Anticipatory Knowledge and the Tensions of Anthropocene in Outer Space Research

In recent years, space exploration research has emerged as a field for building anticipatory knowledge to address the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, such as the lack of resources for a planet on which the risks associated with climate change are raging. This contribution investigates the promises, imaginaries and tensions inscribed in MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative), a research project aimed at developing ‘Bioregenerative Life Support Systems’ (BLSSs), by testing farming systems in extreme conditions, such as those of outer space. Through the theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the study analyses the scientific literature on BLSSs to investigate: a) the narrative infrastructures (Felt, 2009) aimed at legitimating technoscientific research on outer space; b) the ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) that underline scientific writings proposing forms of anticipatory knowledge concerning representations of the future and horizons of expectations of life in outer space and on Earth; c) what forms of renegotiation of coexistence between humans and plant organisms are prefigured.

The analysis of these narratives shows how the transformative visions of the future underlying BLSS projects are in tension with the same ecological concerns predicated in those visions; they are oriented by two apparently conflicting, but dialectically linked drives (Scharmen, 2021) - one towards the Earth, the other beyond the latter’s orbit - held together in a single scientific proposal that addresses the challenges for the future of human existence. In the social sciences, this tension gained momentum in the debates over the opposition between different emancipatory futures, emphasised by Bruno Latour’s contrast between the ‘Terrestrial’ - i.e. an orientation towards the recovery of Earth - and the ‘Out-of-this-world’ (Latour, 2017), which could mean to ‘escape’ from the Earth, i.e. to gain freedom from the limits and constraints of our home planet.