How the Moon became a place – Aeon

To geographers and anthropologists, ‘place’ is a useful concept. A place is a collision between human culture and physical space. People transform their physical environment, and it transforms them. People tell stories about physical spaces that make people feel a certain way about that space. And people build, adding to a space and transforming it even further.

Some scholars have started using these concepts to think about extraterrestrial locations. In her book Placing Outer Space (2016), the Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri observes that scientists often think about planets, both in our solar system and beyond, as places. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the case of a series of talks given by Carl Sagan titled ‘Planets Are Places’. In other cases, scientists express a sense of place indirectly through their practices and language. Messeri observes that planetary scientists conduct place-making primarily through ‘narrating, mapping, visualising, and inhabiting’ other worlds. ‘Importantly,’ Messeri writes, ‘one can be (or can imagine being) in a place. Place suggests an intimacy that can scale down the cosmos to the level of human experience.’