Extracting Life: Open Pit Mines on a Mars Analog

Rio Tinto, in the South West of Spain, is a landmark point in the history of the mining industry. Today, it is also well known as a Mars analog. This presentation follows the research practices of a team of astrobiologists that are digging boreholes in the Spanish mining site in order to extract data on subsurface life to be used in shaping searches for life on the red planet. But the metaphor of extraction is too easy. The relations between scientific practices and the activities of mining corporations are not so simple. Instead, the specificities of this case point towards a more complicated pattern. One that is not only made of similarities, but also of significant differences. One that pushes us to take the metaphor seriously and, simultaneously, to tame and complicate it. The landscape of Rio Tinto, then, emerges as a space where uneasy relations are negotiated, made and unmade, and where science and mining weave with and repel each other. This allows me to imagine how extraction can be put to use in our theorization. In fact, it both relocates the practices of extracting in specific materialsemiotic context and it adapts to and thrives in the cracks between astrobiology and mining. Both the extractive industry and scientific research emerge transformed from these encounters, opening up what extraction could be, and the logic it might carry with it.