msattler Annotations

Across Scales and Systems (https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sketch-2-across-scales-and-systems/essay)

Monday, August 10, 2020 - 6:46pm

Just realized my responses weren't saved in the artifact, very sorry!  Please see them now...

  • deutero [reflective/learning capacity]: How are people and organizations denoting and worrying about the phenomena you study?  Space Exploraion agencies must deal with the logistical realities of long-duration life support systems for increasingly remote missions.  While much attention is placed on 'solving the technical problems,' human and others' quality of life issues are largely ignored.  Agencies working toward Anthropocene 'solutions' increasingly find themselves defining un-fixable problems, per their understanding of Climate Change Earth as a closed-system biogeochemical-thermal phenomenon.  Perhaps current conceptualizations of 'sustainaing environments' might shift in order to allow the identification and exploration of new approaches to these 'problems.'
  • meta [dominant discourses]: What discourses constitute and circulate around the phenomena you study? Where are there discursive risks and gaps?  The Anthropocene, Interplanetary Colonization, Closed-Systems.  Closed systems tend to foreground certain types of [risky?] conceptualizations:  finite resources, standardization necessary to facilitate quanitification, top-down worldviews and management approaches. These conceptualizations tend to engender dictatorial power, and a black-boxing or non-transparent approaches to technocratic decisionmaking. 
  • macro [law, political economy]: What laws and economies undergird and shape the power the phenomena you study?  The 'Economy of Nature," a quantitative Ecological Systems Theory approach to energy/matter relationships.
  • meso [organizations]: What organizations are implicated in the phenomena you study? What geopolitics are in play?  Nationstates, private entrepreneurs, wealthy individuals.  Politics of prosperity, and ultimately survival.  Lots of colonial/postcolonial dynamics here.
  • bio [bodies]: What are the bodily effects of the phenomena you study?  Human and ecological health and well being. Everything from oxygen deprivation and atmospheric toxicity to thermal regulation, to the fragility of ecosystem service provisioning.
  • micro [practices]: What (labor, reproductive, communicative) practices constitute and are animated by the phenomena you study?  How can life-supporting labor be partitioned across ecosystems, technologies, and humans?  What are realistic durations of 'long-duration' survival within hostile environments?  How can scientists, engineers, designers, and non-experts communicate effectively across disciplines and divergent value systems [Trading Zones here, perhaps?]
  • nano [language, subjectivity]: What kinds of subjects are produced by and imbricated in the phenomena you study?  People and living Others as laborers. Emergese as a 'Rosetta Stone' language.  What is quality of life for humans and others?  How important is it to survival?
  • edxo [education and expertise]: What modes of expertise and education are imbricated in the phenomena you study?  Scientific and Engineering expertise, vs. 'Exploration' style experimenters.  Lab Studies type confusion between the object and subject [Biospherians were experimenting on themselves, within a 'lab' that they had a significant hand in creating].  Cultures of science vs. the Biospherians very unique culture and ethic of ecotechnical making/doing.
  • data [data infrastructure]: What data, infrastructure, analytic and visualization capabilities account for and animate the phenomena you study?  Environmental sensor data largely lost.  Lots of archival records of the design process and the Scientific Advisory Committee debates.  Several primary accounts and biographies published. Thousands of popular press articles.
  • techno [roads, transport]: What technical conditions produce and delimit the phenomena you study?  Biosphere 2 as a scientific apparatus, a inhabited lab.  A materially closed, energetically open synthetic environment, designed as a 'mini Earth.'
  • eco-atmo [ecology, climate]: What ecological and climatic conditions situate the phenomena you study?  A 'mini Earth' whose spatial and temporal scales diverged wildly from those of Earth.  An ecosystems service provisioned environment, entirely reliant on petrochemical energy inputs that powered mechanical devices.
  • geo [earth systems]: What geological formations, contaminations, resources and scarcities ground the phenomena?  Living organisms as biogeochemical transformers.  The tightest building envelope ever constructed, needed to measure atmospheric chemistry.  Species extinction, disappearing oxygen, agricultural pests, El Nino cloudcover reducing calculated available solar energy.
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