In 1876, an unlikely candidate was considered for election to the Royal Society. Whilst his sunken eyes betrayed a lifetime spent in intellectual study, his body was crippled by years of working-class labour. The candidate was James Croll (1821-90). His qualifications for election were considerable: 92 articles in the Philosophical Magazine, Geological Magazine, and Chemical News, and four original monographs. Where Croll is remembered, it is as a geologist and climatologist, whose influential theories about ice ages caused Charles Darwin to revise Origin of Species (1869, 5th edn.). However, of Croll’s 17 proposers, half never met him in person. Whilst his contributions rewarded entry to the most prestigious scientific societies, the man himself remained a mystery.
Croll was in fact born in poverty in rural Scotland. After learning to read from his elder brother, Croll became a fervent autodidact. By becoming a janitor at a college in Glasgow, he used the library to teach himself geology, metaphysics, and philosophy. In 1867, he was appointed to the Geological Survey and published a controversial but widely-read theory of climate change. Croll mediated seemingly antithetical worlds of emergent professional science, theology, and poverty through an extensive correspondence network. He exchanged 300 letters with gentlemen, churchmen, and ‘scientists’. In this paper, I argue that Croll used personae to be accepted as authoritative by men of different social, theological, and professional statuses, whilst also remaining true to his own convictions. By analysing correspondence, I consider multiple perspectives on status and theory in nineteenth-century science.

Astrobiology, the scientific field investigating potential extraterrestrial life, is often understood as a post-Sputnik development initiated by academic molecular biologists anxious to distance themselves from NASA’s quasi-military human spaceflight program. This paper complicates this origin story by examining the first-ever set of astrobiology experiments, which were carried out by the United States Air Force (USAF) in the mid-1950s. At the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) in Texas, physiologists and microbiologists led by ex-Luftwaffe researcher Hubertus Strughold constructed small environmental simulations of Mars, and sealed hardy terrestrial microbes inside the freezing, desiccated, low-pressure, nitrogen-rich containers to see if any could survive. First called a ‘Marsarium’, after the terrariums used in colonial plant transportation, the name that stuck was ‘Mars Jar’. More than an academic exercise, the Air Force scientists used Mars Jar studies to understand what sort of life future astronauts might encounter on expeditions to the Red Planet, and how it could be used instrumentally to establish a military base there. Building on recent scholarship about the work of virtual representations of Mars by Janet Vertesi and Lisa Messeri, the story of these early physical simulations shows how astrobiology emerged as a Cold War military concern, and built-up Mars as a potential battlefield among other strategically-valuable extreme environments America needed to defend like the polar regions and the deep seas. Most crucially, it reveals ways that present-day astrobiology, focused on Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, retains an unchecked colonial gaze and instrumental regard for extraterrestrial life.

In 1995, dental surgeon-turned-planetary scientist and terraforming expert Martyn J. Fogg authored the seminal “technical-level” book on the history, science, and prospects of “engineering planetary environments.” In this book published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, Fogg categorized geoengineering as a subset of terraforming. In 2000, geoengineer David Keith noted that terraforming and geoengineering “are linked by commonality of proposed technologies, ethical concerns, and by their ambiguous position between the realms of science fiction and reasoned debate about human use of technology.” In 1997, the notorious nuclear physicist Lowell Wood co-wrote an influential geoengineering thought-piece. Recently, Wood has revealed that geoengineering Earth is simply “the first stop” in his grander ambition to terraform the Red Planet. Wood proclaimed, “It is the manifest destiny of the human race!” It is this harmony between what has been collectively referred to as “planetary engineering” that suggests the need for pursuing their roots and intersections. At present, these are what some would consider fringe sciences that are often cast at best as fantastically utopian and at worst as products of the deranged minds of mad scientists in the mold of Dr. Strangelove. By examining their shared history and overlapping research questions we can come closer to a more fruitful dialog that simultaneously takes their fictive origins seriously and emphasizes the cutting-edge science behind planetary engineering. Only then can we properly address the ethics and socio-political implications of planetary engineering.

In the early 1940s, the British colony of Mauritius found itself in a precarious position. The 1942 Japanese occupation of Burma and a powerful cyclone in Bengal the same year shattered the rice economy of the Indian Ocean. Not three years later, three cyclones in 1945 pushed the Mauritian sugar economy to the brink of collapse and unleashed a colony-wide outbreak of poliomyelitis. Anxious about the potential political crises sparked by a hungry population and growing concerns over disaster recovery, chronic malnutrition, and disease, the colonial state attempted to reshape the domestic nutrition systems of its agricultural poor. This was done by identifying women as the vectors through which to change social patterns of food production and consumption. In addition to building an ethnographic infrastructure to understand the social worlds of Mauritian women, colonial researchers also collected biometric data -- blood samples and splenic studies -- data that became an archive around which the development of the colony was to be rationalized. These efforts to produce new nutritionally-minded households also folded into contemporaneous efforts by the colonial state to “improve” the natural spaces of Mauritius by eradicating malaria: forests were cleared, rivers canalized, and pesticides spread. Mauritius was, one study declared, “a [s]anatorium."
This paper examines the social aftershocks of these efforts to intervene in the biological and natural worlds that Mauritians inhabited. Debates over food and disease proved to be fertile territory for emerging discourses of political community, constitutional change, and diasporic belonging. Drawing on the colonial archive, the papers of Indo-Mauritian cultural organizations, newspapers, and the writings of Hindu intellectuals, this paper suggests that the emergence of political community and civilizational thought drew from, in part, gendered debates over how Mauritians encountered the natural world as well as their nutritional habits. It centers the historical significance of Indian Ocean networks of knowledge and culture in Mauritius while also attending to the locally specific ways in which those networks became meaningful for Mauritians.