\n Adobe Stock Photo\/Phoebe Watts<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n A blue Earth ascends over the barren surface of the moon, against the black void of space. This famous photograph, Earthrise, was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders.<\/p>\n After almost six decades, we take this image for granted. But imagine a different Earthrise<\/em>, in which space isn\u2019t black but bright blue, like the clear day sky. <\/span>As strange as it may strike you, this is how most Europeans imagined it for centuries.<\/p>\n We know our understanding of the universe has undergone other major transformations, with far-reaching effects. For example, the shifts from an Earth-centred to a sun-centred universe and from a finite to an infinite universe weren\u2019t only scientific discoveries. They made people genuinely rethink their place in the cosmos. The shift from a bright to a dark universe is of comparable significance, but it has been almost lost to history.<\/p>\n In recent years, through my research in literary history and the history of science, I have tried to piece together when this shift happened. When, so to speak, did space turn dark? And I\u2019ve found myself asking: what happened to us in the process?<\/p>\n \n Consider the testimony of Domingo Gonsales, the protagonist of the first English science-fiction novel, Francis Godwin\u2019s 1638 Man in the Moone<\/em>. Travelling to the moon aboard a swan-powered spacecraft, Gonsales reports seeing very few stars \u2013 and these few, \u201cby reason it was always day, I saw at all times alike, not shining bright, as upon the earth we\u2026 see them in the night time, but of a whitish colour, like that of the moon in the day time with us\u201d. Why does he see fewer stars than we do from Earth? And why are they pale, like the moon seen in the daytime sky? Because his space simply is the daytime sky. The sun has dimmed the light of the brightest stars and drowned out completely that of fainter ones.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From our perspective, Gonsales\u2019s universe is upside down. In his version, it is in daytime that we see it as it really is, whereas at night it is obscured by Earth\u2019s dark shadow. But if we ascended into space at midnight, we would eventually break out of the shadow, into the eternal day beyond.<\/p>\n Gonsales doesn\u2019t mention the shadow, but we catch a glimpse of it in another early space travel story, John Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/em>. Approaching Earth, Milton\u2019s Satan sees \u201cthe circling canopy \/ Of night\u2019s extended shade\u201d. In imagining a premodern Earthrise<\/em>, then, we should add this shadow into the picture \u2013 a dark cone extending from the gibbous planet into the blue heavens and disappearing below the lunar horizon.<\/p>\n Other authors explain why space isn\u2019t just bright, but bright blue. The most common explanation is that the \u201cfirmament\u201d \u2013 the variously imagined vault of the cosmos \u2013 was blue in colour. This is the view, notes Milton\u2019s contemporary, the atomist philosopher Walter Charleton, held \u201cnot only by vulgar, but many transcendently learned heads\u201d. In looking at the day sky, they thought they were simply looking at the end of the universe.<\/p>\n This universe also appears in visual art. Here, again, comparison with Apollo 8 is instructive. Some hours after capturing Earthrise<\/em>, the crew delivered a radio broadcast to Earth from lunar orbit. Commander Frank Borman wished Earthlings a merry Christmas and read from the biblical account of creation. For the first time, humans attained a comparable, godlike perspective on their blue planet, sparkling in the black abyss. But when premodern artists illustrated these same biblical verses, they often drew the inverse: dark Earths, suspended in azure heavens. To complete the alternative Earthrise<\/em>, imagine one of these darker Earths, rather than the familiar \u201cblue marble\u201d, ascending over the lunar surface.<\/p>\n \n In Francis Godwin\u2019s Man in the Moone<\/em>, the protagonist Domingo Gonsales sets sail for the moon in his swan-powered spacecraft<\/p>\n Houghton Library<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t just poets and painters. Philosophers and scientists also imagined such universes. Aristotle describes \u201cthe shadow of the earth (which we call night)\u201d. Two millennia later, so does Copernicus, writing that \u201cwhile the rest of the universe is bright and full of daylight, night is clearly nothing but the Earth\u2019s shadow, which extends in the shape of a cone and ends in a point\u201d.