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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
“Everything is sad,” wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the “tears of things”?
In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and emergent – associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we should feel about climate change. Between the information gathered by planetary sensors and the simple act of breathing the air, new unsettling moods are produced for which we currently lack an adequate language. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet? Or is the strange feeling of witnessing mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to begin with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our all-too-human melancholia and a more impersonal sorrow, nestled in the heart of the cosmic elements.
Spanning a wide range of topics – from the history of cosmology to the “existential threat” of climate change – this book is a reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension. As Pettman and Thacker observe, never before have we known so much about the planet and the cosmos, and yet never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet, to say nothing of the stars beyond.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Blurb
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Sequence 1: In Space No One Can Hear You Weep
Opportunity Knocked
Then Again
An Inventory of Affects
The Weeping Animal
We Need Not Decide
Earthshot
Ecce Kosmos
You Are Here
Pale Blue Dot
Billions and Billions
The Last Dog
A Mir Formality
Where No Man Has Gone Before
Stranger Danger
Final Contact
Loving the Alien
Ego Bruises
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 2: Dark Star
A Sad Planet (I)
A Sad Planet (II)
A Star and a Sorrow
The Gift of Sorrow
Sadness is a Planet
Astral Melancholy
Rays of Sorrow
Saturnalia
Planetary Ennui
Rings of Saturn
Every Direction is the Same
Ruinous Time, Incessant Decline
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 3: Planetary Sorrow
Alien Stupidity
The Grass is Greener
Belated Lives
Phoning Home (but Being Left on Hold)
The Bringer of Old Age
Impact Statement
Sad Sacks
Mono no aware
“What’s the Point?”
Riding a Cannonball
A Gleaming Leprosy
Seeds of Time
The Forgetting of Stars
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 4: Comets, Importing Change
No Safe Spaces in Space
Graduating from the Human Evolutionary Level
Missed Connections
X-Risk
Excessive Egotism
Man Has Lived in Vain
Justine and Claire
Facing Fate
Jim and Julia
Civilization is Back
Space is the Place
On Gloomth
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 5: Last Life
A Lump of Death, a Chaos of Hard Clay
Catastrophism (I)
Catastrophism (II)
Last Life
A Dissipative Species
An Outbreak of Life
The Toil of Sorrow
Concrete Islands
Solitude of the Species
The Inner Desert
Wind and Sand and Wasteland
Dreaming of the End
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 6: Unearthly
Unearthly
Planet Without People
Human Trespass
Everything’s Gone Green
Invasive Species
Sad Plants
Hollowed-Out Earth
Structure of Feeling (Angkor Wat)
Reason Unhinged by Grief
Primordial Pathos
Chthonic Depression
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 7: Entropology
Post coitum omne animalium triste est
Entropology
Under Non-Western Eyes
Then Again (Again …)
All Watched Over by Machines
The Ambition to Vanish
Haunted Atoms
Necrobiome
Biophobia
The Hedgehog and the Fox
In the Land of the Jammy-Rams
hitchBOT
Barefoot Across America
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 8: Omen of the World
Storm and Stress
Omen of the World
A Feeling for Apocalypse (I)
Apocalypsis
Black Tears
The Lost World
Memento mori
A Feeling for Apocalypse (II)
Vital Signs
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 9: Shapes of Sorrow
Music of the Spheres
Abandoned by the World
Dream Worlds
Shapes of Sorrow (I)
Shapes of Sorrow (II)
Weltschmerz
The Deeps
A Poetics of Planets
Impersonal Sublime
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 10: Liquid Sky
The Despairing Jelly
How Horror Blasts Out
Plan(et) B
Oumuamua
When You Can No Longer Phone Home
Cetacean Retreat (aka, In Search of Life’s Porpoise)
Squid Game
His Octopus Teacher
Parts Unbearable
Hypersea
Oxygene
Elemental Intimacy
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 11: Dark Crystals
The Cave of Swords
Frozen Warnings
A Second Suicide
A Forest of Jewels
Snowblind
A Theophany of Non-Organic Life
Through a Glass Darkly
Go, Crystall Teares
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 12: Prayers for Rain
Prayers for Rain (I)
Prayers for Rain (II)
Gravity of a Planet
Black Bile, Cold and Dry
Night’s Black Bird
Atmospheres
Dissipative Structures
Gazing Wearily, Striving Unwillingly
Melancholy of Anatomy (I)
Melancholy of Anatomy (II)
Sad Planets (a Typology)
As One Listens to the Rain
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 13: Quiet Despair
Our Only Home, the Night of Space
Around Our Grave a Glass-Clear Silence
Lost in Space
Sarcophagus in Space
A Black-Draped Sun (I)
A Black-Draped Sun (II)
The Earth a Grave
Blind Life, Black Star
Divine Despair
A Quiet Despair
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 14: The Last Philosopher
You Were Here
Cosmic View
The Last Philosopher
Help Less (a Eulogy for SN11)
Eco-Ex
If–When–Why
The Gift of the Body
Extinction without Death
Cosmic Sacrifice
Sacred Conspiracy
Rare Earth
Celestial Firmament
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 15: Solastalgia
Concern Team
Atlas Crunched
Olympia
Long After the Thrill
Sad Girls
Nine of Swords
The Waning of Affect
Hiding the Pain
Bitter Lemonade
The Ashes
Back in the Saddle
Solastalgia
Moving Home
The Lucky Country
Shipping Eden
The Two Willow Trees (a Lachrymose Children’s Story)
Notes
Extreme Weather
Sequence 16: The Clever Beasts
The Machine Stops
Collapsology
Zoom Fatigue
Cosmographs
The Clever Beasts
Objective Allegories
Exhibit D
Global Happiness Index
Indexicality
Sad Things (a Partial Inventory)
No More Happy Returns
Notes
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Blurb
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
References
End User License Agreement
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“Everything is sad,” wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the “tears of things”?
