Hello World: Digital Media and the Search for Interplanetary Life on Religion’s Final Frontier

Abstract

Abstract NASA’s 2021 Perseverance Rover races toward the farthest reaches of our known world to search for signs of life. Although promising to discover life on the surface of Mars, the rover’s digital images of Mars’s barren and scorched wasteland paradoxically reinforce the fear that death is inevitable. Why search for life on the barren wasteland of Mars? This article explores this question from the perspective of scholarly examinations of Spiritualism and argues that the search for extraterrestrial life on Mars’s surface constitutes a growing religious community, one that reframes religious practice around digital media’s interface and endows digital technologies with the potentiality to transform the burden of our impending extinction into an opportunity to extend humanity’s perceived temporal and spatial finitude.