Clean Solar Outshines Filthy Oil

by Robert Hunziker / September 1st, 2025

We can have a world that runs on a resource that’s available to everyone everywhere.

— Bill McKibben

There’s a renaissance of nature powering the world, and it’s happening throughout the planet hidden from public view because it’s everywhere all at once and not in one isolated location easily identified. It’s solar panel installations experiencing smashing success everywhere throughout the world. Solar panels are consuming the world faster than public media has caught up with the trend to broadcast the good news. People simply aren’t aware of this ongoing miracle.

Nobody knows this better than Bill McKibben, author, activist, educator, and leader of 350.org. He’s a brilliant environmental activist who has dedicated his life to a better world. His newest book Here Comes the Sun (W.W. Norton & Company) is all about a better world.

McKibben was recently interviewed by Chris Hayes of MSNBC fame: The Chris Hayes Podcast – Why is This Happening? McKibben’s new book and much more was discussed on Chri Hayes’ podcast on YouTube. The interview is an optimistic take on the future of planet Earth because of rapid advancement of renewable energy.

This article is based upon the McKibben interview.

Accordingly, “It’s the rest of the world outside of America that’s really catching on.” Even though the climate situation is in dire straits today, there is a ray of hope in the midst of our troubled planet, an explosion of renewable energy the past 36 months that’s truly amazing, an eyeopener, happening fast!

Renewable energy has been labeled “alternative energy” for 40 years, and as such, pigeonholed as an alternative or second fiddle. For decades now this frame of mind has downplayed its importance. That stigma is about to be lifted in the face of a big bright new world lighted and powered by the Sun. “It’s the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system, and we have immediate access to it.”

For example, amazing things are happening: This Spring 2025 China was putting up three (3) gigawatts of solar power every day. One gigawatt is equivalent to one coal-powered plant. So, they were essentially installing three coal-powered plants per day.

Equally impressive, over the past 15 months California produced renewable energy for long stretches every day and at times producing more than 100% of the power it needs with renewables. At night, California switches to batteries that spent the day soaking up sunshine. That all-important battery auxiliary power source did not exist three years ago. Overall, as of 2025 California has cut the state’s natural gas bill by 40% from two years ago.

And Texas, the headquarters for the oil and gas industry, is challenging California. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), as of early 2025, Texas has over 22 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar capacity. That’s enough to power more than 3.5 million homes with clean energy. It is now second in national solar rankings. EVs have increased by 3900% since 2014. Wind energy is up three-fold since 2014. Renewables are hot items in Texas, displacing oil and gas like hot cakes. Do Texas Republicans agree with Trump that climate change is a hoax? Ask them!

Elsewhere in the sane world, in Pakistan ordinary people have taken matters into their own hands, putting up rooftop solar power on individual homes now equal to one-half of the country’s electric grid. The biggest solar adopters are farmers, using solar to replace diesel fuel to power field generators for water irrigation. As a result, Pakistan used 35% less diesel fuel last year than the year before.

In Africa mini grids powered by solar are popping up all over the continent.

A couple of weeks ago Indonesia, the fourth most populated country, committed to build 100 gigawatts of solar power over the next decade.

In part, all of this is happening because five years ago an invisible line was passed when it became cheaper to produce energy from the Sun and wind rather than burning fossil fuels that emit CO2 by the bucketful. Still, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, for the year 2024, fossil fuels still supply about 80% of the world’s energy as renewable installations simply meet additional demand.

According to McKibben, “All of this is happening at exactly the same time as the climate is spiraling out of control.” June 2023 is the key month, almost every month since has set a new record for heat. Coincidentally June 2023 is also when humans started installing one gigawatt of solar per day around the planet. Now, we are in a race against time to see who wins because major systems of the planet are just beginning to unravel, e.g., the jet stream has become so skewed that it’s like spaghetti. It has profound influence on weather patterns for the entire hemisphere, and it’s one reason for whacky weather that’s literally destroying property.

