M.

"A society that refuses to protect our habitat, rejects the diversity that makes us most innovative and adaptable, and fears innocent people fleeing for their lives is not a society ready or able to move into space." sapiens.org/culture/space-…

"Speculative ethnography is built from the same stuff as scientific ethnographic work, while also bringing seemingly distant possibilities into the time and space of ongoing history." culanth.org/fieldsights/fi…

People often marvel at how some science fiction authors wrote as if they could see the future. This is because those writers were doing speculative social science through their fiction; they observed and analyzed the factors shaping the past and the present.

"What good is any anthropology that doesn’t imagine better lives and futures, and then work to make them real?" @OmanReagan in our specualtive anthropologies series: culanth.org/fieldsights/fi…

"If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there." — Gene Roddenberry

“Sexism in the Oxford Dictionary of English” by @OmanReagan medium.com/space-anthropo…

2016: "Tay started to agree with racist and white supremacist posts from social media users and went so far as to deny the Nazi Holocaust, tweet 'feminism is cancer,' and make transphobic statements... Microsoft shut her down after less than a day online." sapiens.org/culture/messag…

"Looking at Earth, extraterrestrials might see nuclear weapons, fascist governments, surveillance states, racism, intolerance, torture, poverty, hunger, and inequality amid abundance." sapiens.org/culture/messag…

Space colonizers often promote a regressive fantasy of technological and civilizational progress. A techno-utopian priesthood preaching to a choir of tech-bros across a globalized Silicon Valley, singing the praises of a CEO’s imagined city on Mars. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

"How can we confront the limitless wonder of the cosmos if we can’t confront our own death?" Meditation on Death for Planet of People, 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia sixchairsbooks.org/Lithuanian-Spa…

The Interstellar: "unfolds to reveal a constellation of inhabited worlds ... What was remote, insensate, and desolate out there in the space between the stars becomes intimate, poetic, and inhabited down here on Earth." punctumbooks.com/titles/anthrop…

"The Social Sciences Interdisciplinarity for Astronomy and Astrophysics -- Lessons from the History of NASA and Related Fields" arxiv.org/abs/1907.07800

"We are composed of microbial worlds and situated within multiple relations among many communities—from microbial aggregates to networks of species, planetary ecosystems, and beyond to solar system ecologies." sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

"The very practices humanity would need in order to survive in space colonies or on another planet like Mars are those we fail to engage in here and now on Earth." sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

"The future-as-possibility must exist if we want to break the foundations of a seemingly inescapable, unrelenting, fascist now." culanth.org/fieldsights/fi…

"Humanity's long-term future in space will be shaped by our short-term visions for who goes there and how..." (arxiv.org/abs/1708.05318) cambridge.org/core/journals/…

"As we think about extraterrestrial intelligence it’s helpful to remember humans are not the only intelligent life on Earth." scientificamerican.com/article/can-ar…

"We know so little about what might constitute life, intelligence, minds, sentience, and other factors, that I think we should approach everything we encounter as though it might be more than we assume." diaphanes.net/titel/xenoling…

"It is a rare occurrence when researchers experience complete resonance—a profound connection to what they have encountered, one that facilitates a deeper understanding of something that might not actually be present." — Lisa Messeri savageminds.org/2017/02/23/the…

"What would it mean to host extraterrestrial guests? How do we imagine hosting the truly alien?" sapiens.org/culture/extrat…

"It is impossible for any text to exist outside of society, as both its creation and its use are colored by cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices. Real people rooted in cultural contexts build, read, and interact with the dictionary." sapiens.org/language/dicti…