In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and emergent – associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we should feel about climate change. Between the information gathered by planetary sensors and the simple act of breathing the air, new unsettling moods are produced for which we currently lack an adequate language. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet? Or is the strange feeling of witnessing mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to begin with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our all-too-human melancholia and a more impersonal sorrow, nestled in the heart of the cosmic elements.
Spanning a wide range of topics – from the history of cosmology to the “existential threat” of climate change – this book is a reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension. As Pettman and Thacker observe, never before have we known so much about the planet and the cosmos, and yet never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet, to say nothing of the stars beyond.
Sad Planets
Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker
polity
Copyright © Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker 2024
The right of Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6237-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942110
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
In recent years, a host of official terms have emerged which attempt to grapple with a new kind of sorrow: “climate anxiety,” “climate angst,” “environmental grief,” “eco-grief,” “eco-guilt,” and “solastalgia,” to name but a few. While they differ in their specifics, what these and similar terms have in common is a reckoning with the limits of human existence vis-à-vis the planet on which we are but temporary residents. Never before have we known so much about the planet; never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet – to say nothing of the wider cosmos.
From a certain perspective, the awareness of global climate change seems to have been primarily scientific, evidenced by the now routine articles, news reports, and media coverage on the topic, themselves backed up by a plethora of research data. However, what the data reveals are not only changes to atmospheric conditions but a range of “existential threats” that are as much philosophical as they are political, social, economic, and ecological. Again and again, climate change documentaries have collated the science into a cautionary tale about the precarious relationship between human beings and planet Earth. A whole “climate culture” has emerged, one that includes everything from corporate “off world” initiatives, to climate activism, to the latest Hollywood disaster film.
In the maelstrom of big data, media coverage, and public opinion, something else has emerged, something so obvious that it has, perhaps, gone unnoticed: the question of how one should feel about climate change. “Climate” is, after all, a strange entity, ambient but palpable, diffuse yet tangible, something abstract that is also felt, in the way that heat, cold, humidity, air pressure, and the weather are felt. Climate is as vast as the sky and as minuscule as particles of air. It floats above us and moves through us, and in scale it renders human existence insignificant at the same time that it is judiciously measured, predicted, debated, and even engineered. In the process a new “we” is produced, one that is still vaguely defined, at once inclusive and exclusive, divergent and convergent, fractured and holistic, human and non-human. Between the data generated by a vast array of planetary sensors and the simple act of breathing the air, there are emergent emotions, affects, and moods for which we perhaps lack an adequate language.
A host of questions emerge. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet, or is the strange feeling of planetary sorrow an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to begin with? Hovering in the background of such ruminations is the specter of human extinction, the thought of which seems both unacceptable and inevitable. Is human extinction some faroff and remote event, or is it in fact already happening? How should one mourn the death of a species? And who – or what – will be left to mourn the end of humanity?
There is a sense in which even beginning to address such questions is both daunting and presumptuous. Traditional forms of thinking and writing will not do; and a single, linear, totalizing argument would seem to lack an appreciation of the indistinctness of both climate and affect. Therefore, this book is organized differently, centered around a series of micro-essays of sorts. These in turn have been constellated into “Sequences” based on overlapping themes and their variations. While there is a linear flow to each sequence, each of the micro-essays can also be read on its own.
New York, Summer 2023
Sequence 1In Space No One Can Hear You Weep
Opportunity Knocked
“My battery is low. And it’s getting dark.” Many of us felt a heart-spasm when we first read these words – the last transmission from the Opportunity robot, stranded on the surface of Mars. A diligent non-human NASA employee, which had been doing its job so conscientiously for fifteen years, was now succumbing to a kind of mechanical mortality. The pathos was pure, even if the rover’s last words were condensed for poetic effect. The robot, also known as Opportunity – or “Oppy,” for short – surprised its makers in terms of its resilience on the red planet, so far from home, as well as for its work ethic. Long after scientists assumed it would have succumbed to rust, radiation, or some other interstellar malady, Oppy continued to forage, explore, sample, and send missives home. It was like some kind of plucky character from a Pixar movie. Except it was real. In the end, a massive dust storm was the thing that did the rover in. As Abigail Fraeman, one of the project managers, explained: “By Thursday, we knew that it was bad. And then, by Friday, we knew it was really bad, but there was nothing we could do but watch. And then it was Sunday, we actually got a communication from the rover and we were shocked … It basically said we had no power left.” Apparently Oppy was overcome with a kind of awe at the sight of the approaching wall of rust-colored dust, about to engulf all its sensors like a sublime tsunami. Indeed, the rover’s last words essentially said, “the skies are incredibly dark … no sunlight is getting through. It’s night time during the day.”1 Before its battery died, Opportunity managed to send back a last image, a distorted and grainy image of shadowy gray, half-truncated as the transmission was cut off.
