Stapledon's Vision of the Earth
Why you should read Star Maker and, more importantly, why you should come to my TEDx talk.
In 1937, the British philosopher and author, Olaf Stapledon, published one of my favorite stories and one that has inspired my topic for my upcoming talk for TEDxBoulder.
Star Maker is a short novel where a fictional human character in England has his consciousness transported from his body, upon which the consciousness then experiences leaving the Earth, traveling out into the cosmos, seeing new worlds and new life, and experiencing life on galactic and universal scales.
There’s so much to explore in the story. Topics range from consciousness, astrobiology, planetary science, cosmology, and deeper questions in philosophy and religion.
Some report that Arthur C. Clarke once said that it was "probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written." Brian Aldiss, in his book Billion year spree; the true history of science fiction, said that “Star Maker is really the one great holy book of science fiction — perhaps after all there is something appropriate in its wonderful obscurity and neglect.”
I even have often wondered if Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech in 1994 (and book of the same name) were inspired directly from Star Maker.
Sagan, in his speech noted of the image of Earth as a dot from a distant vantage:
“That's here. That's home. That's us. On [that dot] 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.”
And yet, some 57 years earlier, when Sagan was just 3 years old, Stapledon’s narrator in Star Maker remarks upon seeing the Earth:
“I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in the sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.”
Sagan was certainly known for being a voracious reader as well as a luminary in astronomy and astrobiology. He most certainly would have read Stapledon’s writings, and given the similarities in these two excerpts, I think it justifiable to hypothesize that Sagan went back to some of the great thinking of the past when crafting his own observations of the Earth as a pale blue dot in an image taken by Voyager 1 from some 6 billion kilometers away.
But Stapledon’s writing was even more forward thinking than that.
Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel to “outer space” and orbit the Earth in his little Vostok 1 capsule on April 12th in 1961. Before that, no human eyes had ever seen our world from the outside. Gagarin remarked later of what the Earth looked like from space: “I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.” Later astronauts have reflected about the impact of seeing the Earth from the outside, such as Scott Kelly’s quote, “From space, you realize how small and interconnected we all are. It's a perspective that can inspire us to be better stewards of our planet and work towards a brighter future.” There are many other examples of how travelers to space have remarked on the beauty of the planet, it’s appearance to them, and how it has impacted them.
And yet, nearly a quarter of a century before Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, in Star Maker, Stapledon envisioned what a view from the outside might look like:
“The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a living thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.”
Not only did Stapledon come remarkably close in his description, but he also intimated what the experience of seeing our world from the outside might do to a human psyche.
There are many reasons to read Star Maker, but among them is certainly to consider the profound impact that a cosmic perspective can have on us here and now. Our world is changing drastically and we need a long view, a cosmic view, to really frame our own individual and larger societal roles in it all. We can and should be better stewards of our world. We can and should be working together to make tomorrow better for future generations. And, as I will partly argue in my upcoming TEDx talk, we can and should be prepared for the impact of discovering that we are truly not alone in the cosmos.
In my upcoming talk for TEDxBoulder, I’ll be exploring the impact of Stapledon’s writing on my own life and my thoughts on what it means for us to now be considering our place in the cosmos. You can join us on 14 September 2024 at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder.
Check out more and come to my TEDx talk by visiting TEDxBoulder.com. And prepare for the talk by reading Star Maker. I can’t promise my talk or the book will change your life, but I’ll try my best much as I can say for certain that Stapledon did as well.
