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Marvin the martian spaceship4/25/2023 ![]() Lee runs the Haughton-Mars Project, an analog research facility on Devon Island, an uninhabited, barren Arctic outpost in Nunavut, Canada. That relevance can take the form of geological formations, like lava tubes or sand dunes, or it can be a whole region with lunar or Martian flair, like the Atacama Desert in Chile or volcanoes in Hawaii.ĭr. The most direct arrow between this world and those beyond is the “terrestrial analogue,” a physical location on Earth that resembles some aspect of another world - usually the moon or Mars. “It actually makes a lot of sense why planetary scientists, whose phenomena are removed in time and space, would think that simulation and replication would be how they could still study that which is remote,” said Lisa Messeri, an anthropologist at Yale University and the author of the book “Placing Outer Space,” “because that’s what science has been doing for hundreds of years.” □□ Their methods are in keeping with scientific traditions that value both laboratory-based research and direct contact with nature. “And so there’s something very fundamental to the approach of using analogues.” “Throughout science, we reason by comparison all the time,” said Pascal Lee of the Mars and SETI institutes. In making the untouchable physical and the abstract concrete, they are creating not just similes but ways to conceive of these planets as actual places. ![]() In these simulacra, they see, feel and control worlds - or at least metaphors for them - in an attempt to decipher parts of the universe they’ll likely never visit. Planetary and exoplanetary scientists, for instance, don’t just wait for data to come to them: They also construct miniature versions of other places using convenient geological landscapes, gravel crushers and simulation chambers on Earth. These objects are fixed, and their conditions cannot be tweaked.īut that’s not how all astronomy works. Taking what they can get, they passively receive information about far-off stars and planets. In the historical imagination, astronomers look through telescopes, and photonic wisdom pours in at the speed of light.
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