EARTHLESS ASTRONOMY, LANDLESS DATASETS, AND THE MINING OF THE FUTURE

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

This chapter describes how large-scale mining and astronomical observation in Chile’s El Loa province come to interact on the terrain of optimisation and automation—of extraction, on the one hand, and observation, on the other. It describes how cosmic complexity is substantiated as astronomical data and how astronomical datasets circulate beyond astronomy as a source of “free” Big Data, supposedly without exploitable ends or ethical implication. Pointing to the land-intensive, labour-intensive, resource-intensive, and territorially and cosmopolitically fraught production of complex, large, and mobile astronomical datasets at the ALMA observatory, the article argues that not only are astronomical datasets not “free” but that in an optimisation economy, extraction is optimised, not displaced. In early July 2012, I attended a small conference, Research Networks and Cloud Computing for Astronomy and Mining, organised by the Universidad de Chile’s Centre for Mathematical Modelling (CMM). The conference focused on two seemingly distinct industrial and scientific domains in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert: megascale copper mining and radio astronomical observation. Visits to two sites bookended the conference, both located high in the western slopes of the south-central Andes, in El Loa province in Chile’s second northernmost region of Antofagasta. The first site was Chuquicamata, one of the largest open-pit copper mines on the planet. The second, located about two hours east of the mine, on the Llano de Chajnantor (Chajnantor Plateau), near the international border of Chile and Bolivia, was the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), one of the most ambitious ground-based astronomical projects in the world.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space
Pages263-280
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781000890617
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2023

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