According to McKibben, solar is a mighty force not to be reckoned with. For example, imagine for a moment there’s a ship carrying solar panels across the ocean. Compare that ship full of solar panels to a ship carrying coal across the ocean. Over a lifetime the solar panels will produce 500 times more energy than the same ship containing coal.

Here’s another example by McKibben, regarding the muscle of solar: He met a farmer in Illinois who grows corn for ethanol. He said one acre worth of corn would power his Ford F150 for 25,000 miles for one year. But if he covers the same one acre with solar panels it’ll produce enough electrons to run his Ford F150 Lightening EV 700,000 miles.

EVs and auxiliary batteries for power grids are about to get better, more powerful, and safer. Sodium ion batteries for EVs are the new trend in China. This is one more major advancement. Sodium-ion batteries charge faster than lithium-ion and have a three times higher lifecycle

Meanwhile, archaic America is focusing on old-fashioned, awkward oil and gas drilling while denigrating and dissembling modern renewable policies as quickly as possible and literally decimating science and destroying important science data as well as key data sources. This is truly a tragedy. America is a prime example of the doing the opposite of China’s modernization campaign that embraces science along with renewables.

In July Al Gore gave a TED speech wherein he mentioned the solar miracle taking place in China: He noted positives in the alternatives space. For example, the costs for renewables have plummeted to levels making fossil fuels unproductive in comparison. Exxon’s own prediction that solar capacity would only achieve 850GW by 2040 was dead wrong; as of year-end 2024, it is already at 2,280 GW, nearly triple the Exxon projection for 2040. Solar is now the least expensive source of electricity in human history. Since the Paris Agreement, solar electricity generation has soared by 732%. And electric vehicle sales have increased 34x since 2015.

According to Gore, in April 2025 China installed 45 gigawatts of new solar capacity. This is equivalent to 45 brand new giant nuclear reactors installed in one month.

An accelerating renewables revolution is underway throughout the world. Still, both McKibben and Gore mention the sorrowful fact that Earth’s systems are stressed like never before, and it’ll take a herculean effort to steady-the-ship-of-state. Too much time has passed with too little work to get off fossil fuels. Thank goodness solar is on the march in a very big way. But will it be fast enough, soon enough?

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Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Refugee Dunghills: Australia Makes Another Nauru Deal

by Binoy Kampmark / September 1st, 2025

Over the last two decades, Australia has made a name for itself by pursuing barbaric policies towards refugees and asylum seekers arriving by sea. Priding these moves as noble and humanitarian, cruelty born of kindness, these have entailed attacking the right to seek asylum guaranteed under the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 and the obligations of a state signatory not to penalise, discriminate or return (refoul) those to a place which would imperil them.

From these policies grew the Pacific gulag – offshore refugee centres where desperate human beings were treated like hunks of undifferentiated meat to be “processed”. In such centres, sexual abuse, self-harm, mental ruin and suicide flourished with weedlike vigour, described by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre as “cruelty by design”. The final, rather damaged product was never to enter Australia, to be resettled in less than accommodating places as the Pacific Island state of Nauru, or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Fractious locals in either case were not impressed by cultural incompatibilities. Periodically, Australia might also get a helping hand from New Zealand, always more willing to pull its weight on the issue of accepting desperate boat arrivals.

Over time, the number of people finding themselves in indefinite detention grew. As Australia lacks any constitutional protections against indefinite detention without charge, judges once saw fit to see this outcome as perfectly appropriate for refugees and asylum seekers. The shameful 2004 High Court case of Al-Kateb v Godwin saw the Commonwealth Solicitor-General argue, successfully, that a stateless Palestinian born in Kuwait, having arrived in Australia by boat without a visa, having also failed to get a protection visa, and having no prospect to be returned to Gaza or Kuwait, could be detained indefinitely.

This was a remarkable finding, enabling the Commonwealth to exercise punitive functions normally associated with the judiciary. The cold words of Chief Justice Murray Gleeson are worth remembering: “A person in the position of the appellant might be young or old, dangerous or harmless, likely or unlikely to abscond, recently in detention or someone who had been there for years, healthy or unhealthy, badly affected by incarceration or relatively unaffected. The considerations that might bear upon the reasonableness of a discretionary decision to detain such a person do not operate.”

