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Gaze-scaling: Planets as Islands in Exobiologists’ Imaginaries

ABSTRACT From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, scientists and engineers in the U.S. chartered a new field, exobiology: the search for organic life beyond Earth. Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, led exobiologists in framing a powerful sociotechnical imaginary for the emergent discipline, one that envisioned planets as islands. That vision followed long traditions in natural science, literature, and geography in which islands had been posited along dueling edges: fragile, bounded sites that required preservation, but ones that also been staged as bountiful, inviting exploration, even exploitation. From Lederberg's archive, other historical sources, and astronautical accounts of seeing Earth from above in the Space Age, the conceptual duality of islands – as enclosed and expansive – transferred to how exobiologists considered their solar system. Planets, including Earth, came to be imagined as biospheres to be preserved, but simultaneously as sites that could possibly underwrite humans' future colonization. Such speculation was supported by a rich visual culture of technologically animated perception, from Apollo 8's Earthrise photograph (1968) to Mariner 9's (1970) televisual images. Scaling the gaze of planetary science from Earth to extraterrestrial sites, exobiologists' planets-as-islands imaginary forecasted a cosmic archipelago of interconnected life in the post-World War II era.