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Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff and I'm excited to be joined by Dagomar de Groot, the author of Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System, published by Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, in October 2025. Dagomar is Associate professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. He is also a contributor to the Washington Post, Nature and Eon. He is the author of the Frigid Golden Age, Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, which was named one of the 10 best history books of 2018 by the Financial Times. He also hosts the award winning podcast, website and video series the Climate Chronicles. The link for which you can find on his website, which is appropriately named Dagomar degroote.com I selected the Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean because it struck me as a rare and ambitious book, one that treats the solar system itself as environmental, that has shaped human history rather than as a distant backdrop or purely scientific domain. As an aside, the production quality of the book is top shelf, from the picture to the quality of the pages. And candidly, it's a book you want to own and buy a physical hard copy versus reading on your Kindle Dagumar, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss your book.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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B
Dagmar, why did you write the Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean? And who is the target audience?
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C
Yeah, okay, so the reason I wrote it is because I was kind of depressed, to be honest. I had just written a book about climate change and I made myself into an expert on climate change. And this was about, I guess it was about 10 years ago and 10 years ago it really looked like we were heading towards a worst case scenario for climate change by the end of this century. What that means is a warming of maybe 4 degrees Celsius relative to the late 19th century, totally world altering in some places, kind of world destroying. And I was pretty depressed about that. So I wanted to write a book that was a little bit more uplifting and that provided new historical perspectives on things that I hope would go well in the coming century. And by that I had in mind, you know, the human expansion into outer space, space discoveries. I've always been a space nut. I love everything to do with astronomy, of course, so, so I wanted to write a book that uplifted me a little bit more than, than my previous work. And trouble was, maybe it's just my personality, but Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean ended up being a book in part also about existential risk. So the worst things that could our species. But at the same time, it's a book that argues that we know about a lot of these risks because of what's happened in outer space and we're able to actually address them because of space science. So it's not maybe as optimistic as I had hoped, but it may be more interesting for that.
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B
Definitely interesting, optimistic and somewhat sobering. I want to get into some of the, the military, I don't even know what to call it, plans for using nuclear weapons in space. And I think even Goddard at one point wanted to launch or blast or explode and bomb on the moon so everyone could see it and know we had it. That, that is scary. And I actually want to ask you about the whole solar flare issue, which I think could potentially have led to nuclear Armageddon. But I'm jumping ahead, no question. It is a fascinating book and I learned so much. I do want to drill down a little more into the title. You say this book is first and foremost an environmental history. So I'm going to ask you, when you use the phrase cosmic ocean, what do you mean by it? And how does that, how is that an accurate metaphor for our Understanding, namely, Earth in the place in the. In our solar system.
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C
Yeah. Maybe I should first define environmental history as well, which can be confused with natural history, kind of similar terms. Environmental history is the study of the mutual interactions between environments and peoples through time. And really, my favorite way of thinking about it is the human history, as though everything else other than humans mattered. We often think about human history as being, well, one person has an idea and then they have a decision, and they influence another person and another person. And that's why our species has, you know, changed through time and become what it is today. But of course, all of that happens in a context. And for environmental historians, the context is the Earth. And really what I'm trying to do with this book is say, okay, yeah, the Earth is important, right. But it's one part of something much, much bigger. Earth is not isolated from the rest of the universe, rest of the solar system. It looks that way to us because our eyes have evolved to be adapted to see visible light from the sun. We don't see things like gravity. We feel it, we don't see it. We don't see the invisible radiation, the solar wind particles that the sun sends out throughout the solar system. You can't really see the asteroids that flit by Earth all the time. But these things matter, and they connect us to a much bigger and dynamic environment in the solar system. So those ripples on the cosmic ocean are the changes in the solar system environment. And, of course, the solar system goes through cycles all the time. We're orbiting the sun, and the sun is actually moving around the center of the Milky Way. Things are constantly moving according to regular cycles in the solar system. So the changes I look at in ripples are those changes that are not cyclical, that are kind of anomalous. We don't expect them, just sort of happen. And partly because we don't expect them, they have a big impact on us historically. And now we're even. We've developed the capability to make changes ourselves, and which is really a very important threshold for our species. We can alter the Moon, we can alter Mars, we can alter the space environment near Earth. And that is a profound difference between where we are now as a species and where we have been.
