The Earth from Space -- what did people think it looked like?

[lpetrich]

SUNlite3_4.pdf -- the article "So high up the Earth looked like a WHAT?" (PDF page 6) by Martin S. Kottmayer (about UFO contactee and abductee notions of the Earth from outer space)
The Myth of Etana (Article) - Ancient History Encyclopedia
How Artists Once Imagined the Earth Would Look from Space (io9)
Question: Perception of Earth before 1950s. : space
Earth from space in pre-1950's art? : space

MSK tells us the myth of Etana, one of the oldest surviving attempts to imagine what the Earth would look like if one traveled away from it.

Etana was a king of the Sumerian city of Kish, and the fable existed in several versions, probably all the surviving ones were originally part of the library of the Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal (668-635 B.C.) Joseph Campbell tells one version in writings on myth. The king asks the gods to give him the means to have a child. They direct him to an eagle imprisoned in a pit who knows where there is a plant that will enable this desire to be fulfilled. The bird was in the pit as punishment for breaking an oath once. For his freedom, the bird swore to be servant to any mortal sent to him by Shamash, his god. Etana releases the bird from the pit and they fly to acquire the plant. The bird climbs higher and higher to the heavens. Periodically the eagle asks the king to look below to see how far up they have gone. The journey spans hours and the king reports how he sees the landscape receding with land and sea shrinking and shrinking in apparent size.

They reach the heaven’s gates of Anu, Bel, and Ea, but must continue to a still higher heaven. They climb towards the heaven of Ishtar (our Venus) and below them the king now perceives, “The land is a mere clod and the broad salt sea a wicker basket.” Two hours later, Etana could not even see the land or sea and he cries to the eagle to climb no farther. With that command they start to fall back. It takes hours and when they crash, both shatter. The widow mourns and the king’s ghost is thereafter invoked in times of need.

Though the Earth is clearly flat in that story, it is correct about the Earth looking smaller and smaller as one goes.

Going to Greece around 800 BCE, when Greece acquired writing again, we find the story of Daedalus and Icarus. But Icarus was over a sea the whole time, and he didn't go far enough up to see much of the Earth.

Advancing forward to 1608 CE, we have Johannes Kepler's  Somnium (novel) ("Dream"). It features a trip to the Moon, and it features the Moon's surface being divided up by the Earth's visibility from it, and also the Earth's phases, though not much more detail about the Earth's appearance.

From io9:

Before this, a number of artists tried to imagine what our planet might look like from space. Most of these simply showed a school globe hanging against a starry background like the Universal Pictures logo. But a few artists made an effort to depict our world realistically.

Land and sea areas are easy, but clouds are another story.

Some speculated that the earth would appear like a hazy ball, with almost nothing of the surface visible, others that the cloud cover would be intermittent and the atmosphere mostly clear. Even the great Chesley Bonestell was unsure, usually depicting the earth’s clouds in sparse, narrow bands.

Some of them were fairly realistic, like Camille Flammarion (1884), and Lucien Rudaux (late 1930's) and William Palmstrom (1956) used weather reports. But Howard Russell Butler (1920's), Chesley Bonestell (1950's), and others went the thin-streaks route.

The first picture of the Earth from outer space was taken from a V-2 rocket in 1946 (First Photo From Space | Space | Air & Space Magazine). It went up about 65 mi / 105 km, barely into outer space. So it was until the 1960's, when spacecraft could get much farther from the Earth, far enough to capture its full disk in its field of view. The first full-color one was from the DODGE satellite in 1967: DODGE 1967.


Now to how people might react. MSK notes: "Anyone who followed the space program know that astronauts have sometimes expressed almost mystical transcendent sentiments on seeing the Earth from space." He then noted several of them who had done so. Also, looking at the Earth from space has been a common activity for Space-Shuttle and ISS astronauts. Some science-fiction writers have anticipated it:

Then this one from Olaf Stapledon’s Star-Maker (1937):

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 opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring were more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live 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.

MSK then quotes some UFO contactees, starting with Orfeo Angelucci (The Secret of the Saucers, I think):

The lights inside darkened. Then either the entire craft or the seat turned slightly more to left and the strange window widened about three more feet. I saw a huge globe surrounded by a shimmering rainbow. I trembled as I realized I was actually looking upon a planet from somewhere out in space. The planet itself was of a deep, twilight-blue intensity and the iridescent rainbow surrounding it made it appear like a dream-vision. I couldn’t see it all, for a portion at the bottom of the sphere was cut off by the floor line.

Now I heard a voice that I remembered so well. “Orfeo, you are looking upon Earth – your home! From here, over a thousand miles away in space, it appears as the most beautiful planet in the heavens and a haven of peace and tranquility. But you and Earthly brothers know the true conditions there... My heart was so full of emotion that tears were the only possible expression.”

MSK quotes some other contactees with similar sorts of descriptions, and then notes some others who weren't very lyrical about the Earth from space. He notes George Adamski and Howard Menger, with the latter describing the Earth as “fast diminishing in size” as he traveled to the Moon.

UFO abductions are a different story. MSK again:

Abductions commonly are about humans being subjected to medical procedures and sexual indignities and aliens have no inherent logical reason to take people off-planet to do such things. Scenes of abductees experiencing space travel are in the minority and seeing the earth shrink into the distance seems quite hard to find even with the help of Bullard’s definitive study of all abduction cases up to 1985.

He then mentioned 8 cases of abductees seeing the Earth from outer space, and of these 3 cases of the Earth getting smaller and smaller as one goes.

MSK did that to criticize a part of Chris Aubeck and Jacques Vallee’s book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times and their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs (Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2010) where they attempted to link the Etana story to UFO-abduction stories.

MSK finds better analogies with UFO-contactee stories, and I agree, though I think that one shouldn't push the parallels very far.

But there is an important parallel, I think. Etana, like those SF-story characters, UFO contactees, and real-life space travelers, was a willing traveler, instead of someone dragged aboard and subjected to clumsy medical examinations and the like.

 

[Rhea]

Cool. Thanks! I hadn't thought about how well these descriptions would overlap. This was very interesting.