For the Human Practices part of the project, we decided quite early on to do a collaboration with the University of Copenhagen and their iGEM team. Our universities are already tightly bound together and seeing as we both did space-related projects and were familiar with each other and our respective projects, due to having met at the BioBrick Tutorial and later at the Nordic iGEM Conference, it made perfect sense to have our teams meet with the aim to elevate the ambitions of our respective human practices projects by joining forces. We agreed that it would be fun to explore a new side of our natural science-brains and write a report founded in the humanities. We found that this was quite unusual in previous iGEM space projects and therefore we found it relevant to question issues related to space travel in a new way. The University of Exeter had reached out to do a space-related human practices project and together, we decided to do a three-part space-related humanities report, with each university exploring the same overall issue on the basis of different fields. DTU engaged in history, UCopenhagen in rhetoric, and Exeter in ethics.

We knew quite early on that we wanted the report to cover the possibility of colonization on Mars. At DTU, we were intrigued to look retrospectively at the space race that lead to the moon landing and to look into the political situation at the time, in order to draw parallels to what might need to happen now to land a manned mission on Mars. The pressing matter would subsequently be what to do when we do land a mission on Mars by looking at previous colonization and imperialism and look into some of the driving factors of that era.

Brainstorming was a big part of our first Skype meetings, and because of our early start, our discussions managed to shape parts of each others Human Practice projects. We continuously separated to do research and met online to discuss our findings in relation to the further development of the project. This way, we slowly found a common angle for the project which ended up being “why colonize Mars?”. We would structure the report so that it discussed the issues in different ways: explaining, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating. We sorted the report in a structured manner. Firstly, exploring previous events in history and relating them to Mars colonization, then analyzing rhetorically the most cogent arguments for and against Mars colonization, and finally discussing the ethical implications of Mars colonization. We would do all of this while also determining the current measures set in place to prevent contamination on Mars, and other extraterrestrial environments.

You can read the report here.

All in all, our collaboration has been a huge success, where we have gotten the opportunity to work on our projects in a completely different way, and perhaps more importantly, worked with other incredible universities and people. Thank you Frida, Victoria, and Matt!

As UCopenhagen got the offer to participate at Københavns Kulturnat (the biggest cultural event in Copenhagen, translates to “Copenhagen Culture Night”), they decided to extend the Danish-based part of the collaboration to include that event as well. This has enabled us to reach a large number of people to discuss our report.

Read more about Københavns Kulturnat here.