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

Ripples on the cosmic ocean
Dagomar Degroot
Viking, Great Britain; Belknap Press, USA

If you pay attention to news from places other than Earth – and as one New Scientist reader, chances are you do – then you may have heard about hints of life on a distant planet, or perhaps the news that a Mars Rover found possible signs of ancient life in distinctive mottled rocks. You may also remember the brief period, about a year ago, when it looked like a deadly asteroid might hit Earth.

As exciting as these events were, they also quickly faded into a background hum, all too easily usurped by more pressing and all too real events on Earth, such as new wars or impending climate catastrophe. The tantalizing possibility of microbes belching gas on a planet more than a trillion kilometers away might spark the imagination for a few minutes, perhaps even spark a restless night, but what relevance do these cosmic discoveries really have to our lives on Earth?

In fact, turning our gaze 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 shaped human history – and can help save our planet.

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

His new book underscores his interest in how changes in cosmic environments affected human history, and he takes a broad view of scientific progress, drawing on the archives of scientists both prominent and obscure, to make a compelling case for looking out to the cosmic ocean from our isolated vantage point on Earth. “We can’t pretend the ocean doesn’t exist,” writes Degroot. “It’s not just because the waves will come whether we look for them or not, it’s also because we can only understand our island by looking out to sea.”

Without our planetary neighbors lighting up the night sky throughout human history, we would be poor. We would have less understanding of Earth’s climate, its past ice ages and future global warming; we would be at far greater risk from existential threats, such as nuclear weapons and catastrophic asteroid strikes; and we would in all likelihood be stuck in the religious conflict surrounding the heliocentric worldview. That’s quite a list.

Degroot shows how much influence a single planet can have. Take Venus, for example, an inhospitable hellscape of fiery volcanoes belching sulfur dioxide onto a scorched surface, where temperatures exceed 460°C.

This view was not always like this. When astronomers first turned their telescopes on 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 it had clouds.

This led to fantastic notions of Venusian beings beneath this cloud cover, which was central to the new idea of ​​cosmic pluralism which claimed 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?

The understanding that Venus became so warm due to a runaway greenhouse effect raised the question of whether the same was possible on Earth, and many of the scientists who spent significant parts of their careers working on Venus and its atmosphere, such as astronomer Carl Sagan and climate scientist James Hansen, were instrumental in raising 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 forced scientists to grapple with the possibility that a similar scenario could be caused by nuclear weapons. And then, in 1994, the collective witness to Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 tearing through Jupiter’s atmosphere raised the alarm that we should be on the lookout for similar threats to Earth.

But Ripples on the cosmic ocean is also a lot of fun to read, with countless excursions into lesser-known sagas in the history of scientific thought. These often involve strange and colorful characters. One such is Immanuel Velikovsky, an American-Russian psychoanalyst who seems to fascinate Degroot. Velikovsky consulted ancient mythology to make some surprisingly accurate predictions (alongside many not-so-stunning ones) about Venus, which from the 1950s to the 1970s became a thorn in the side of the scientific establishment.

While Degroot is persuasive in arguing the importance of looking out into space, he seems on shaky ground when it comes to how to treat future observations and space exploration. Especially, as he acknowledges, because we live in an unprecedented age of space exploration, spurred on by billionaire-funded private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Degroot says we may be able to find another way, one that doesn’t involve exploiting space for the benefit of a privileged few, which throughout history was often the motivation for studying the solar system, as colonial elites sought knowledge they could use to expand their empires. Instead, we should enrich our lives on earth, supporting “a vision of the ocean where we build in the water to support our home, for the common benefit of all,” writes Degroot.

One example he gives is space-based solar energy, which could involve putting 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.

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

Three other great books about the solar system

Pale blue dot A vision of man’s future in space
Carl Sagan
Astronomer Carl Sagan’s book 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 feature in Dagomar Degroot’s book (see the main review), when he retells the famous story of how an American radio adaptation was so convincing that listeners panicked, believing that Earth was really being invaded by Martians.

A city on Mars
Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Living off the planet looks pretty problematic, say the Weinersmiths, a cartoonist and biologist author couple who describe the brutal reality of life on Mars with scientific precision and beautiful illustrations.