Then came the NZYQ decision in November 2023, in which the Australian High Court reversed itself. The judges found it unlawful for the government to continue detaining people in immigration detention where there was no real prospect of their practicable removal from Australia in the reasonably foreseeable future. To do so contravened the Constitution as such detention was not reasonably capable of being seen as necessary for a legitimate and non-punitive purpose. As such individuals could not be returned to their countries of origin for reasons of persecution or because of a refusal to accept them, release had to be granted.

A feverish panic broke out in the Albanese government. The government had lost one of its most important, sadistic weapons in the policy armoury. Hysterical demonisation followed regarding some 200 non-citizens who had to be released into the community. They were seen as exceptional in their defects, remarkable in their criminality (murderers, rapists, child molesters). They were to be treated as singular offenders, bound to reoffend and therefore in need of some form of permanent invigilation, incarceration or both. That recidivism remains a feature of Australians who are also released did not merit discussion, nor did the fact that many in the cohort in question had never been convicted of an offence.

The Albanese government, egged on by a yapping conservative opposition, went about the business of subverting the High Court’s decision as best it could. In November 2024, new laws were introduced permitting payment to third countries to accept unlawful non-citizens. Those refusing could be returned to detention. With utmost secrecy, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke reached out to Nauru, yet again, as Canberra’s favourite refugee dunghill. A bribe was in the offing.

In February, with sketchy details, the Albanese government revealed that it had reached an agreement with the Pacific nation to resettle three members of the NZYQ cohort of non-citizens, one of them convicted of murder, for an undisclosed sum. All had been granted 30-year resettlement visas and “would reside in individual facilities with a shared kitchen space, be free to move around the island and would have working rights”. They were deemed good enough for Nauru, whose government was keen on ruddy cash but not good enough for Australia, a country founded, most ironically, as a penal colony.

The transfer was also arranged despite the findings by the UN Human Rights Committee in two cases the month prior that Australia remained responsible for asylum seekers arbitrarily detained in offshore facilities in Nauru. Committee member Mahjoub El Haiba stated at the time that State parties cannot avoid their human rights responsibilities “when outsourcing asylum processing to another State”. Obligations remained “firmly in place” where states exercised “effective control over an area […] and cannot be transferred.”

The small arrangement was a taster of things to come. On August 29, timing the matter with the end-of-week lull in political interest, the Albanese government and Nauru signed a memorandum of understanding allowing the deporting of 280 members of the NZYQ cohort. Burke, who signed the MOU with Nauru’s President David Adeang, had done so after meeting the cabinet and the country’s entire Parliament. A wretchedly brief statement from the Australian Home Affairs office promised that the MOU contained “undertakings for the proper treatment and long-term residence of people who have no legal right to stay in Australia, to be received in Nauru.”

The staggering cost of the agreement involves the immediate payment of a vast and seedy sum of A$400 million, with A$70 million to follow in annual payments for associated costs. The enticing nature of these sums for Nauru’s government becomes even clearer given that this small state of under 12,000 people has an annual GDP, according to 2024 figures, of US$160 million. The misery of some can prove to be very profitable for others.

Jana Favero, deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, had an appropriate response to the latest arrangements. “This deal is discriminatory, disgraceful and dangerous.” The Albanese government had “launched yet another attack on migrants and refugees. An attack that will result in the most significant of outcomes – mass deportation.” Greens Senator David Shoebridge also remarked that the government, instead of “building partnerships in the Pacific based on equality and respect” had preferred to force “our smaller neighbours to become 21st-century prison colonies.” For Nauru’s venal politicians, seduced would have been a more accurate word.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Structural Foundations of Africa’s Biggest Slum

by Black Agenda Report / September 1st, 2025

Poverty is an artificial creation. Join political activist Ajam Baraka and members of the Communist Party of Kenya on a trip, making the case using Kibera, Africa’s largest slum.

