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, USA

If you pay attention to news from outside Earth—and as a The new scientist readers, chances are you have – then you may have heard about signs of life on a distant planet, or perhaps the news that the Mars Rover has 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 Earth might be hit by a deadly asteroid.

As exciting as these events were, they also quickly receded into the background hum, too easily usurped by more pressing and all-too-real events on Earth, like new wars or imminent climate catastrophe. The exciting possibility of microbes spewing gas on a planet more than a trillion kilometers away might spark the imagination for a few minutes, maybe even trigger a restless night, but what significance do these space discoveries have for our life on Earth?

In fact, turning our eyes beyond our cosmic shores has had a profound effect on human history, climate historian Dagomar Degroot argues in his new book. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: How the Solar System Shaped Human History—and May Help Save Our Planet.

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The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus has raised the question of whether the same is possible on Earth
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Although not a scientist, Degroot is a relatively new breed of interdisciplinary historian and currently an environmental historian at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

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

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

Degroot shows how much influence one planet can have. Take Venus, for example, an inhospitable hellscape of blazing hot volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide on a scorched surface where temperatures exceed 460°C.

This view was not always like this. When astronomers first turned their telescopes towards 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 fantastical notions of Venusian beings beneath these clouds, which was key in the emerging idea of ​​cosmic pluralism, which argued that Earth was not the only place where life existed.

As our observational instruments 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 realization that Venus had become so hot due to an uncontrolled greenhouse effect raised the question of whether the same was possible on Earth, and many scientists who spent a substantial part of their careers working on Venus and its atmosphere, such as astronomer Carl Sagan and climatologist James Hansen, were instrumental in raising the alarm about possible climate change on Earth.

Degroot’s book is full of such examples. We learn how the dust storms that make Mars so hostile have forced scientists to grapple with the possibility of nuclear weapons causing a similar scenario. And then, in 1994, there was the joint witnessing of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 tearing through Jupiter’s atmosphere, raising the alarm that we should be on the lookout for similar threats to Earth.

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

While Degroot is persuasive about the importance of looking into space, he seems more uncertain about how to handle future observations and space exploration. Especially, 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 might be able to find another way, one that doesn’t involve exploiting space for the profit of a privileged few, which has often been the motivation for studying the solar system throughout history, as colonial elites sought knowledge they could use to expand empire. Instead, we should enrich our lives on Earth and promote “a vision of an ocean in which we build in the water to support our home, for the common good of all,” writes Degroot.

One example he cites is space solar power, which could involve placing solar panels on the moon that beam energy back to Earth. However, given the basic state of the experiments testing this, this argument is not particularly compelling.

Still, Degroot makes it clear that a decision will have to be made one way or another: the history of understanding the solar system makes it inevitable. “Humanity’s past has been partly influenced by ripples on the cosmic ocean,” he writes. “More will come no matter what we do. We are now gaining the ability to make our own waves. Our future may depend on how we make them.”

Three more great books about the solar system

Pale blue dot A vision of the human 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 appears in Dagomar Degroot’s book (see main review) when he retells the famous story of how the American radio adaptation was so convincing that listeners panicked and believed that Earth had really been invaded by Martians.

City On Mars
Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Living off the planet looks pretty problematic, say the Weinersmiths, a cartoonist-biologist duo who describe the brutal reality of life on Mars with scientific precision and beautiful illustrations.

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