most comprehensive synthetic, bioregenerative, long-duration, life-support enclosure experiment ever conducted. Conceived and produced by a diverse group of interdisciplinary designers, its building envelope was designed to be materially closed but energetically open, operating similarly to Earth’s gravitational well. Its enclosure, more than two orders of magnitude tighter than the space shuttle, required the invention of synthetic environments, uniquely engineered eco-technologies, and design processes. B2 needed a robust probabilistic design approach, one capable of producing a successful bioregenerative ‘synthetic laboratory’ environment that not only accounted for all the parameters necessary to sustain life, but that simultaneously incorporated means to address the indeterminacy inherent in living systems, and the inevitable interpretive flexibility required for successful on-the-fly technological adaptations. Inspired by Ecological Systems Theory [EST] Diagramming, the Biospherians developed their own generative and representational design approach comprised of bubbles, arrows, and the accounting of stocks and flows between them, which facilitated the quantification of biogeochemical transformations, that simultaneously functioned as a Rosetta Stone for communication among experts across the diverse, and siloed, disciplines and knowledge systems required to produce B2. This paper unpacks tensions, and unintended consequences, of how the Biospherians accomplished their design, leveraging Ecological, Earth Systems, and Engineering approaches. It then analyzes emergent outcomes of living inside the “Human Experiment” which included significant troubleshooting of their life-supporting environment, and some of the surprising environmental outcomes which hold significant value for future long-duration, life-supporting, bioregenerative, off-planet exploration and inhabitation.

Paper short abstract:

The representation of the Earth, the exploration of its most remote places and the idea of the environment are elements that are intertwined in the history of geographical thought and its visual mobilities. This paper reconstructs three of the most fundamental moments in its most recent development.

Paper long abstract:

Space exploration in the 20th century made it possible to collect a vast amount of visual material depicting the Earth floating in space. This new perspective is widely regarded as a key factor in raising awareness of the finiteness of the planet's resources and consequently, in setting limits to economic development in relation to environmental issues. This was only a part of a longer process in geographical thought, which began at the end of the 18th century, with the shift of the representation of the Earth as a sphere in space from the visual imagery of astronomy to geological representations: this process would later include at least two other fundamental steps. Starting from some examples taken from ongoing research, the first part of this paper sets out to show how the exploration of hot deserts, linked to colonization projects of the mid-19th century, contributed to the imagination and representation of the Earth as seen from space in Western scientific illustrations. The second part looks at the role of the exploration of cold deserts (the poles) and its representation at the beginning of the 20th century, seen as a fundamental push towards desiring to explore outer space and other planets. The last part contains a summary of the visual mobilities which have criss-crossed along the various paths taken to explore the environments of our planet, culminating in the desire to go beyond it.