Is the pang many of us felt at this story merely a viral case of the pathetic fallacy, so potent that even scientists were not immune from it? Or is there something objectively sad about a machine with a purpose, left to face its end on its own, perhaps the only moving thing on the planet – exposed to the alien elements in a way, and on a scale, that no human has yet to experience? No doubt, the philosophers can argue about whether the pathetic fallacy is in fact a fallacy or not until philosophy itself faces the same entropic fate as the Mars rover. But we would submit that there is indeed something powerfully poignant about such a scenario as this, not isolated to – or explained away by – the eye of the human beholder. Perhaps there is a seam of sorrow threaded through the universe to which humans may be the most sensitive – or maybe not – but in any case affects the universe in different ways, even where, and when, life is absent. (Perhaps partly because of this absence.) Creatures no doubt experienced sad situations long before there were humans around to witness or record them. Trees, after all, certainly fell in the forest many millions of years before Homo sapiens came along to question the sound that these timber giants most definitely made. Who are we to presume that trees don’t mourn the collapse of one of their neighbors? (After all, we’ve only recently discovered the extent to which trees communicate and cooperate through “the world wood web.”) Perhaps it’s a form of arrogance to assume that only humans can experience what Spinoza called “the sad passions” and what Virgil called “the sadness in things.” Perhaps even a courageous laborer, made of the world’s most expensive nuts and bolts, is imbricated in an affective atmosphere as much as an elemental one.
Then Again
Then again, we could just as well propose the opposite hypothesis. That the cosmos is not a cold and sorrowful void but an inviting plenum on which glittering jewels of possibility are scattered across the heavens like warming embers. This would be the true pulse of the universe that the mystics attempt to find and channel through their ecstatic whirling or their immobile meditation. This is the subterranean ocean of tranquility beneath all our suffering and sadness: a wretchedness that, these same mystics insist, is just an illusion (from one view), or (from another) a series of necessary tests, on the path out of Saṃsāra to Nirvana. Melancholia would then, contrary to the alchemical or astrological tradition, be unconnected to the motion or music of the spheres and instead be a slimy film that humans alone leave in their wake – viscous evidence of their heavy and gloomy passage through this world. Human sadness as material excretion, manifest in our poetry as much as in our plastic, and in our sparkling new mega-churches or supermarkets as much as in our ruins. This heavy psychic, or even spiritual, baggage marks our species in sharp contrast to all the other creatures, who flow through life “like water in water,”2 and who only know sadness when humanity introduces it to them. (An introduction no living thing can now fully avoid, given our genius for leaving the calling card of our own misery inside every crevice and infusing our own bitter tears into every toxic droplet.)
An Inventory of Affects
Climate seems at once distant or remote and at the same time the most intimate and immediate. The vast weather systems that form hurricanes, wildfires, or tsunamis operate at a scale beyond the comprehension of the individual human beings, and yet it is individuals that are also directly impacted by such events. A downstream effect occurs as those of us not directly impacted bear witness to the effects of extreme weather and are in turn affected indirectly. The experience of climate events – at whatever level – then opens onto other, more abstract, more ambivalent dispositions. As instances of climate migration increase around the planet, at what point will human beings find themselves exiled from the planet itself? Behind the climate event lurks the specter of human extinction, the haunting image of an uninhabitable Earth, a planet indifferent to the human inhabitants that have occupied it for a comparably brief moment in deep time. A rift begins to grow between the planet and its now temporary human inhabitants.
A culture of climate, a confusion of affects. Is it going to happen soon or is it happening now? To feel climate and to feel about climate. The weather “out there” and the weather right here, at my doorstep. The devastation wrought by extreme weather events – themselves becoming more regular, more normalized – cannot but produce emotional and affective responses. At the same time it can be difficult to know how or what to feel about something that operates at a scale that so far exceeds that of the individual human being. No doubt this is why, in recent years, a new vocabulary has emerged in the public discourse surrounding climate change. Psychologists discuss “eco-grief,” the grieving expressed by those directly impacted by climate events. This is often distinguished from “environmental grief,” or the indirect grief felt by those of us who witness the devastation of climate events for human beings, but also for animal and planetary life as well (the term has also been applied to the mourning of the loss of species). The plethora of information about the near-term impacts of climate change has also had an impact on our relationship to the future and our ability (or inability) to plan for it, given the unstable and tenuous character of climate events themselves. This has led psychiatrists to talk about “climate anxiety,” the feeling of uncertainty and instability linked to climate change, which in some cases may inhibit an individual’s ability to make future life decisions at all. Related to this is what journalists sometimes call “climate angst,” or the frustration felt by individuals at the inertia and apathy of political leaders and government organizations to adequately respond to the “existential threats” of climate change. The troubling sense of the inevitability of it all is linked to what philosophers and sociologists have termed “solastalgia,” or the irretrievable sense of a loss of home, be it one’s actual home, one’s place of residence, or one’s country – in some cases scaled up to the planet itself.
