Overview Effect
Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé
I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.
When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."
The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw…
A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.
Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space…
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism. Instead, the government opted for "space settlement." Of course, as Stewart Brand pointed out at the time, the last thing you do in space is settle. Quite the opposite! Making the decision to explore space -- and live there -- is just about the most unsettled act a human can commit.
There have always been two camps on this issue. First, the unsettled, like Brand: the science-fiction aficionados, capitalists, rocketry geeks, macrocosmic thinkers,…