Down To Earth
Down to Earth examines the ways citizens are familiarised with space research.
with: Paris Selinas, Dionysia Mylonaki
The necessity to mobilise resources for space research is a topic that comes up quite often, with government funding being the focus of debate.
Down to Earth examines the ways citizens are familiarised with space research. The project and the accompanying paper intends to question the means employed for the funding of space research (mostly for purposes of extraction) by mobilising a discussion around potential disasters, e.g. in the case of the asteroids. We highlight the fine line between educating and using methods that intend to terrify citizens.
The project provides a digital platform that creates scenarios of catastrophe on demand, according to which, an asteroid hits a selected place. Then, it takes user’s location and finds familiar landmarks to compare the scientific quantity with. For example, for London based users, the platform would compare the dimension of an asteroid to the dimension of Big Ben. As a final act of mobilization, it creates a fictional scenario where an asteroid is hitting your current location and estimates the damages in terms of people killed, calculated using a knowledge database like Google Firebase and an asteroid blast impact formula.
Awards & Appearances
- Space App Challenge, London - Peoples Choice Award
- 66th International Astronautical Congress, Jerusalem
