The signature of life: Designing the astrobiological imagination

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 23, 2006, Pages 67-95

  Helmreich, Stefan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 65849155708     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/grey.2006.1.23.66     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Hillel Schwartz, Century's End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York: Doubleday, 1990)
2. D.S. McKay, E.K. Gibson Jr., et al., "Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001," Science 273 (1996): 924-930
3. Astrobiology 1, no. 1 (2001)
4. P.J. Boston et al., "Cave Biosignature Suites: Microbes, Minerals, and Mars," Astrobiology 1, no. 1 (2001): 25-56
5. For further work on Mars, microbes, and the poles, see B.M. Jakosky et al., "Subfreezing Activity of Microorganisms and the Potential Habitability of Mars' Polar Regions," Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 343-350
6. To be sure, scientists have been looking for microbes on Mars since the Viking voyages of the 1970s. See Norman H. Horowitz, "The Search for Life on Mars," Scientific American 287 (1977): 57-58
7. S. Kempe and J. Kazmierczak, "Biogenesis and Early Life on Earth and Europa: Favored by an Alkaline Ocean?" Astrobiology 2, no. 1 (2002): 123-130
8. See also R. Cavicchioli, "Extremophiles and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life," Astrobiology 2, no. 3 (2002): 281-292. Europa has been a favorite site for science fiction speculation about extraterrestrial life, notably in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010
9. See Steven Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
10. and B.S. Blumberg, "The NASA Astrobiology Institute: Early History and Organization," Astrobiology 2, no. 3 (2003): 464
11. On the early history of exobiology, see Audra J. Wolfe. "Germs in Space: Joshua Lederberg, Exobiology, and the Public Imagination, 1958-1964," Isis 93 (2002): 183-205
12. and Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
13. Monica Grady, Astrobiology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian), 81
14. D.J. Des Marais, M.O. Harwit, et al., "Remote Sensing of Planetary Properties and Biosignatures on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets," Astrobiology 2, no. 2 (2002): 153-181
15. D.S. McKay, S. Clemett, et al., "Recognizing and Interpreting Biosignatures, Abstract #12873 (Oral Presentation) - The Classification of Biosignatures," Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 625
16. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996)
17. Hillel Schwartz, "De-Signing," Critical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2001): 55-65
18. Another recent discussion of the uses of Schwartz's copying work can be found in a 2002 issue of Cultural Analysis (3) on Copies/Reproduction/Seriality, http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/caforum/volume3/vol3-toc.html (accessed 5 February 2004)
19. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 17
20. Karen N. Werner, review of The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz, Social Problems Forum: The SSSP Newsletter, 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997), http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/148/ pageid/225 (accessed 9 January 2006)
21. Schwartz, "De-Signing," 55
22. See Sarah Franklin, "Life Itself" (paper prepared for the "Detraditionalisation" Conference, Centre for Cultural Values, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, 3 June 1993)
23. Damien Neva, "Finding Terrestrial Intelligence in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (unpublished paper, New York University, 2001)
24. A vast literature by SETI advocates seeks carefully to parse the philosophical and technological issues at stake here; see Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997)
25. Hillel Schwartz, "The Indefensible Ear," in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 487-501 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2003), 489
26. Hillel Schwartz, "Noise and Silence: The Soundscape of Spirituality" (paper presented at the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace "Realizing the Ideal: The Responsibility of the World's Religions" seminar, section IV: "Religion and the Ideal Environment," Seoul, 20-27 August 1995), http://www.nonoise.org/library/ noisesil/noisesil.htm
27. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 276
28. Sebastian von Hoerner, "Universal Music?" Psychology of Music 2, no. 2 (1974): 18-28
29. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Science: Goals," http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/science/goals.html
30. For foundational thinking about the mathematics of chirality and of various kinds of symmetry more broadly, see Hermann Weyl, Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952)
31. On the chemistry of life, see Bruce Jakosky's The Search for Life on Other Planets (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
32. Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 45
33. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Volumes 7-8, ed. Arthur Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1931-1935, 1958)
34. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1970)
35. See Marjorie Garber, Quotation Marks (New York: Routledge, 2003) for more on the multiple uses of these devices
36. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 328
37. D.J. Des Marais, L.J. Allamandola et al., "The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap," Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 233
38. David Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 184
39. Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 196
40. For a complementary discussion of how cellular life-as-we-know-it gathered animacy through filmic and computer-graphical animations, see Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, "A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-systems, and Film," Grey Room 17 (2004): 30-63. Like biosignatures, animations fold representational strategies into the logic of life itself
41. David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (New York: Ecco, 2003), 35
42. Doyle, Wetwares, 25
43. http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/science/life/
44. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (Columbia Records, 1978)
45. See Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 228-266
46. Schwartz, "De-Signing," 55
47. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000)
48. On torque, see Hillel Schwartz, "Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century," in Zone 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 70-126 (Ottawa, Canada: Bradbury Tamblyn and Boorne Ltd., distr. MIT Press, 1992)
49. See also Stefan Helmreich, "Torquing Things Out: Race and Classification in Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its Consequences," Science, Technology, and Human Values 28, no. 3 (2003): 435-440
50. Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
