11March 2021
Earlier this year, NASA announced that a massive asteroid is set to have a close encounter with Earth, passing within two million kilometers (in space terms, that’s closer than it sounds, earning it the title of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid). Moving at just under 77,000 miles per hour, and estimated to measure around a kilometre in diameter, Asteroid 2001 FO32 will be the largest and fastest of its kind to pass so close to our planet this year.
Last month, a professor of astrophysics at Queen’s University Belfast, Alan Fitzsimmons, told Dazed that if an asteroid that size were to make impact with the planet’s surface, it could result in mass devastation and worldwide climatic effects. Luckily, we don’t have anything to worry about just yet, since astronomers’ observations have shown that it isn’t on track to hit us for at least 200 years.
Every so often, I’ll notice references to VNS Matrix in writing today, often alongside Donna Haraway’s 1985
Cyborg Manifesto (I see Sadie Plant mentioned less often, though she’s every bit as relevant; her 1997 book
Zeros + Ones unearthed a complex historical connection between women and machines). Part of why I think these ideas on gender and technology continue to interest us is that the future they envisioned hasn’t happened yet. Writing plays an interesting role in this issue; Haraway explicitly framed ‘cyborg writing’ as charting a path forward, saying that it’s “about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”