Challenging the space-age Manifest Destiny narrative, as Elon Musk vies to move humans to Mars

2015-05-08T12:26:00-04:00

It’s a myth almost universally believed, that sits at the core of liberal technocratic thought, and has been embedded in practically every other work of speculative fiction for the last half century. You can sum it up like this: 'When we go into space, we will all magically become nice.'...It’s early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world then issues like these should be at the hearts of our efforts from the very start.

The longtime space-age Manifest Destiny of humans inhabiting Mars and the prominently white, European male perspective that narrative perpetually emphasizes has become a bubbling multi-faceted discussion among science bloggers as Elon Musk's staunch ambitions to ultimately turn humans into a "multiplanet species" continue to develop. Stemming from that discussion, writer Martin Robbins of The Guardian contemplates whether or not humanity's eventual future on Mars can exist without the earthly issues of sexism and racism.

Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing

2012-03-13T20:49:00-04:00

We may perhaps have been preconditioned to search out irony, but this, like most of our preconceptions, quickly began to fade. Eight years and thousands of miles later, this view has shifted into a multiplicity of facets describing a place that is far more difficult to define. Our once hermetic view of the supposedly hermetic suburban world has taken on a prismatic new form — and with it a far greater sense of omnipresence.

Also, The Book Discussion:

In 2002, Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out to explore the American suburbs. Over 178 days they drove 22,383 miles, made 134 suburban house calls, and took 2,593 photographs. In Manifest Destiny, Griffiths reveals the results of this exploration. Structured through 58 short chapters, the anthology offers an architectural pattern book of suburban conditions all focused not on the unique or specific, but the placeless. These chapters are complemented by an introduction by Griffiths and an afterword by Swiss architectural historian Martino Stierli.

In December 2011, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne included the book Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing as one of the ten entries in 2011 year in review: Best in architecture. Christopher writes: “In 58 very short chapters, Jason Griffiths, a British architect who teaches at Arizona State, miraculously finds new language to de...

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Challenging the space-age Manifest Destiny narrative, as Elon Musk vies to move humans to Mars

Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing