Arrangement

Abstract: Last month, Artemis II announced humanity’s return to the moon. One of the stunning images from the mission, Earthset, echoes Earthrise, a similar photo taken by the crew of Apollo 8 as their spacecraft circled the moon in December 1968. Earthrise was snapped by astronaut Bill Anders and depicts a blue and white planet floating in the blackness of space – an iconic image often credited with the emergence of a new global environmental consciousness in the late 1960s. While Earthrise highlights earth’s vulnerability to environmental destruction, the picture also showed us a different vision of ourselves. As Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman reflected, “We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality… this must be what God sees.” This talk explores the abstracted view of earth from above as an integrated whole and the politics of a whole humanity that this God-like view engendered. It understands the 1968 moment as the culmination of a longer quest to know the earth in its entirety through scientific exploration into the unknown, which was often entangled with histories of colonialism and racialized and gendered exclusions. The talk explores the utopian imaginaries this view of earth inspired in how humans could rise above parochial interests to unite as one against the cold nothingness of space, but also traces the silences and erasures that enabled what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” The material used is part of my ongoing book project on international cooperation in Antarctica and outer space in the mid-20th century.

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