A Sustainable Space Race? Haley's Comet, the Climate Crisis, and Retelling Space Exploration through Object Fabulation

A new space race is on: as NASA prepares to return astronauts to the moon and private sector actors speculate about colonising Mars, astrophysicists are discovering thousands of small, rocky planets (Kopparapu et al., 2018).For the public, these exoplanets hold promise of alien life or an escape from Earth beset by the climate crisis. However, this is a dangerous narrative: astrophysicists agree that colonising other planets or terraforming Mars are not viable options to ensure our survival - there really is no Planet B.

In an unprecedent and unique collaboration, Christine Lehnen and Raphaëlle Haywood are bringing together the disciplines of creative writing and astrophysics to combat this dangerous narrative and develop a better, sustainable narrative for space exploration. Christine Lehnen will draw on the creative research method of object fabulation to explore the motivations of astronomers working in humanity's distant past and compare them with motivations of astronomers working on cutting-edge experiments today to develop a new narrative for why we are looking at the stars: to better understand, sustain, and nurture our own planet rather than colonise others.

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