This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

The Offworld Rubbish Project

Offworld Rubbish

What is it to be a member of a species for whom the discards and remainders of their technological capacities are populating territory beyond the planet that species inhabits? This is the working research question animating a very new line of inquiry for me: analyzing the discards and remainders of human extraterrestrial activity. Though it is a new line of research, it is a direct offshoot of my existing research on electronic waste. Much of the discards and remainders I am interested in for this new project are electronic or packed full of them. They are many other things as well - nuclear, chemical, biological among them - and these will be part of the investigation as the project unfolds.

I use the term 'offworld rubbish' for its genre bending capacities.'Offworld rubbish' is easier to remember than 'the discards and remainders of human extraterrestrial activity. And not all offworld rubbish arises offworld: vast terrestrially based infrastructures must exist so that human beings and their technologies may operate extraterestrially. Those infrastructures have attendant discards and remainders as well. 'Offworld rubbish' also captures in a useful way the deadly serious play between genres of science and fiction that are so baked into everyday life (not everyone's equally or everywhere, to be sure) - and here I have in mind a vast constellation of work in science and technology studies (STS) that inspires this project of which I would point to Donna Haraway as an especially important thinker. Her notion of the 'science fictional' and 'staying with the trouble' help me think about and analyze offworld rubbish.

One of the operating assumptions of the Offworld Rubbish Project is that the discards and remainders of human extraterrestrial activity are banal. They are not special. They are a norm in excess of the action from which they derive. What I mean by this can be grasped in a few figures that circulate from NASA and the European Space Agency:

More than 100 million pieces of debris are estimated to have been accumulating in orbit above the Earth since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Debris in orbit above 1000 km will “normally continue circling the Earth for a century or more” (NASA Orbital Debris Program Office 2014).

The European Space Agency estimates that only 7 percent of the objects tracked by the agency’s Space Debris Office are functioning satellites (European Space Agency 2013).

So I am NOT interested in the discards and remainders of human extraterrestrial activity because their presence harkens back to a past before them, when things were pure and natural. That is a modernist trap. But I am interested in these discards and remainders because they help me grasp a complex matter of concern: how to muddle on in spite of permanent and accelerating impurity that exceeds the planetary volume I inhabit.

To put it differently, Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize winning poet and writer from St. Lucia, has written that "[d]ecadence begins when a civilization falls in love with its ruins" (cited in Stoler 2013: 27). There is a risk, in other words, in moving from the idea that because space beyond the Earth's surface is literally populated by trash and waste from human activity 'we' have fallen from the grace of a mythical time of purity into a state of impurity. Instead of thinking about offworld rubbish as a Fall, instead of dreaming of an impossible purity while wringing hands over the defiling effects of our technoscience fictional ways of life, it is analytically much more useful and interesting to stay with the troubling mixtures and follow the action wherever it goes. We would be better off, as Bruno Latour argues, to love our monsters.

I am just beginning to think out loud about offworld rubbish.

The Orbital Wake of the Anthropocene from Josh Lepawsky on Vimeo.