an anthropology of creativity and freedom
On August 27 2020 I am scheduled to attend the annual European Astrobiology Network Association Conference. Yet on the same day, NASA is hosting the annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference. Because it is still ‘during the corona’ in the United States and in Europe both conferences have been moved online so I... Continue Reading →
As 2020 wears on, Mars is all over the news. There’s corona, there Black Lives Matter, there’s Beirut, there’s starvation, there’s Hong Kong, there's Trump & Biden, and now there’s Mars. SpaceX has successfully launched astronauts going to the International Space Station from the US for the first time since 2011. I had no idea... Continue Reading →
The great thing about industrious people is that things happen. I’m beginning to wonder if the bad thing about industrious people is the same. The night sky as we now know it is in the process of changing for good. I am talking about Starlink; Elon Musk’s fleet of satellites intended to revolutionize internet speed... Continue Reading →
The map-making angle seems for the longest time to be a dead end. ‘During the corona’ I get the fantastic idea one day that I can interview WASD20 through Zoom. WASD20, whose name it turns out is Nathan, teaches American history at a high school. I quiz him about the economy of youtube channels and... Continue Reading →
In January 2017, the number one grocery product sold through Amazon was a meal replacement drink called Soylent (Watson 2018). Soylent is, according to the company website, an engineered nutrition drink consisting of soyprotein, slow-burning carbs from beets, oleic sunflower oil, and 26 vitamins and minerals. The composition of the drink has been engineered so... Continue Reading →
I find that my fascination with Elon Musk’s endeavors is not universally shared when I contact a colleague from the Department of Biology. As an astrobiologist he is not at all impressed with Elon Musk. In fact, Musk irritates him. Not that he thinks Elon Musk has not done remarkable things, but what bothers him... Continue Reading →
How can I allow myself to be in awe of what Elon Musk does? Didn’t I read what he said about those divers who didn’t want his too complicated and beside-the-point submarine? Haven’t I read Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein (who for some reason for me blur into the same person) and what would they... Continue Reading →
Off the coast of Finland lies an island called SuperShe. It was purchased in 2017 by Kristina Roth, who had recently sold off her $45 million company, Matisia Consultants, to “seek out something even more fulfilling” (Bloom 2018). Or as she put it more bluntly to a room of Latvian tech students during her speech... Continue Reading →
According to Robert Crossley (2011) utopian fiction relocated from Earth to Mars towards the end of the 19th Century. By then most of Earth was mapped and the chances of finding uncharted valleys significantly reduced (ibid.:90). I bought a pile of the utopian novels referred to by Crossley. According to this literature, Mars was the... Continue Reading →
In 1928, Virginia Woolf was asked to give two lectures on the topic of Women and Fiction at two women’s colleges in Cambridge. Her digressions over the title she had been given to lecture on resulted in her book “A Room of One’s Own” (Woolf 1929). Why is it, she pondered, that she was asked... Continue Reading →
Mars: A Room of My Own 