In short, a new affective vocabulary concerning climate change has emerged, existing in the shadows of the more official, more public discourses of science, policy, and politics. While each of these terms is different from the others, they all bear witness to a unique emotional terrain for which there may not be adequate words. Not yet, that is. It will likely be a matter of time before this new vocabulary enters the official, institutional taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Many of these unofficial diagnoses take terms usually applied to individuals (“anxiety,” “grief”) and apply them to the species as a whole, terms denoting something about the planet that so far exceeds the individual we can only use generalities (“climate,” “ecology,” “environment”). Are we already witnessing a near future in which doctors can diagnose patients with “climate anxiety” or “geotrauma”? What are the treatment options for “climate angst,” much less a pandemic of “solastalgia”?
Perhaps, before rushing headlong into classifying – and pathologizing – these ambivalent affects, it’s worth pausing in order to acknowledge their diffuse, nebulous, and shadowy contours. The range of emotions, affects, and moods surrounding climate change are arguably of a different sort. They are negative affects: affects that point to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, and in so doing they raise deeper, “existential” questions about the particular being that has had the provenance to name itself a human being. These are also negative affects in the sense that they index the horizon of our ability to have a relation to something as devastatingly impersonal as a hurricane, a wildfire, a flood, an earthquake. How should we relate to something as diffuse and ambient as the weather, as climate? The question is almost an elemental one. Wind, fire, water, ice. Negative affects reside at the liminal edges of the more accepted, more “healthy” affects, but, because of this, perhaps they also reveal more. Perhaps they also reveal the limits of our species-specific attitudes, orientations, and dispositions towards “our” planet. Perhaps what they reveal is a gulf between our habitual, human-centric beliefs towards the planet and the difficult-to-accept notion of the planet in itself, indifferent to our varied fears and desires.
The Weeping Animal
Nietzsche understood that the animals judge us for our histrionic ways and for being the drama queen of the animal kingdom. “I fear that the animals see man,” he wrote, “as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense – as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.”3 This is an intriguing reversal of the humanistic assumption that it is our own kind who, exceptionally, are the rational ones. Nietzsche makes this observation in his great attempt to construct a “gay” or “joyful” science (fröhliche Wissenschaft), rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of the dismal archive of most human thought and endeavor. (At least, that is, since Socrates showed up and poisoned the well with his sanctimonious talk of goodness, morality, truth, and reason.) Despite his contempt for modern man, Nietzsche retained a faith in our latent potential to transcend our own resentments and the attendant passive-aggressive sharing of negativity that so often goes under the cloak of culture, society, and so on. Indeed, only someone who felt the weight of the world so heavily could understand the stakes in forging a more light-hearted orientation towards being – in saying “Yes” to existence, despite the profound insecurity of fleeting mortality. (And, in this Zarathustran project, Nietzsche would enlist many animals as totem or spirit guides.)
Of course, the wrong people listened to the wrong parts of Nietzsche, and took it the wrong way. Hitler believed the Übermensch would climb ever upwards on the charred bones of lesser men, while Ayn Rand – not quite so extreme – used the philosopher’s words as an alibi to promote the kind of self-defeating cynical solipsism that officially informs much of our current anti-social society.
Rather than humbly ask the animals for advice on drying our neurotic tears, we slaughtered them for sport and status, destroyed their habitats, drove them to extinction, and imprisoned the remaining ones for our civic edification. When the Tove Jansson-like character, from Jansson’s short story “The Wolf,” visits a forsaken zoo on an abandoned island in mid-winter, she is overcome with sadness when she sees the eponymous creatures in their snowy cage. “The wolves’ ceaseless pacing struck her as appalling. It was timeless. They loped back and forth behind their bars week after week and year after year, and if they hate us, she thought, it must be a gigantic hate! She felt cold, suddenly, terribly cold, and she started to cry.”
The weeping animal indeed. Seeking forgiveness from a creature that howls at the moon. But does the wild wolf – free and far from the human stench – howl at the moon out of joy or from a purer sadness, moved by the pack perception of lunar beauty and the reflective illumination it provides?
We Need Not Decide
We need not decide – at this early point in our consideration of such key matters – whether humans are merely the most sensitive species when it comes to absorbing ambient and universal sorrow, or whether it is humans themselves who funk up the cosmos with their own woeful stench. (Forever lamenting their fallen state, as part of the world, but not truly of it.) Is the human mind, and its subsequent arts and sciences, a prism reflecting an ubiquitous sorrow, saturated into the marrow of Things? Or is it a powerful projection mechanism, using ever more powerful optical technologies to beam our own wan inadequacies onto the panoramic widescreen of the night sky. The quantum aspect of existence means both could be equally true. Or equally false.
These two alternatives, however, should be kept in mind – along with the tension created between them – as we explore the interstellar terrain of sad planets.