It is symptomatic of a larger issue because, despite Nairobi being the wealthiest county in Kenya, contributing 27% of the country’s GDP, 60% of its 5 million residents live in squalor across 200 slums. Successive governments since independence have done little to change the status quo, leaving the people to predatory organisations that, at best, provide a band-aid to a gaping wound, or at worst, serve to depoliticise the masses.

Black Agenda Report & North-South Project for Peoples-Centered Human Rights have come together to re-release African Stream’s Mini-Doc.

Black Agenda Report provides news, commentary, and analysis from the black left. Read other articles by Black Agenda Report, or visit Black Agenda Report's website.

 

Deja vu-Lebanon

43rd commemoration of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Sabra Shatilla

by Heather Stroud / September 1st, 2025

In 1982 the world watched as Israeli troops invaded Lebanon, taking over the capital city of Beirut. The Americans and International Community made a deal with Israel that if the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) withdrew from Lebanon, Israel would retreat from Beirut.

Under a guarantee that the women, children and elderly would be protected by an International peace keeping force, all Palestinian men of fighting age left Lebanon for foreign shores. What happened after the PLO left is well documented. September 1982, Israeli forces surrounded Sabra/Shatilla allowing their proxy Christian Phalange militia to massacre over three thousand civilians.

There are credible witness accounts of rapes of young girls, mass slaughter, and incidents of pregnant women having their unborn babies ripped from their wombs. Israel provided bulldozers to scoop up the bodies and bury them in mass graves. Palestinians in Shatilla Refugee Camp, describe night as becoming day, because the IDF fired flares to light up the sky making escape for many Palestinian civilians impossible. The massacre lasted three days before the US and international community ordered a halt.

Forty three years have passed: the US, along with their allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, are telling the Lebanese they should disarm the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah. On this occasion there is no requirement for Israel to stop it’s military attacks in South Lebanon and the Bekka Valley. There is no promise of stopping the Al-Jolani, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) attacks on the northern broader of Lebanon, or the eastern border region. The Lebanese are being told that disarming Hezbollah will be better for them since Israel is an ally of the West, as is Al-Jolani, (formerly ISIS) the newly recognised leader of Syria.

Western mainstream media reports on the current US demands are deplete of historical context. There is no recognition that Hezbollah represents a third of the Lebanese Government and the role it plays in protecting the sovereignty of Lebanese territory. There is no mention either, of Israel’s expansionist ambitions of establishing its Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael), even though the Israeli political leadership speak openly about it.

Hezbollah formed as a direct result of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinian civilians. Ordinary Lebanese citizens – teachers, doctors, builders, tradesmen and so forth, joined Hezbollah in order to create a resistance movement capable of protecting Lebanon from Israel’s recurring attacks on their country.

Israel’s ambition to expand its territorial borders into all of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, connects the people of these three countries in a bond of brotherhood.

No American, Saudi or Israeli official has a right to dictate policy to the Lebanese on how they should govern their country. They have no right to interfere on matters relating to security and defence. Only the Lebanese Government, with the full support of the people, have a right to make such decisions.

Political Zionism, is a fundamentalist doctrine that holds to the belief that historic Palestine and beyond, belongs to the Jews. The implementation of this doctrine has resulted in a settler colonialist enterprise that is supported financially and militarily by the US, Christian Evangelicals and most of the Western Establishment. Missing from this enterprise for it to be legally and morally binding, however was the pre-requisite that the transfer of statehood from Palestine to Israel be ratified by the people whose country was requisitioned.

Resistance Movements that have grown out of this initial injustice and the humanitarian crimes committed over the last hundred years by modern-day Zionist Israel, have been labelled as terrorist organizations by Israel, US, and its close allies. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Ansarullah and more recently Palestine Action, a U.K. group, all fall within this framework of being a proscribed terrorist organization, hence anyone who speaks out in support of their actions is arrested under section 13 of the terrorism act of 2000.

