AffordanceFuturism
Socio-material Relations for the Extraterrestrial HumanWilliam Stewart
The everyday presence of and reliance on orbital infrastructure has made humanity’s engagement with the cosmos seem commonplace. Connections to and relations with the cosmos have never been closer: satellite constellations guide and inform everyday life, multiple iterations of human habitats support life off Earth, and robotic explorers extend our senses far wider than ever before. The collective imagination thus turns to an extraterrestrial form of humanity—one which inhabits the stars and Earth is no longer the sole primary residence.
From the early orbits of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the interstellar robotic Voyager probes through to the International Space Station, Tiangong space station, James Webb Space Telescope and multiple Lunar and Mars rovers, Earth’s cosmic impression is ever-expanding and pushing the envelope of possibility to permanent extraterrestrial habitats for biological life. Infrastructures, Akhil Gupta (2018: 63) argues, are ‘concrete instantiations of visions of the future’ that inform ‘the present through a politics of anticipation’. The presence of orbital infrastructure, gazing both earthward and towards the expanse of the universe reveals a dynamic environment and renders distant locales ever closer. This rendering of the cosmos as within grasp affords humanity the possibility to imagine acting in and with places beyond Earth.
I draw on the ‘promise of infrastructure’ (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018) and outer space affordance (Döbler and Carbon 2023) to explore the role of orbital infrastructure in advancing and articulating the promise of humanity’s cosmic future. Orbital infrastructure affords visions of a future for life off Earth.
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