When You Look at Earthrise, You Are Seeing the Wrong Thing (Or: An Autobiography of Earth)
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Abstract
Since the photograph Earthrise was taken — specifically, by NASA astronaut Bill Anders during Apollo 8's fourth lunar orbit on (the Earth equivalent of) December 24th, 1968 CE at 16:39:39.3 UTC— it has been analyzed exhaustively to reveal a broad range of general, universalizing, and uncompromising claims about Earth, humanness, and the future. These claims, however, are also often orthogonal to one another or even contradictory. (Here are a few: Earthrise shows a fragile biosphere endangered by human excess... or it demonstrates that human technological ingenuity can solve terrestrial problems with outer space resources... or it masks a militarized, nationalist project as a moment of sublime transcendence... or it shows that humanity is ready to leave Earth’s cradle and spread life elsewhere in the cosmos....) This paper’s concern, however, is not with these analyses nor with their contradictions, but rather with the curious fact of their common generality and universality despite the spatiotemporal precision and specificity of Earthrise’s provenance. In this paper, I continue my ongoing project of thinking humanness from elsewhere in the cosmos to argue that Earth’s fundamental conditions (its gravity, active core, radiation profile, magnetosphere, atmospheric chemistry, solar distance, and more) can sustain multiple—and even contradictory—generalized spatiotemporal analyses of the world, humanness, and the future without the specific autobiography of any individual terrestrial analyst of Earthrise being of relevance. Indeed, I will argue that Earthrise produces the aesthetic and embodied effect, for terrestrial viewers, of looking at Earth as if you were looking at it from Earth by obscuring the specific autobiographical moment of space-based viewing; the specific human-nonhuman assemblages and the simultaneous precision and compromise demanded by the always-contingent conditions of such viewing; and their radical non-equivalence to terrestrial spatiotemporal conditions. To put it another way: Any specific Terran could write an uncompromising and general autobiography of Earth without consequence to the whole world, a possibility that cannot be extended beyond its surface where the specificity of any act can be generally and immediately consequential. I will conclude by arguing that in looking at Earthrise from elsewhere in the cosmos, a non-Terran you would see not a general view of Earth, but rather, a specific example of how terrestrial humans are privileged to look at themselves in the multiple, contradictory, and uncompromising ways that their home world still sustains.
Biography
David Valentine is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