Earthshot
In October of 2021, in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, Prince William announced the launch of a new initiative, the Earth Shot Prize – “a new global prize for the environment,” valued at £5 million annually, and “designed to incentivize change and help to repair our planet over the next ten years.” Motivated by an increasingly rare sense of noblesse oblige, the then second-in-line to the English throne noted, in an interview with the BBC: “We are seeing a rise in climate anxiety; young people are now growing up where their futures are basically threatened the whole time.” William went on to sympathize with the plight of those unfortunate enough to be born outside of Buckingham Palace – or, failing that, the English aristocracy – stopping short, of course, of calling for a dissolution of the monarchy and the redistribution of wealth, lands, and resources. Channeling the struggling classes as best he could, the prince concedes, “You’ve got to worry about a job, you’ve got to worry about family life, you’ve got to worry about housing, you’ve got to worry about all these things. Then you put the climate – the very thing we live, breathe, and walk around on – on top of that? So no wonder we’re having a lot of mental health concerns and challenges coming along.”4
Perhaps the likely future king is right, and anxiety is the dominant mood of the times. Others may nominate anger, or indignation, as the signature affect of our age. Certainly, social media, and the echo chamber of public life, seem custom-designed to fan the flames of both fear and fury. We however, have chosen to focus on sadness in the following pages, for several related reasons. First, sadness is a sibling to anxiety, angst, and anger, but is what remains when the energy or passion of the latter burn away. In that sense, sadness seems more of an underlying condition, foundation, or given. Sadness is, we submit, the natural tone of things once all the other cacophonous sounds die away. As such – and this brings us to the second reason – sadness (along with its close cousins melancholy, sorrow, despair, gloom, grief, and so on) is somewhat taboo in our relentlessly upbeat, frozen grimace, “have a nice day,” motivational poster-plastered culture. To feel down, bereft, wan, or low is akin to blasphemy in an age that asks us to sacrifice everything but our optimism and hope, both of which – famously, cruelly, masochistically, and stubbornly – spring eternal. (Cioran: “One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.” Which may explain why Prince William is so keen to reward those who continue to toil in the increasingly fallow fields of such faith.) Sadness is both timely and timeless in its response to each poignant scene or situation with which we find ourselves confronted each day; and also, in its more profound and universal understanding of the futility of action, the vanity of plans, and inevitable passing of all that is precious. (Including the cold comfort of sadness itself.)
What the Earth and all of its inhabitants are enduring at present – including insentient elements such as landscapes and habitats – is a scandal and a shame. What’s more, we are ashamed that we are the main source of the scandal, as much as some of us still try to deny it. Clearly the world is becoming a sadder place to live in, if only because the extinction rate is accelerating exponentially for our fellow living beings (even as those animals that call themselves humans are multiplying at an alarming rate). Even those people who sit right at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – adjusted to include fast wifi, prestige brand clothing, and cold-pressed juice bars – feel the sadness that washes all around them, like a rising tide. (For, as much as the economically comfortable try to deny it, happiness is a collective resource and cannot be hoarded without great psychic cost.)
The end looms – through floods, famine, fire, plague, or nuclear winter. And yet we no longer have faith in the kind of existential consolation that the idea of the apocalypse or the End Times used to bring. We suspect and understand that the earthly story, along with its pathetic human drama, will limp along even after things have completely fallen apart. No rapture awaits. No kingdom of heaven. But rather struggle, improvisation, conflict, and sheer persistence for its own tenacious sake. Yes, we have a right to be angry, given how callously those self-nominated to be our stewards act and obtain. Yes, we have a right to be fearful, given how close we sail daily to the figurative cliff. But sadness, we feel, is the pulse of the matter, even as it forms the conditions for those precious and fleeting efflorescences of joy to which even the most miserable of souls is prone, despite their – our – commitment to a sense of infinite resignation.
When it comes to an existential inventory of the affects, this book could certainly be the first volume in a series – including Mad Planets, Scared Planets, Scarred Planets, Charred Planets, and so on. (Even Glad Planets, if we’re feeling foolishly optimistic.) … But sadness seemed the right affect for the times, as well as for the timeless human condition itself. (And, by extension or association, the world, the planet, the solar system, and beyond.)
Ecce Kosmos
We all have at least one. A moment in which the scales finally fall from our eyes and we look around us as if suddenly reborn, seeing the world – nay, the universe! – afresh. Seeing beyond the horizon of the familiar is an uncanny feeling; a cosmic feeling – to realize, not only mentally, but viscerally – that we are but fleeting creatures, clinging to a rock that is somehow both spinning and hurtling through the endless inky darkness of space. This epiphany can be either terrifying or wondrous, or a stirring combination of both. For at least one person, it happened during a rather epic excursion to Cappadocia, in Turkey; a strange lunar landscape of caves and human ant-hills that once concealed entire subterranean towns of persecuted Christians. Today, it plays host only to tourists and the occasional nomad or wandering ascetic. Climbing to the top of one of the tallest of these sandy peaks at sunset, this person suddenly discovered the glowing, golden orb of the sun to their left and the rising, silver full moon to their right. For one prolonged and breathless twilight moment, these two heavenly bodies appeared the same size, and the heaven-struck one stretched out their arms as if they could catch hold of both of them, as if they were suddenly a kind of phoenix – stretching their wings – in the midst of an allegorical, Vitruvian tableaux. Ecce homo. Behold the human.
