ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Turning Planetary: Rethinking Earth from Orbit

• In Event: Scales of the Earth: Space, Science and the Specters of Planetary History 01

English Abstract

With the looming climate catastrophe and the advent of what many describe as a ‘Second Space Age’, the figure of the planet has become ubiquitous, be it in the so-called planetary humanities, in proposals to recast global history as ‘planetary history’ and in widespread calls for a ‘planetary turn.’ Yet, the inflationary use of ‘planetary’ has frequently diluted the term's heuristic sharpness and analytical precision. Discussions of planetarity are only meaningful if planet Earth is considered both in relation to other planets and from an external, extra-terrestrial vantage point. The talk argues that the technoscientific transformation of the world into planet Earth is a comparatively recent historical process which began in 1946. It contours, with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the concept of ‘planetization’ to historicize this worldwide, if unevenly spread development. Empirically, the paper examines the controversy Donald E. Keyhoe’s (1897–1988) international bestseller ‘The Flying Saucers Are Real’ (1950) caused within mainstream science. One of the first popular books to insist that ‘flying saucers’ were vehicles of extraterrestrial rather than human origins, Keyhoe portrayed UFOs as harbingers of a new interplanetary age, not a space age, where the future encounter with intelligent aliens would necessitate a rethinking of humankind’s planetary condition. In so doing, the paper contours planetary history as a novel field of historical research centered on the planet’s own historicity and offers a conceptual-historiographical framework for the two-part symposium ‘Scales of the Earth: Space, Science and the Specters of Planetary History.’

Author

• Alexander C.T. Geppert, New York University/NYU Shanghai