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Unfolding the Space Between Stars: Anthropology of the Interstellar
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Description: In this anthropological account of the “interstellar” – the vast expanses of outer space between the stars – I take interstellar travel as an object of ethnographic study. First, I examine three interstellar space projects: NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft; 100 Year Starship’s manifesto on their quest to travel to another star; and SETI’s search for life in the universe. Finally, I turn to corresponding examples of interstellar travel in speculative fiction. In 2013, NASA announced a transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as the “sound of interstellar space” and marked it as crossing a boundary into the “space between stars.” Organizations like 100 Year Starship and the Interstellar Message Composition program at SETI describe interstellar travel in terms of spacecraft, listening for signals, and active transmission. Fiction and science also co-render humans into interstellar scale via speculative technologies like artificial intelligence, instantaneous travel across the universe by “folding space,” and the “generation ship,” in which generations of crewmembers live and die during a multi-year voyage to another star. This ethnography of interstellar ontologies across multiple sites and scales builds on feminist science studies (Haraway), recent work on abstractions as scientific things (Helmreich), and the concept of hyperobjects – non-human entities that are massively distributed in time and space (Morton). As interstellar space moves between abstraction, text, place, and object, I find that it unfolds to reveal a constellation of potentially inhabited worlds inscribed by both scientists and speculative fiction; what was remote, insensate, and desolate becomes intimate, poetic, inhabited. Keywords: Science; Speculative Fiction; Object-Oriented Ontology; Deconstruction; Space Please cite as: Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2015. “Unfolding the Space Between Stars: Anthropology of the Interstellar.” SocArXiv, Open Science Framework. Manuscript, submitted February 4, 2017. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/r4ghb/ A version of this paper was presented as: Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2015. Unfolding the Space Between Stars: Anthropology of the Interstellar. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, November 21.