Or, at least, behold this one human – one of several billion, whiling away their allotted time on this sad planet. See how small this person is – how foolish – stretching their arms like a faded wax miniature, perched atop a dry and long-stale wedding cake. See how they channel their sense of cosmic insignificance into its inverse, by virtue of an astronomical fluke. (Had this person lingered a little longer during that last gas station rest stop, they would surely have missed this particular angle on the spectacular sunset.) The humanist doublegesture par excellence: to acknowledge the accident of our own existence, and then to swiftly turn this contingency into some kind of epic necessity.
Once upon a time we explained away the fact that there is something rather than nothing – especially the “something” that is ourselves – by virtue of theological necessity. (“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation … He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”)5 Today the operation is more nuanced, though no less self-aggrandizing. On some level we understand, and even admit, the profound absurdity of our own existence – the fact that all of our moods, experiences, efforts, hopes, toils, and troubles are but the haphazard end point of a 13 billion-year concatenation of mysterious quantum dominoes. Despite this, we remain egocentric enough to feel that we were also somehow inevitable, if not decreed. In public, we admit that our dentist bills, or latest opera – and everything else that takes up our sphere of attention – are but the continuing aftershocks of the Big Bang, and a mysterious cocktail of particles, energies, forces, genetic sequencing, and animating affects. In private, however, we can’t but help pat ourselves on the back (or, alternatively, wring our hands in lamentation) that we ourselves – this unique individual that carries the burden of our name – are more than just a brief sneeze in God’s great handkerchief; we are a singular witness to the infinite miracle of existence, with all the agency and existential privilege this entails.
You Are Here
“Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,” sings Major Tom (aka David Bowie). A preemptive epitaph for our species? In this age of climate strife and planetary catastrophe – all bundled up in the catch-all phrase “the Anthropocene” – our cosmic dilemma takes on a special significance. In contrast to other secular epochs, in which a certain human continuity was taken for granted, we now have a new and keen appreciation of our situatedness and accompanying fragility. The human race can suddenly see an unexpected finishing line looming ahead of us, and yet it cannot slow down the pace in a bid to keep the marathon going. We live in a neo-millenarian age, except this time the prophets of doom are not preachers describing fire and brimstone from the pulpit but scientists describing “cataclysmic events” with detailed graphs and charts from the Senate room floor or the UN assembly. Who can we turn to, now that God is dead to our institutions, if not to our atavistic hearts? Who can we appeal to for salvation, other than ourselves? (A terrifying scenario, since we are not at all convinced that we are worth saving.) Without a divine overseer or benign alien intervention, we either sink into a kind of fatalistic gloom or displace such helpless feelings onto adolescent fantasies of interstellar colonization. “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,” sings the human choir, their tear-stained cheeks smudged with ashes. “There is nothing they can do,” echoes the Greek chorus of these apathetic End Times.
Historians and philosophers alike fetishize the moment we saw our own Earth from a distance not through the prism of the imagination but through an actual camera (either hitched to a satellite or operated by an astronaut). Martin Heidegger famously talks of “the age of the world picture” – a modern upheaval in which our rather abstract and numinous “world” is reduced to an objective “factual” representation of the planet. With the advent of satellite photography, “the world” suddenly becomes conflated with, or reduced to, “the Earth” – representable, analyzable, parsable; reduced to an object of positivist, scientific knowledge. The dark irony here is that the moment we see the world as a unified visual, cognitively graspable object, we lose the capacity to really think about the world (and thus we lose the capacity to think the world into being, anew). Henceforth, we can only approach it instrumentally, as something to manipulate, conquer, control, terraform.
Seeing the Earth trapped within the frame of representation can be reassuring to those minds who feel more confident when they have maps to help orient themselves. (Indeed, what is more grounding than those maps that confidently assert, “You are here”?) And yet “here” is never self-evident or easily given. Less literal minds find the iconic image of our planetary home to be alienating, disorienting, and reductive. For how can one really reconcile all those billions and billions of lives – of which humans are only a fractional, albeit consequential, instance – with such a flat, remote image? What knowledge or wisdom is gained by seeing the material foundation of our collective being in a single selfie? Assuredly, the scientific gaze tells us as much about the world as the male gaze tells us about women.
Pale Blue Dot
Emerging from the techno-cultural matrix that gave us the first photographs of Earth is also the figure of the benign astronomer, embodied most famously in the soothing voice of Carl Sagan. His rousing speech about the “Pale Blue Dot” is indeed a moving piece of rhetoric, which continues to make many an eye misty as it circulates in pirated versions on YouTube. In this speech, Sagan wrestles with what we might call “the enabling trauma” of being suddenly alienated from our own spiritual homeland through the blunt rendering of its actual cosmic situation – its isolated spatial location.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds…. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves…. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand…. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.6
With this stirring invocation, Sagan describes “the local sublime,” rousing us to feel a kind of global pride in embracing our own outré status as conscious beings who find themselves in a far-flung corner of the void. The mystery remains, he argues, as does the dilemma. But this new awareness of our pale blue precarity allows us – for the first time in our species’ history – to truly acknowledge the fragility of our conditional existence. The resulting hope is thus that we shall be more respectful of one another through such knowledge, gained through an unprecedented estrangement from ourselves.
