Overview

An ambitious world history showing how space events have shaped life on Earth Our solar system is an extraordinary place where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our own fragile blue planet. In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking humanity to the rest of the solar system. He reveals how the shifting sands of other planets have shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific and cultural innovation, and encouraged new ideas about the emergence and fate of life. Martian dust storms altered the trajectory of the Cold War and inspired fantastical stories about alien civilisations. Comet impacts on Jupiter led to the first planetary defence strategy. And volcanic eruptions spewed sulfuric acid into Venus's atmosphere, exposing the existential risks of global warming. But just as we expand the boundaries of space exploration, cosmic environments are becoming increasingly vulnerable to human activity. Yet, they may also hold the key to slowing down the climate crisis back on Earth. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean urges us to develop an interplanetary environmentalism across a vast mosaic of entangled worlds and to consider the profound connections that bind us to the cosmos and each other.

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9780241741450

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Reviews

Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean brings us a new arena of history, the history of our collective engagement with our planetary neighbors in the inner solar system. Dagomar Degroot has constructed an amazing synthesis of how cultural projections, and gradually the observational sciences, have brought the environmental histories of the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids into sharper and sharper focus. Simultaneously, Degroot shows how our explorations of environments in the inner solar system have illuminated the critical features of our home planet Earth. This is a book that will be widely read as we grapple both with our emerging efforts to inhabit near-earth environments and with the pressing problem of planetary sustainability here on Earth. -- John L. Brooke, author of Climate Change and the Course of Global History A beautifully illustrated and flowing account of the place of our world in the vastness of the cosmos. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean offers a stark warning about the interplanetary hazards our world faces, but it also offers hope: about our potential to explore the cosmic high seas and our potential to save our own little island. Degroot sets some awesome challenges, but he opens up some liberating possibilities -- John Haldon, author of The Empire That Would Not Die Dagomar Degroot has boldly taken environmental history where no historian has gone before. In this beautifully written and handsomely illustrated book, Degroot shows how dynamic components of the solar system have affected both earthly environments and human ideas over the last five centuries. Part history of astronomy and astronomers, part super-macro environmental history, the book brims over with both interesting anecdotes and arresting perspectives on our place within the cosmos -- J. R. McNeill, author of The Webs of Humankind

Author Information

Dagomar Degroot is Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. A contributor to the Washington Post, Nature and Aeon, he is the author of The Frigid Golden Age- Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, named one of the ten best history books of 2018 by the Financial Times.

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