51. See R.F. Knacke, "Possibilities for the Detection of Microbial Life on Extrasolar Planets," Astrobiology 3, no. 3 (2003): 537
52. See Doyle. On biochemical specificity and cryptography, see Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
53. See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1980)
54. For a critique of autopoiesis that misses this point, see Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004)
55. McKay, Gibson et al. See also A.H. Treiman, "Submicron Magnetite Grains and Carbon Compounds in Martian Meteorite ALH84001: Inorganic, Abiotic Formation by Shock and Thermal Metamorphism," Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 369-392
56. A. Steele et al., "The Microbiological Contamination of Meteorites: A Null Hypothesis" (paper presented at the First Astrobiology Science Conference, NASA Ames Research Center, Ames, Iowa, 3-5 April 2000)
57. Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 325
58. See "Wittgenstein on Mars," http://www.georgecoates.org/OnMars/
59. K.L. Thomas-Keprta et al., "Abstract #12641 - Biogenic Magnetite Crystals in Martian Meteorite ALH84001," Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 606
60. J. Toporski and A. Steele, "Abstract #12676 - The Relevance of Bacterial Biomarkers in Astrobiological Research: Setting a Standard," Astrobiology 2, no. 4 (2002): 608
61. S.L. Cady et al., "Morphological Biosignatures and the Search for Life on Mars," Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2003): 352. The debate goes on, with some researchers supporting the biotic origin of ALH84001 with studies in biomineralization and others contesting biogenesis through work on non-biological crystal morphology. The detection of analogous shapes through an appeal to amplification has been crucially questioned as the royal road to reading signs of life in ALH84001
62. M.C. Malin and K.S. Edgett, "Evidence for Recent Ground Water Seepage and Surface Runoff on Mars," Science 288 (2000): 2325-2330
63. See also M.D. Max and S.M. Clifford, "Initiation of Martian Outflow Channels: Related to the Dissociation of Gas Hydrate?" Geophysical Review Letters 28 (2001): 1787-1790
64. Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 102
65. W. Charles Lamb, "Letter to Dr. Walter S. Adams, Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, 7/26/28," in No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (Supplement to a Chain of Flowers Volume IV, Number 7, Guide Leaflet Number 5), ed. Sarah Simmons (West Covina, CA: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993)
66. For a Creationist interpretation of the imbalance of right- and left-handed compounds in biotic nature, see Jonathan Sarfati, "Origin of Life: The Chirality Problem," TJ 12, no.3 (December 1998): 263-266, http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i3/chirality.asp
67. P.H. Figueredo et al., "Locating Potential Biosignatures on Europa from Surface Geology Observations," Astrobiology 3, no. 4 (2003): 852
68. K. Khurana, M.G. Kivelson, and C. Russell, "Searching for Liquid Water in Europa by Using Surface Observatories," Astrobiology 2, no. 1 (2002): 93-103
69. Hillel Schwartz, "Hearing Aids: Sweet Nothings, or an Ear for an Ear," in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham, 43-59 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996)
70. J.B. Dalton et al., "Near-Infrared Detection of Potential Evidence for Microscopic Organisms on Europa," Astrobiology 3, no. 3 (2003): 505
71. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "Calibration Targets," http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft-instru-calibr.html
72. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "Revealing Mars' True Colors: Part Two" (28 January 2004), http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/ a13-20040128.html
73. P.C.W. Davies, "Does Life's Rapid Appearance Imply a Martian Origin?" Astrobiology 3, no. 4 (2003): 675
74. BLUR.CO.UK, http://www.blur.co.uk/site.html
75. See Doyle, On Beyond Living
76. and Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)
77. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
78. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 168
79. Paul de Man, "Autobiography as Defacement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 81. Blumberg's "The NASA Astrobiology Institute" is alive to this doubleness. Writing of "the question 'What is life and how is it characterized?'" Blumberg offers that "allied with this is an understanding of death: 'When does life cease, and how can its effects be detected and measured in fossil remains and in the influences that life has on its environment that remain after the disappearance of the living material?'" Blumberg, 465
80. A further discussion of defacement can be found in Bernadette Wegenstein's "Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete," Configurations 10 (2002): 221-259. Wegenstein argues that not only has faciality been dispersed across the skin - Deleuze and Guattari's argument - but the interiority for which it stands has been allowed to inhabit a plurality of organs: "It is not necessarily behind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obsolete. ... In short, any body part has the potential to become this special 'window to the soul,'" at 233-234. We could say the same for "life" in astrobiology; it has migrated onto other planets
81. A lovely elaboration of this etymological connection can be found in James Hamilton-Paterson, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds (New York: Random House, 1992)
82. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723-742
83. I ask, then, as Peter Galison puts it, that "theory arrive ... in a more piecemeal way, with concepts as tools to disrupt texts, images, and experience." Peter Galison, "Specific Theory," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 4 (2004): 380
84. Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 178
85. Hillel Schwartz, "Toys, Poise, sod Noise: A Review of Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, by Gary Cross, Meetings, Manners and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour, by Wilbert van Vree, and Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts," Journal of Unconventional History 11, no. 2 (2000): 110
86. For a discussion of the metaphor of fluid mechanics in the work of Bruno Latour, see T. Hugh Crawford, "Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour," Configurations 5, no. 1 (1007): 1-21
87. Andrew Pickering, "The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science," American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559-589
88. Joseph Rouse, "What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?" Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 74
89. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "Introduction," in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1-2
90. Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7
91. On the matter of modeling mistakes, Maurer quotes here from Roy Wagner, An Anthropology of the Subject (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xiii
92. Schwartz, Century's End, 212