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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

The Earth as Instrument

Résumé

In 2002 the Deutsches Museum in Munich organized an exhibition with the title Klima – das Experiment mit der Erde. What had transformed the Earth into an experimental setting or system? Part of the answer, I suggest, lies in a major technological shift over the last few decades: the Earth has been covered in millions of sensors, whose data have turned it into one big locus of scientific investigation. What was once our natural habitat has become an artificially modified environment, whose study has led us to realize that we are carrying out an ongoing experiment with the Earth. Our Earth has become instrumentalized for better or worse. On the one hand, our newly acquired knowledge warns us about the long-term consequences of political and economic actions; on the other, it opens the door to further instrumentalization of the Earth: climate engineering, for example. Historians of scientific instruments have paid little or no attention to this transformation: for example, the historical encyclopedia Instruments of Science has no entry for “sensors,” nor does the term appear in definitions of scientific instruments, and in museums, the focus unsurprisingly is rather on individual instruments of size that can be touched and seen. The omnipresence of sensors entails three consequences: First is the emergence of a class of new instruments, living things (“living instruments?”) and natural objects (“natural instruments?”) linked to sensors ranging in size from bacteria to volcanoes, to the whole Earth. Second is a shift from quick, repeated, and often interventionist experiments to passive, slow, detection and monitoring of complex organisms and environments at distance. Third is a change in focus from the singular instrument to networks of instruments.
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Dates et versions

hal-04538553 , version 1 (09-04-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04538553 , version 1

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Matthias Dorries. The Earth as Instrument. Writing the History of Scientific Instruments, May 2024, Munich, Germany. ⟨hal-04538553⟩
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