<\/p>\n There was nothing irrational about such views. Early European thinkers simply had no compelling evidence to the contrary, especially regarding the nature of outer space and of Earth\u2019s light-refracting atmosphere. Without such evidence, why suspect that night is the rule and day the exception? What reason had a premodern Christian to break with centuries of tradition and no longer view the heavens \u2013 the abode of God, angels and blessed souls \u2013 as a realm of eternal light, but one of eternal darkness?<\/p>\n Which isn\u2019t to say bright space was universal, even in premodernity. Thinkers of the Islamicate world, for example, accepted dark space from the 9th century onwards, though the reach of their views in the West seems to have been limited. By all accounts, dark space had to be rediscovered by European thinkers in the 17th century.<\/p>\n For one thing, the period saw major advances in the scientific understanding of the atmosphere. Indeed, \u201catmosphere\u201d is a 17th-century word, and one of the first to use it in English was Walter Charleton, whose universe can be described as the missing link in the story: neither bright nor dark, but changing from one to the other as the observer turns towards and away from the sun. This is because Charleton\u2019s universe is still bounded by a firmament \u2013 although a black one, \u201cand not azure, as most suppose\u201d \u2013 and is also filled with swarms of tiny particles or \u201catoms\u201d, driving him to speculate about their visual effects. But for Otto von Guericke, who accepted an unbound, infinite universe, and made groundbreaking experiments studying the vacuum, space is, precisely, space. If we found ourselves in such \u201cpure\u201d, \u201cempty\u201d space, with \u201cno body lighted by the sun either underneath or before\u201d us, we would \u201csee nothing other than shadow\u201d.<\/p>\n From this point on, dark space is increasingly accepted by European scientists and scientifically literate thinkers. But that isn\u2019t where the story ends, because bright space still survives for centuries in the popular imagination.<\/p>\n \n A 13th-century manuscript depicts a grey Earth casting a black shadow into a blue universe (left). The newly created Earth is also imagined as a black marble surrounded by a blue cosmos in a 15th-century manuscript<\/p>\n Heritage Image Partnership Ltd\/Alamy; Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n Fast-forwarding to 1858, here is the astronomer James Gall, imagining ascending into space in a work aimed at the Victorian general reader: \u201cWe look around, and oh, how strange! the heavens are black\u201d. Gall knows space is black, but he doesn\u2019t expect his audience to know it. And this audience isn\u2019t necessarily uneducated in other departments. It isn\u2019t an ignoramus or a child who, as late as 1880, still believes the universe is an \u201cenormous sphere of blue\u201d \u2013 it is a distinguished literary historian, David Masson. Isolated instances continue into the 1920s, the very doorstep of the Space Age.<\/p>\n We are dealing, then, not only with a lost, but also remarkably recent shift in our cosmological imagination. Because some of the most striking evidence appears in literary works, especially space travel narratives, it was first noticed by literary scholars: C. S. Lewis and, more recently, John Leonard. But it is yet to receive sustained study, and its cultural impact remains almost entirely uncharted.<\/p>\n This impact has been profound, although it often hides in plain sight. For example, it is widely recognised that images like Earthrise<\/em> transformed our planetary and environmental consciousness. Earth became \u201cwhole\u201d and \u201cblue\u201d, but also \u201cfragile\u201d: emblematic of the imperatives of political unity and ecological sustainability, as well as the threat of nuclear warfare and anthropogenic climate change. What isn\u2019t recognised, however, is that this transformation wasn\u2019t due solely to a new view of the planet, but also of what surrounded it.<\/p>\n Whole Earths had been imagined, depicted and reflected on since antiquity. But most floated in bright universes, eliciting very different reactions. The impact of Earthrise<\/em> was therefore even greater than commonly understood. Once such images entered mass circulation, they wiped away even the last remaining vestiges of the old, bright cosmos, searing its exact inversion into the popular imagination: Earth as a luminous oasis in a dark cosmic desert. Earth was never \u201cblue\u201d or \u201cfragile\u201d, as such. It appeared so against the lethal darkness around it, which now became not only a scientific but also a cultural and psychological reality.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n![\"View](\"https:\/\/images.newscientist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/06144315\/SEI_272995866.jpg\")
<\/div>The path towards Earthrise<\/em><\/h2>\n
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