Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability

Seminar - 23rd January 2018, Joshua Nall

On the 23rd January Joshua Nall, the Curator of Modern Sciences, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge, will be visiting to give a seminar and answer questions on his work. Please fill out the form below to register attendance and allow sufficient catering.

Location: IAS seminar room and reception

Format:

12:00 - 13:00 - Seminar

13:00 - 14:00 - Lunch/Discussion

Escape to Mars: Capitalist fantasies of planetary habitation, c. 1900 / c. 2017

Mars, we are told, will soon be inhabited. Space entrepreneurs and so-called tech-visionaries have declared it so. These manifestos for an off-earth future explicitly eschew the politics of climate change in favour of a ‘pure’ technological solution to planetary demise. In this talk I will argue that this form of capitalist delusion has a longer history than we might expect. Planetary decay and the allure of Mars have been implicated in the fantasies of industrialists for at least 120 years. Recovering this long history, I want to suggest, helps us better understand the pernicious blend of ecological determinism and techno-triumphalism at the heart of these fantasies, then and now.


Privacy notice
This form will be used to manage attendance at an event. Your attendance at the event will be recorded and associated with your name, but no other personally identifiable data will be stored, and the data will not be used for any purpose other than as a record of the event.

The University of Warwick is the Data Controller of any information you have entered on this form and is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection Legislation. The University's Data Protection webpages provide further information on your rights and how the University processes personal data. If you wish to submit a data subjects rights request, make a complaint or report a suspected personal data breach, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email at infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk.

Spam prevention

Failure to load reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a utility used to verify you're not a robot filling out this form. Unfortunately this has failed to load correctly.

Please try reloading the page. If the problem persists, or if you are in a country which blocks Google products, please contact us by using the ‘page contact’ link at the foot of this page.