Billions and Billions
Astronomers are indeed nothing if not optimistic, forever on the lookout for new bodies, new orbits, new portals to new dimensions. Yet they are also inherently melancholic, inventing larger and more powerful telescopes every few years in order to peer further and further into the abyss. Their charge, in the modern era – in contrast to more enchanted times, in which the skies were vast scrolls containing the fates and fortunes of Men – is to make increasingly exquisitely detailed maps of the Infinite and Expanding Nothingness, to make recordings of the vast and intimidating heavenly silence. (Though we must also accept that this scenario is only depressing for biocentric people – that is to say, people with a disproportionate investment in the notion of life.) But the universe is weird. It is somehow both mind-bendingly empty and host to multitudes. It is a plenum set into a glittering void. It contains countless bodies, but these bodies are forever out of reach, winking at one another across quantum ballrooms of unfathomable distances. (Recall that, before TripAdvisor, one of the most popular travel guides was called Lonely Planet.)
“Billions and billions” is the astronomer’s mantra. There are billions of stars out there, we are assured, some of which must surely nurture life of some description. But while the math is heartening, the signs are not. (Or, rather, the lack of signs are not.) Telling humans that there are billions and billions of stars out there is about as helpful as reminding a poor farmer in Ecuador that there are billions and billions of dollars out there. It’s a verifiable fact, but not of any relevance in this case – and indeed not great for morale. To realize the intense and inexplicable “state of exception” in which terrestrial life subsists is to experience a cosmic version of “sonder”: the sudden realization that other people have as deep and complex lives as you do. Except, in this case, the feeling is inverted and reversed. It is the sudden, sinking understanding that we earthlings are the only creatures at least within thousands, perhaps millions, of light-years. The consequences of this negative epiphany – psychic, social, scientific, ethical, metaphysical, and so on – have yet to be fully grasped.
Indeed, it’s probably an act of self-preservation to avoid grasping this knowledge fully. Lonely, yes. Though we have invented a dizzying variety of ways to distract ourselves from this loneliness. (Art, media, gossip, alcohol, money, love, sport … the list is nearly endless.) Indeed, who is to say we would be any less lonely if a fleet of friendly aliens suddenly arrived in our skies. No doubt they would just be one more form of difference to become aggravated or threatened by – yet another opportunity to indulge in xenophobia.
The Last Dog
The first female in space was not, as commonly considered, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963, but Laika the dog, nearly six years earlier. We tend to forget this detail, even as Laika herself has become a tragic near mythical figure, embodying the ambitions and follies of the Cold War space race. (Notably, all space dogs in the Soviet program – of which there were dozens – were female, since there was no room in the nosecone of the rocket ships for male dogs to lift their leg up and relieve themselves.) Laika herself was sourced, like all her other canine cosmonaut comrades, from the streets of Moscow. Scientists, armed with tape measures, poached amiable strays and brought them to the Institute of Aviation Medicine. After distinguishing herself in training, Laika was ultimately chosen not only for her cool temperament under pressure but for her photogenic visage and pleasing silhouette. (A different dog, Albina, actually performed better in most tests leading up to the launch but was not deemed as attractive. The space race was, after all, just as much an artifact of marketing and propaganda as of astrophysical achievements.)
Laika was chosen to orbit the Earth in Sputnik 2 – a larger and more ambitious satellite than the unmanned one which had shot across the headlines of the world less than a month earlier (giving the Soviets first blood when it came to the conquest of space). As a result, the Western media initially nicknamed Laika “Muttnik.” Under pressure to ensure this second launch was timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, short-cuts were made. And while there was no expectation, from the beginning, that Laika would survive the journey, she was supposed to be spared too much trauma on her heroic flight, designed to pave the way for human space travel soon after.
Sputnik 2 launched successfully on November 3, 1957, and official Soviet news outlets reported a healthy passenger for the first few days. Decades later, we would learn that these were in fact lies, and that poor Laika perished around seven hours after lift-off after enduring terrible stress and unbearable temperatures (the latter due to a known issue with the thermal insulation). As a result, this first creature to leave the Earth’s orbit, presumably in the history of the planet, circled the globe as a singed corpse for five long months before finally receiving an organic cremation when Sputnik 2 disintegrated on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere on April 14, 1958 (after circling the Earth 2,570 times). The English newspapers called Laika “the fuzziest, loneliest, unhappiest dog in the world.” After she was pronounced dead by Soviet officials, her demise was framed as a noble “sacrifice” towards a more glorious, interplanetary future. Indeed, Laika was not the first of such sacrifices, and it is estimated that at least fifteen dogs died during suborbital launch experiments in the 1950s. (Though accurate figures are hard to come by, even today, due to the intense state secrecy around the space program.)
