Natural scientists often appear in the news media as key actors in the management of risk. This paper examines the way in which a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists have constructed asteroids as risky objects and have attempted to control the media representation of the issue. It shows how scientists negotiate the uncertainties inherent in claims about distant objects and future events by drawing on quantitative risk assessments even when these are inapplicable or misleading.Although the asteroid scientists worry that media coverage undermines their authority, journalists typically accept the scientists' framing of the issue. The asteroid impact threat reveals the implicit assumptions which can shape natural scientists' public discourse and the tensions which arise when scientists' quantitative uncertainty claims are re-presented in the news media.
15/07/13 MEB. Accepted for pub., OK to pub
In September 2012, graduates of Imperial College's science communication masters courses gathered to celebrate 21 years of the programme. The MSc in Science Communication was the first of its kind in the UK and one of the first masters courses in the world to offer a combination of practical and theoretical studies of science communication across a range of media. This commentary reflects on the longevity of the programme, the reasons for its success, and the opportunities and challenges facing science communication courses today.
Over the past twenty years a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists have actively promoted the idea that an asteroid might collide with the Earth and destroy civilisation. Despite concerns about placing weapons in space, the asteroid scientists repeatedly met with scientists from the Strategic Defense Initiative to discuss mitigation technologies. This paper examines the narrative context in which asteroids were constructed as a threat and astronomy was reconfigured as an interventionist science. I argue that conceptualising asteroids through narratives of technological salvation invoked a 'narrative imperative' which drew the astronomers towards the militaristic endings that their stories demanded. Impact-threat science thus demonstrates both the ways in which scientific research can be framed by fictional narratives and the ideological ends which such narratives can serve. They foretell a large impact causing global fires, the failure of the world's agriculture and the end of human civilisation. But, these scientists assure us, we live at a unique moment in history when we have the technological means to avert disaster. They call for support for dedicated astronomical surveys of near-Earth objects to provide early warning of an impactor and they have regularly met with defence scientists to discuss new technologies to deflect any incoming asteroids.The scientists who have promoted the asteroid impact threat have done so by invoking narratives of technological salvation -stories which, like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), promised security through a superweapon in space. The asteroid impact threat can therefore be located within the broader cultural history of fantasies about security and power which Bruce Franklin (1988) has argued is inextricably linked to the century-old idea that a new superweapon could deliver world peace. Howard McCurdy (1997: 78-82), in his study of the ways in which the US space programme was shaped by popular culture, has suggested that the promotion of the impact threat can be seen as the completion of Cold War fantasies which had used a politics of fear to justify space exploration. McCurdy highlights the alignment between the promotion of the impact threat and works of fiction.In this paper, I consider the reconceptualisation of asteroid science which this alignment entailed.It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a complete history of the science of planetary impacts. My focus is on how a group of scientists moved from seeing impacts as significant events in Earth history to seeing them as threatening events in the human future -a move from historical to futurological narratives. Nor is there space to give a full account of the empirical developments which were used to support the construal of asteroids as a threat. Rather, I wish to make the case that these empirical developments were given meaning within a specific narrative context which drew civilian astronomers into contact with defence scientists, especially those working on SDI.
Among the many limitations of the deficit model of science communication is its inability to account for the qualities of communication products that arise from creative decisions about form and style. This paper examines two documentaries about the nature of time -Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light and the first episode of the BBC's Wonders of the Universe series -in order to consider how film style inflects science with different meanings. The analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which authority is assigned between film author, narrator and depicted subjects and the degree to which different film styles promote epistemological certainty or hesitancy.
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