It has become evident that International Law, once perceived as a moral law set up to address international war crimes, has, in the case of Israel, been repeatedly undermined. The International Court of Justice in coming to the conclusion that plausible genocide was taking place in Gaza, along with the International Criminal Court at The Hague, have faced enormous political opposition in their attempt to give the proper name to the crime of genocide and serve arrest warrants on those deemed guilty.

In International Law those who live under occupation- (and in the case of Palestinians under a brutal genocidal occupation,) have a legal and moral right to resist that occupation in whatever form they decide – including armed resistance. As a deeply criminal occupying power, Israel does not have the right to defend itself against those under its occupation. Furthermore, in International Law, all states and movements that are aware that a genocide is being committed are obligated to take action to prevent that genocide from continuing.

In contrast, to the resistance movements that have found themselves listed as terrorist, it is well documented that the US, along with UK and Israeli, have at different times, financed, trained and supported mercenary terrorist militants, such as al-Jolani’s Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), ISIS, and Al-Qaeda.

The International infrastructure is geared toward sustaining the ability for israel to commit genocide and expand into its neighbouring countries . For justice to ever be achieved, the legitimacy of resistance movements needs to be recognised. Lebanon is currently being given the message: ‘go along with our demands to disarm Hezbollah or resist and face the consequences’. In reality, as with the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, there are no guarantees that Lebanon will be safe from Israeli military incursion and occupation.

Given the current threat posed by Israel’s clear expansionist ambitions, disarming Hezbollah would be akin to leaving the back gate open for the thieves to enter. Most Lebanese support Hezbollah, including non-Shia. Short of an absolute dismantlement of the Zionist Israeli enterprise it is unlikely that Hezbollah will agree to disarm.

 

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Heather Stroud, the author of The Ghost Locust and Abraham's Children, has been involved in human rights issues for a number of years. She lives in Ryedale where she is increasingly drawn into campaigns to keep the environment free from the industrialization and contamination of fracking. Read other articles by Heather.

Digital Siege of Balochistan

by Syed Salman Mehdi / September 1st, 2025

To the people of Balochistan, connectivity is not meant by scrolling through their social media or by undertaking a light entertainment. Internet access is tenuous at best, which – in one of the most poorly dealt with provinces in Pakistan – serves both as a lifeline to education, economic opportunity, and communication with the rest of the world. However, on 6 August 2025, that lifeline was immediately severed as the provincial government ordered a blanket block on mobile internet access in all of its 36 districts, saying that it would remain blocked until 31 August.

This was not an extraordinary incident. Pakistan has developed an ominous reputation of normalising digital repression. In 2024 alone, internet access was terminated 18 times with a total of more than 9,700 hours of shutdowns, costing the national economies an estimated USD 1.62 billion. Pakistan has become one of the worst culprits in the world next to India and Ethiopia.

A Manufactured Silence

Supporters of these shutdowns argue that blocking internet access is necessary to protect national security and to prevent militant coordination. Contrary to what might be true, some of the deadliest attacks have been in the places already bereft of internet access.

A question, then: assuming that militants can operate offline, what exactly does cutting the internet off to the rest of the population accomplish?

Are these actions maintained in the interest of security or are they in the interest of power centers?

Think of the timing. The inordinate closure of the government is also done around times of political sensitivities. There was a deliberate cell shutdown during the days of Muharram in July of 2024 in a number of districts. In July 2025, following a coordinated effort of insurgent groups to organize Operation Baam, the state reacted not by acting in transparent way, but with another communications blackout.

Everyday Lives, Interrupted

On the human side, the cost is high. Students have missed online classes, exams, and the status of online submission of online applications are uncertain. To the proprietors of businesses, electronic banking and consumer interactions go down in one night. Journalists are not able to verify events, or report on time; hence, it has been termed by many as an intentional information blackout.

In Panjgur, a young student of journalism recalled his 4 years of life without mobile internet, but this was only possible through an expensive landline PTCL connection. In Gwadar, Nafeesa Baloch, a climate activist, complained that she had missed important deadlines to fill out grants and had lost international partners due to the August blackout: “This did not merely happen inconveniently; it silenced us on our work.” It is a bitter irony. While the leaders of Pakistan are so proud to talk about digital innovations, whole communities have to live as if they had never seen the modern internet.