While the reaction in the West was mostly one of outrage, fanned by the growing animal rights movement, the US did not exactly have firm footing on the moral high ground, as several species of chimp and monkey died during experiments and test flights on the American side of the space race. (Indeed, as recently as 2019, NASA euthanized twenty-seven monkeys in a single day at one of their research facilities.)7 Dogs were preferred to chimps in the USSR because simians – like humans – required more training and vaccines. Additionally, primates were deemed “emotionally unstable and fidgety” by the Soviet scientists in charge of animal discipline. (The celebrated figure of Pavlov, and his behaviorist experiments with canines, was also a likely influence concerning the preference.)
We might pause, then, to consider what it really means that the first living being to reach outer space was, on the one hand, not human and, on the other hand, not truly cognizant of her mission. Today, our sentimental hearts spasm at the thought of an adorable, innocent animal, strapped into a capsule and roasted alive to better pave the way for human space flight. The Soviet scientists at the time, however, considered dogs as quasi-comrades: fellow pioneers and willing allies for the glory of all humankind. This did not prevent, however, belated remorse. (As Oleg Gazenko, a medical officer involved in the program, noted, “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”)8 It is a question of perspective, then, whether these dogs were merely fulfilling their deeper evolutionary mission, as our obedient “best friends,” or if they were hoodwinked from the beginning: doomed as soon as the first wolf crept too close to the primal human fire.
Remarkably, animals were involved in experiments, with space travel in mind, conducted as early as 1897. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, for instance, known as “the father of the cosmonaut program,” managed to increase the mass of a chicken by a factor of ten, while simulating intense gravitational forces, using a centrifuge of his own invention. (The chicken survived.) But why involve non-humans at all? Why scoop them up and strap them down in the rickety manifestation of our own pathology, our own misguided passion for a cosmic escape plan? On what grounds can we justify sending up fuzzy surrogates to test the temperature of the astral waters, even when – as in the happier case of Belka and Strelka – the four-legged cosmonauts return alive and in one piece? Surely this is little more than cowardice. Ignoble, in any case.
Non-human cosmonauts and astronauts complicate the image of ourselves as the lone star-faring species, at least potentially speaking. And this glitch in our own self-image can occasionally happen in public, as when Yuri Gagarin followed the initial trajectory of Laika to become the first human to leave the Earth’s atmosphere (orbiting the planet only a single time). Upon his return to terra firma, he is said to have joked, “Am I the first human in space, or the last dog?”
A Mir Formality
When heading out into space, you cannot count on things being the same when you return. So learned the Russian engineer and cosmonaut Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, after blasting off to spend a planned five months in the Mir Space Station, which circled the Earth from 1986 to 2001. Krikalev arrived in orbit safely, via a Soyuz rocket, in May 1991, and promptly began running various experiments, safety checks, and maintenance routines. No doubt the cosmonaut experienced cold feet about heading into the heavens when events were so uncertain on the ground, especially in his native Russia. For the past eighteen months – since the fall of the Berlin Wall – the various countries comprising the Soviet Union were falling to revolutions, and other upheavals, like dominos. The entire Eastern bloc was in tumult. As a model citizen, however, Krikalev put on his space suit and set forth for the Mir: a tangible reminder of the supremacy with which the Soviets had helped initiate the space race.
When October arrived, and when Krikalev should have been strapping in to return to his loved ones on terra firma, he was surely perturbed to learn that his orders had changed. Even more disconcerting, Krikalev found no clarity around who was in charge anymore, and thus who was authorized to issue orders in the first place. The world’s first “spaceport” – the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which the Soyuz rockets came and went – was based in Kazakhstan, which had recently gained independence. The fate of his mission – indeed the fate of the space station itself – was suddenly anything but certain. As a result, Krikalev was obliged to bide his time after the rest of the crew had left and continue to maintain the Mir – an endearingly messy vessel, which several cosmonauts, in contrast to the pragmatic Americans on the International Space Station nearby, considered a living organism, like a kind of metal maternal womb. Thankfully food supplies, while flavorless and modest, were not yet an issue, and Krikalev spent his time talking to amateur radio enthusiasts back on Earth who had recently learned how to patch in to his satellite communications system. One person in particular – the pilot, folk dancer, polyglot, literacy consultant, and amateur radio enthusiast Margaret Iaquinto – kept Krikalev company over the ham channel; records show that he chatted with her almost every day for a year. We can only imagine how Krikalev felt when, the day after Christmas, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.
After 311 days, however – twice as long as his planned mission – Krikalev finally touched down back on Earth after an international team of scientists secured his safe return. Given the fact that this hardy cosmonaut left the surface during one historical epoch and came back during another, Krikalev is sometimes referred to as “the last Soviet citizen.” (Though this description might best be reserved for Vladimir Putin, who seems to think the KGB is an ongoing concern.)
Less fortunate than Krikalev are the astronauts ejected into orbit by an exploded rocket in Ray Bradbury’s evocative short story “Kaleidoscope.” The tale opens with the disaster: “The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.” In the following pages, we eavesdrop on the panicked
