What to read this week: Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean by Dagomar Degroot

Ripples on the cosmic ocean
Dagomar Degroot
Viking, United Kingdom; Belknap Press, United States

If you pay attention to news from beyond Earth – and, as New scientist Reader, there’s a good chance that’s the case – so you may have heard about signs of life on a distant planet, or perhaps the news that a Mars Rover has found possible signs of ancient life in distinctive speckled rocks. You may also remember the brief period about a year ago when it looked like a deadly asteroid was going to hit Earth.

As exciting as these events were, they quickly faded into background noise, too easily usurped by more urgent and all too real events on Earth, like new wars or impending climate catastrophe. The tantalizing possibility of microbes spewing gas on a planet more than a trillion miles away might spark the imagination for a few minutes, perhaps even spark a restless night, but how important do these cosmic discoveries actually have for our lives on Earth?

In fact, turning our gaze outward, beyond our cosmic shores, has had a profound effect on human history, argues climate historian Dagomar Degroot in his new book. Ripples on the cosmic ocean: how the solar system has shaped human history and could help save our planet.

Although Degroot is not a scientist, he is a relatively new interdisciplinary historian and currently an environmental historian at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

His new book highlights his interest in how changes in cosmic environments have influenced human history, and it takes a global view of scientific progress, drawing on the records of scientists both eminent and obscure, to make a compelling argument for observing the cosmic ocean from our isolated vantage point on Earth. “We cannot pretend that the ocean does not exist,” writes Degroot. “It is not only because its waves will come whether we seek them or not; it is also because we can only understand our island by looking towards the ocean. »

Without our planetary neighbors lighting up the night sky throughout human history, we would be poor. We would understand less about the Earth’s climate, its past ice ages and future global warming; we would be much more exposed to existential threats, such as nuclear weapons and cataclysmic asteroid strikes; and we would, in all likelihood, be stuck in the religious conflict surrounding the heliocentric worldview. It’s quite a list.

Degroot shows the influence that a single planet can have. Take Venus, for example, an inhospitable hellscape of extremely hot volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide onto a scorched surface, where temperatures exceed 460°C.

This vision has not always been the same. When astronomers first turned their telescopes toward Venus, it proved difficult to observe, which we now know is due to the planet’s thick atmosphere. But in the 19th century, most observers agreed that there were clouds.

This led to fantastical imaginings of Venusian beings beneath this cloud cover, which played a central role in the emerging idea of ​​cosmic pluralism that Earth was not the only place where life existed.

As our observational tools improved and we began to learn more about the true inhospitable nature of Venus, a more pressing concern emerged: Is this a vision of Earth’s future?

Understanding that Venus became so hot because of a runaway greenhouse effect raised the question of whether the same thing was possible on Earth, and many scientists who devoted significant parts of their careers to working on Venus and its atmosphere, such as astronomer Carl Sagan and climate scientist James Hansen, were instrumental in sounding the alarm about possible climate change on Earth.

Degroot’s book is full of examples like these. We learn how the dust storms that make Mars so hostile have forced scientists to consider the possibility that a similar scenario could be caused by nuclear weapons. And then, in 1994, there was the collective witnessing of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 passing through Jupiter’s atmosphere, which raised alarm bells that we should watch out for similar threats to Earth.

But Ripples on the cosmic ocean is also great fun to read, with countless excursions into lesser-known sagas from the history of scientific thought. They are often strange and colorful figures. One of them is Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian-American psychoanalyst who seems to fascinate Degroot. Velikovsky consulted ancient mythology to make surprisingly accurate predictions (alongside many less stellar predictions) about Venus and which, from the 1950s to the 1970s, became a thorn in the side of the scientific establishment.

While Degroot is convincing when explaining the importance of looking into space, he seems on shakier ground when it comes to how to deal with future observations and space exploration. Even more so, as he acknowledges, because we live in an unprecedented era of space exploration, driven by billionaire-funded private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Degroot says we might be able to find a different path, one that doesn’t involve the exploitation of space for the benefit of a privileged few, which throughout history has often motivated the study of the solar system, as the colonial elite sought knowledge they could exploit to expand their empire. Instead, we should enrich our lives on Earth, supporting “an ocean vision in which we build in the water to support our home, for the collective benefit of all,” Degroot writes.

One example he gives is space solar power, which could involve installing solar panels on the Moon that send energy back to Earth. However, given the rudimentary state of experiments testing this, the argument is not particularly convincing.

Degroot nevertheless makes it clear that a decision will have to be made one way or the other: the history of understanding the solar system makes this inevitable. “Humanity’s past was influenced, in part, by the ripples of the cosmic ocean,” he writes. “More will come, no matter what we do. We now have the ability to create our own waves. Our future may depend on how we produce them.”

Three other great books about the solar system

Pale blue dot A vision of the future of humanity in space
Carl Sagan
The book by astronomer Carl Sagan Pale blue dot – inspired by an image of Earth taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft – is a meditation on what the solar system can teach us about our place in the universe.

War of the Worlds
HG Wells
This classic features in Dagomar Degroot’s book (see main review), when he tells the famous story of an American radio adaptation so convincing that listeners panicked, believing Earth was really being invaded by Martians.

A city on Mars
Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Living off-planet seems problematic enough, say the Weinersmiths, a pair of biologist cartoonists and authors who depict the brutal reality of life on Mars with scientific precision and beautiful illustrations.