MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper analyses astrobiology as a cosmopolitical project: the ways in which astrobiological “sense-making” practices do political, cultural, ontological, and ethical work as much as they do scientific work. More specifically, this paper argues that astrobiology is engaged in the crafting of a new “origin myth” that makes sense of humanity’s place in the universe during our transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. In doing so, this paper uses ecocritical methods to trace the ways in which astrobiology employs scientific methodologies and engages with popular culture to do four kinds of major work found in origin myths: telling the origin story, demarcating the boundaries between self and the Other, giving normative guidance, and declaring a shared societal purpose. Of astrobiology’s various posthuman mythical innovations due to the Anthropocene, perhaps the most impactful is the incorporation of temporality into framings of “the local.” Boundaries of “self” and “Other” in the Anthropocene can no longer be cleanly drawn via the demarcation of owned territorial spaces, as in the case of the Israelite wanderers or the myth of Manifest Destiny. Nor can they be drawn biologically; our material-cultural enmeshment with the world and the ecosystem makes impotent the species-centered identities of Darwin and Spencer. Rather, the self-Other distinction of the Anthropocene must also take into account matters of temporality; the locality of our tribe is bounded by territory, blood, and time. Few would now argue, for example, that it is not in our “local” self-interest to protect what remains of the lifeworld in the Anthropocene. Instead, our temporal definitions of the local change—should we strive to protect our lifeworld of 100 years from now, or our lifeworld of next fiscal quarter? Here, moral imperatives change depending on how the “local” is rhetorically framed and ontologized.