Defying Courts, Defying Citizens

Considerations of executive competence dominate even where the courts intervene. In July, the Balochistan High Court ordered a partial restoring of internet service, but the government has continued the blackout irrespective of the order of the court. When a high court judgment can be blatantly disregarded, does a constitutional assurance of communication and expression have a quality anymore?

Local coalitions, including the All Parties Kech grouping, have criticised curfews and internet cut-offs as an antipathetic step toward the people, an impediment to the supply of basic commodities and a gag order to representatives of people expressing differences with the state apparatus and its controlling corporations .

A Historical Continuum of Control

This is not a recent. On Pakistan Day in 2012, the mobile services were blocked throughout Balochistan. In 2017, Dalbandin had six months of no mobile data). In more recent times, in 2024 during the general elections, they went again to silence a platform, X like they did to YouTube in 2010. The tendency is another pattern that can only be described as the reaching of the off switch by the state on the part of insecurity.

International Alarm, National Denial

Watchdogs of freedom of expression, including the UN Special Rapporteur himself, have criticised the repeated use of blackouts not only as an attack on liberties but also for their effect on the credibility of Pakistan in the international arena. Nevertheless, the authorities perpetuate it, despite realising the damage to Pakistan’s reputation. Pakistan is in need of foreign investment, yet its digital ecosystem is driven to its knees.

What tone relay to investors about the stability of Pakistan’s institutions?

How can one present the country as a tech hub of the future when connectivity is not a right, but a privilege?

The Questions That Remain

• If security is truly the objective, then why do militant attacks continue even in areas that are already disconnected from the internet?
• What happens to democratic checks and balances, if court orders are not enforced?
• When education, healthcare, journalism, and livelihoods are being disrupted, whose security is being given first priority?
• Above all: when a government opposes and muzzles its citizens far more than it protects them, who is the government actually serving–the populace, itself, or other interest groups?

In Balochistan, every outage is not merely a time out in communication–it is another brick in the wall of isolation under duress. There is a danger that these emergency regulations would become a never ending reality of digital instability.

When the only infrastructure between a people and the rest of the world is a susceptible bridge of connectivity, how long before such a bridge falls entirely?

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Syed Salman Mehdi is a freelance writer and researcher with a keen interest in social, political, and human rights issues. He has written extensively on topics related to sectarian violence, governance, and minority rights, with a particular focus on South Asia. His work has been published in various media outlets, and he is passionate about raising awareness on critical human rights concerns. Read other articles by Syed.

 

“Greetings from 51 Pegasi b”: How NASA made exoplanets into tourist destinations

A new JCOM paper analyzes the synergy between artists and scientists in a popular exoplanet science communication campaign

Sissa Medialab

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Video news illustrating the paper by Ceridwen Dovey "Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters" JCOM 2025

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Credit: Images in the video are published in Public Domain by NASA. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Looking for the perfect vacation? Do you crave late-night fun? PSO J318.5−22, the planet with no star where nightlife never ends, is perfect for you! Prefer some peace and a chance to catch some rays? Kepler-16b, the land of two suns—where your shadow always has company—is waiting!

In 2015, NASA launched an unusual and brilliant exoplanet outreach campaign, offering retro-style posters, virtual guided tours, and even coloring books. The project quickly went viral worldwide. What explains the success of a campaign about a relatively young field of science that—unlike other areas of space research—lacks spectacular imagery?

Ceridwen Dovey, science communicator, writer, filmmaker, and researcher, has just published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) a Practice Insight paper that presents a case study focusing on the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s poster campaign. Dovey describes the productive working relationships between scientists and artists that produced this standout work and shows how, in contexts like this, artists are not merely in service to science but can also inspire research itself and help scientists clarify their own thinking.

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As Dovey explains, the NASA creative team—led by visual strategist Joby Harris, who has a film and music background—faced at least two challenges. 

