Conference Reports by Haitian Ma
NASA History News & Notes, Sep 2023
Since the advent of the Space Age, the thrill of escaping terrestrial bonds has been accompanied ... more Since the advent of the Space Age, the thrill of escaping terrestrial bonds has been accompanied by an anxious glance back at Earth. This twofold conjuncture becomes increasingly polarized in the present moment. As renewed geopolitical competitions and privatized interest in space exploration continue, pressing concerns have been raised about the sustainability of the terrestrial environment. One popular motif in both undertakings, notably, is the portrayal of planet Earth in the universe, with all its mystery, beauty and fragility. Yet, this contemporary appeal to planetarity may already find its foundations in centuries of thinking on outer space. The envisioning and latter endeavor of going into space had made humans see the world from a new lens—as a planet in the vast universe.
Probing this intellectual history of outer space and the concurrent process through which the world was turned into a planet was the focus of the recent conference Thinking Outer Space: Philosophy, Astroculture and the Histories of Planetarity, organized by Alexander Geppert (New York/Shanghai) and Rory Rowan (Dublin) held at NYU Berlin from 19 to 21 July 2023. Through nine thematically-organized and chronologically arranged panels, 45 participants from all over the world examined the notion of planetarity — the thinking of Earth as a planet — from numerous historical lineages and philosophical contexts. The conference also facilitated exchange across disciplines, bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and scholars of religion and sociologists. The goal, as Geppert and Rowan pointed out, was to collectively develop a “canon” of space thinking across intellectual traditions, and understand how space history and astroculture contributes to contemporary discussions around planetarity.
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Conference Reports by Haitian Ma
Probing this intellectual history of outer space and the concurrent process through which the world was turned into a planet was the focus of the recent conference Thinking Outer Space: Philosophy, Astroculture and the Histories of Planetarity, organized by Alexander Geppert (New York/Shanghai) and Rory Rowan (Dublin) held at NYU Berlin from 19 to 21 July 2023. Through nine thematically-organized and chronologically arranged panels, 45 participants from all over the world examined the notion of planetarity — the thinking of Earth as a planet — from numerous historical lineages and philosophical contexts. The conference also facilitated exchange across disciplines, bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and scholars of religion and sociologists. The goal, as Geppert and Rowan pointed out, was to collectively develop a “canon” of space thinking across intellectual traditions, and understand how space history and astroculture contributes to contemporary discussions around planetarity.
Probing this intellectual history of outer space and the concurrent process through which the world was turned into a planet was the focus of the recent conference Thinking Outer Space: Philosophy, Astroculture and the Histories of Planetarity, organized by Alexander Geppert (New York/Shanghai) and Rory Rowan (Dublin) held at NYU Berlin from 19 to 21 July 2023. Through nine thematically-organized and chronologically arranged panels, 45 participants from all over the world examined the notion of planetarity — the thinking of Earth as a planet — from numerous historical lineages and philosophical contexts. The conference also facilitated exchange across disciplines, bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and scholars of religion and sociologists. The goal, as Geppert and Rowan pointed out, was to collectively develop a “canon” of space thinking across intellectual traditions, and understand how space history and astroculture contributes to contemporary discussions around planetarity.