Astrobiopoetics: Will Alexander, Stellar Scale, and the Other Anthropos
摘要
It is a noteworthy paradox that the Anthropocene subject, endowed with ever-expanding horizons of objective knowledge—and despite the massive expansion of its technosphere, along with the ever-vaster scale of the negative commons—seems to be becoming ever more self-enclosed and limited in its intellectual horizons. A symptom of this is the dialectical framing most common in ecological discourse: the world as a globe opposed to the local. That leaves out the moon, the stars, and even much of the exploited world. We can now see exoplanets and other galaxies thanks to space telescopes. We live on an Earth-ringed round with constellations of commercial satellites orbited by a moon soon to be equipped with a 5G network. These expanses offer insight, disorientation, hope, and despair. They are also an increasingly political environment, playing a key role in uneven extraterrestrial development. Yet in most ecological discourse, from poetry to philosophy to politics, they remain consigned to an irrelevant, ignored, or repressed outside.