First, the available visuals: “We live in an age of extraordinary astronomical imagery—the Hubble telescope’s stunning images, for instance—that everybody knows well for their beauty, color and precision”, explains Dovey. “But with exoplanet science imagery, at the moment there’s really not very much to see - and this is a known challenge for the communication of exoplanetary science to the general public.”

The presence of a planet orbiting one or more extremely distant stars is generally inferred from the analysis of large quantities of data: we usually don’t see the planet directly, and must deduce its existence from the effects on its star or on the light the star emits. Even when scientists are lucky enough to obtain a direct image, it’s often rather underwhelming: “There are very few direct images of exoplanets, and usually they are not very visually appealing: they’re just a grainy dot around a sun,” says Dovey.

The second challenge is the rather inhospitable nature of the observed exoplanets: in the vast majority of cases, they are anything but welcoming to humans, a fact that, given the campaign’s concept of imagining exoplanets as tourist destinations of the future, complicated the team’s task.

“The team at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau chose to use 1930s retro-nostalgic image styles inspired by the lovely posters of National Parks like Yosemite created by the Works Progress Administration. Those campaigns sought in part to provide work after the Depression and to attract tourists to iconic national parks like Yellowstone. These posters aimed to evoke the romance of visiting these places and the kinds of nature encounters that would be possible there,” explains Dovey.

Joby Harris and his team decided to create a series of posters imagining exoplanets as if they were just around the corner—your next vacation destination. A playful way to encourage the public to imagine them as real places, drawing on the aesthetics and imagery of the historic series of U.S. national park posters. However, an important issue immediately arose during the discussions between artists and scientists: “Many of these exoplanets would be really nasty places to visit at a human level”, Dovey points out. “So the team, in their public and online presentations about their work, describes having a lot of interesting conversations with the scientists, where they worked together to imagine these planets as places. This created a really interesting creative process of continuous back-and-forth between artists and scientists.”

Perhaps the most interesting insight to emerge from Dovey’s work is precisely this: “What I hadn’t realised, until I started going to exoplanet science workshops for my research, was that the scientists are also doing a lot of work to try to imagine these places, to a degree.” Over the course of her study, Dovey came to understand that scientists in this field also make an imaginative leap to turn abstract scientific data into something concrete about a particular planet. Helping the public to “see” the object of their scientific research in these creative image-making practices can help the scientists to steer new lines of inquiry and encourage the public and funding bodies to remain committed to supporting exoplanet research.

In all this, Dovey believes, collaborating with artists is crucial: “Artists and filmmakers and writers and visualizers—we don’t have to be just an add-on at the end of a project to transmit scientific knowledge,” Dovey says. “We can really be helpful to the scientists, too: not only by questioning their assumptions about how things work, but by going back to the foundations of their planning—mission planning—and showing how research design can be enriched by bringing in a multidisciplinary team from very early on.”

The paper, “Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanets Travel Bureau posters,” by Ceridwen Dovey, is available open access on JCOM.

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Journal

Journal of Science Communication

Method of Research

Case study

Article Title

Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters

Article Publication Date

2-Sep-2025

"Like Luke Skywalker's planet "Tatooine" in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Kepler-16b is a gas giant, like Saturn, so it would have no solid surface to stand on. The view here is of and from an imagined nearby moon. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren't good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie's iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction." 

Credit

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech https://science.nasa.gov/resource/where-your-shadow-always-has-company/?layout=magic_shell&travel_bureau=true&intent=021

"Discovered in October 2013 using direct imaging, PSO J318.5-22 belongs to a special class of planets called rogue, or free-floating, planets. Wandering alone in the galaxy, they do not orbit a parent star. Not much is known about how these planets come to exist, but scientists theorize that they may be either failed stars or planets ejected from very young systems after an encounter with another planet. These rogue planets glow faintly from the heat of their formation. Once they cool down, they will be dancing in the dark."

Credit

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/where-the-nightlife-never-ends/?layout=magic_shell&travel_bureau=true&intent=021