Title
Hello World: Digital Media and the Search for Interplanetary Life on Religion’s Final Frontier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-12-2023
Publication Title
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
ISSN
1477-4585
Abstract
NASA’s 2021 Perseverance Rover races toward the farthest reaches of our known world to search for signs of life. Although promising to discover life on the surface of Mars, the rover’s digital images of Mars’s barren and scorched wasteland paradoxically reinforce the fear that death is inevitable. Why search for life on the barren wasteland of Mars? This article explores this question from the perspective of scholarly examinations of Spiritualism and argues that the search for extraterrestrial life on Mars’s surface constitutes a growing religious community, one that reframes religious practice around digital media’s interface and endows digital technologies with the potentiality to transform the burden of our impending extinction into an opportunity to extend humanity’s perceived temporal and spatial finitude.
NSUWorks Citation
Furiasse, A. (2023). Hello World: Digital Media and the Search for Interplanetary Life on Religion’s Final Frontier. Journal of the American Academy of Religion https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad056
DOI
10.1093/jaarel/lfad056
Comments
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion.