Project Khepri: Mining Asteroid Bennu for Water

Deep space asteroid mining presents the opportunity for the collection of critical resources required to establish a cis-lunar infrastructure. In specific, the Project Khepri team has focused on the collection of water from asteroid Bennu. This water has the potential to provide a source of clean-energy propellant as well as an essential consumable for humans or agriculture on crewed trips to the Moon or Mars. This would avoid the high costs of launching from Earth - making it a highly desirable element for the future of cis-lunar infrastructure. The OSIRIS-REx mission provided a complete survey of asteroid Bennu and is set to return regolith samples to Earth in 2023. This makes asteroid Bennu a well-understood and low-risk target that is estimated to be around 6.26% water by mass. The Khepri Project comprises a team of international students, academics, and industry subject matter experts working on the technical design, business case, and political aspects of a mission to mine asteroid Bennu for water. The research output explores the multi-year mission that the Khepri team has proposed

The Development of Criminal Style in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Separating the Lemmings from the Loners

Despite broad consensus that most juvenile crimes are committed with peers, many questions regarding developmental and individual differences in criminal style (i.e., co-offending vs. solo offending) remain unanswered. Using prospective 3-year longitudinal data from 937 14- to 17-year-old serious male offenders, the present study investigates whether youths tend to offend alone, in groups, or a combination of the two; whether these patterns change with age; and whether youths who engage in a particular style share distinguishing characteristics. Trajectory analyses examining criminal styles over age revealed that, while most youth evinced both types of offending, two distinct groups emerged: an increasingly solo offender trajectory (83%); and a mixed style offender trajectory (17%). Alternate analyses revealed (5.5%) exclusively solo offenders (i.e., only committed solo offenses over 3 years). There were no significant differences between groups in individuals’ reported number of friends, quality of friendships, or extraversion. However, the increasingly solo and exclusively solo offenders reported more psychosocial maturity, lower rates of anxiety, fewer psychopathic traits, less gang involvement and less self reported offending than mixed style offenders. Findings suggest that increasingly and exclusively solo offenders are not loners, as they are sometimes portrayed, and that exclusively solo offending during adolescence, while rare and previously misunderstood, may not be a risk factor in and of itself

Extimate Technology: Self-Formation in a Technological World

Ciano Aydin asks us to consider how technology has become essential to self-formation and traces a new way of conceptualizing the self in relation to technology. Beginning with the central debates regarding the philosophy of the self, Aydin gives a new perspective on the classic debates regarding selfhood. Rather than existing purely as an external entity, he argues that technology has become extimate, the Other separate and within the self. Due to this shift, there are both negative and positive possibilities for our relationship to technology and how technology shapes our understanding of the self. Aydin intervenes with Technological Sublimation Theory (TST) as an alternative method of conceptualizing self-formation. In his analysis, Aydin demonstrates that the self is an interactionist project that will continue to develop alongside technology

Femme Ex Machina: Sex Robots, Embodiment, and Posthuman Subjectivity

Andrea Dworkin warned in her 1974 book Woman Hating that men would soon develop the technology to “create the sex objects that will gratify them” (199). This dissertation investigates one of those technologies: sex robots, as mediated through science fiction film and literature. While the sex robot is still an emerging technology, its embodiment, particularly when female-rendered, has been imagined and negotiated for centuries. Men creating women in a specific, desired image is not new, but the sex robot is currently being transformed from imagined representation to embodied subject. This dissertation traces a pattern of representation that has allowed us to naturalize not just the concept of embodied AI but its embodiment as sexual object. The sex robot’s cultural and social implications become clear in the films and print fiction, which both reflect and create social reality. I am interested not just in what the sex robot offers as a site of analysis for feminist politics, including foundational concepts in feminist theory that continue to be applicable, but also in what film and literary studies offer the sex robot. I read the sex robot less as a discrete object and more as a function within a larger system of representation, a function whose embodiment (or disembodiment) speaks to larger anxieties regarding our remediation through technology. I suggest that we have developed a future oriented nostalgia not only for our embodied and meaty selves, but also for the futures we have already imagined, but which have not yet come to pass. Chapter One traces a trans-historical genealogy of the sex robot through a cultural history of the doll. As a proto-robot, the doll straddles the categories of aesthetics and labour, look and function, categories necessary for a nuanced and expansive reading of the sex robot. Chapter Two traces how robotic labour was codified and became an inherently gendered form of labour. By taking up Villiers de l\u27Isle-Adam’s novel The Future Eve, Karl Čapek’s play R.U.R., and Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, I consider how labour, particularly women’s labour, is essentialized and intrinsically enmeshed with how we understand embodiment. Chapter Three, utilizing Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives, Walter Forbes’ film adaptation of the same title, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as case studies, explores the role of embodiment and memory in shaping subjectivity vis-à-vis the image. Chapter Four assesses the posthuman representation of sex robots and sex robot as prosthesis in Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. This chapter theorizes the concept of future nostalgia as an extension of the preceding discussions