- [07:38]
B
Yeah, that's a great explanation, degamar. I'm going to jump almost to the end here. Should we be altering these environments outside of Earth? And having read your book, I know the conclusion you come to at the end, but I want to give you a chance now, and we'll circle back towards the end part. But what's your view on that? I mean, there clearly is this interactive environment between humans and the solar system. Now, given our technology, our capability. I think you referenced SpaceX in the book Blue Origins. You talk a fair amount about the military view of the moon and even Mars as some sort of forward military bases. It's scary how many times the word nuclear shows up in your book in the context of military. Should we be doing this? Should we be trying to alter these ecosystems? And I, I want to separate that question from SETI and the search for life. I know you talk about Sagan and that human aspiration, but it feels like this is more than the search. This is a chance to dominate nature. And I think someone like Goddard, right, who wanted to actually wanted the US to control nature by shaping the solar system. That almost sounds scary. Frankenstein esque.
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C
Yeah. There are many different visions for what humanity's vision in the solar system both should look like and will inevitably look like. There are those who think, for example, that humanity is climbing up a sort of scale that all intelligent species climb up, called the Kardashev skill. And in this skill we harness more and more energy. So the first level of that skill, we're not there yet, is to harness all the energy in one planet. We're not even actually close to that. We're several orders of magnitude away, but we've been moving towards that. And then the second order would be harnessing all the energy from a star, which means dominating the solar system, basically. A third, which is immeasurably bigger, is harnessing all the energy of a galaxy. And there's even been, so going back to seti, been attempts to look for civilizations, alien civilizations, that have reached the second level of the scale, which we might be able to detect actually from Earth, if they're relatively close to us, or the third, which is dominating the galaxy, we should be able to see that from, from very far away. So there's this idea that there's an inevitability to humanity's development where we harness more and more energy and we start dominating environments, not only on Earth, but beyond Earth, on a truly gargantuan scale. So there's that, then there's the question of morality. So is there something immoral in our transformation, first of all, of environments, just in general? Right. In our extractive transformation of environments? And depending on how you answer that question, that might determine how you answer the question of, well, is there something immoral about us transforming the Moon, for example, or Mars? But it need not determine that question in perhaps the way that you might expect. Meaning, if I think there's something immoral about extractively transforming and degrading environments, that doesn't mean I think it's a bad idea to do that on the moon. If in doing that on the moon I can reduce the burden of humanity on Earth. And that's kind of how I would start to explore and answer this question you originally posed, like should we, should we transform environments? Because for me, really it comes down to, and this is kind of the biggest, one of the biggest things that I took away from writing the book, the idea that even though Earth is connected to all of these environments in the solar system, it is also a unique part of that connected environment because it has complex life and because it has us. We are the product of Earth's evolution. And it's very difficult to extract us from that evolutionary history, from all the other species that surround us. And so I come down saying that I think Earth's environments are uniquely valuable in the solar system. And I think that if you can transform the moon's environment to preserve environments on Earth, which is a huge if, but if you can, then I would support that. And the way to do that could be to generate power on the moon using lunar resources, solar power, for example, beaming it back to Earth. It could also be to extract resources from the asteroids and build large architecture in outer space that serves the Earth off worlding some of the most damaging things that we do on Earth, which can be, you know, mining, power generation, even data centers. Now right off worlding that as much as possible, this is something that appeals to me. So I would, I would support that vision of using the solar system. Yes. And one more thing I'd add to that is that sometimes we have this kind of romantic idea, at least to me, a romantic idea that we can kind of go back to the way things were as a species. Right. So what that would mean is use a heck of a lot less energy or use a whole lot less resources, we may get there. If human populations collapse, I think that's a pretty dystopian future. If human population remains the same, or if it expands even a little bit, then we encounter the problem that there's not enough resources ultimately on Earth's a finite planet. And I think we also encounter the problem of, well, there's a lot of energy that we can generate here, but generating energy on Earth can have some pretty profound trade offs for environments on Earth. So we just cannot escape that reality. In my view.
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B
Definitely thoughtful and nuanced answer. I will follow up with two questions. One, John Don said no man does not can we say no planet is an island. Now, does what we as humans do on Earth ultimately affect the moon, Mars, Venus? You cite numerous examples in your book where we either learn from those planets or in some cases we do want to, I don't know if it's dominate, but change the natural environment there with weapons, satellites, rockets, man made exploration. So I guess my first question is when we engage in a certain behavior on Earth, we should be conscious that it could have an impact throughout the solar system. Is that fair?
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C
Potentially, I don't think it's necessarily the case, honestly. I think in an era of space travel, if we want to send stuff to the moon or Mars, then there is a chance that we alter environments on those worlds, for example. And why is that? Well, for the moon there's a very tenuous exosphere. So it really is like the most diffuse atmosphere that you can imagine. And just by landing stuff on the moon, we alter that exosphere. That's how diffuse it is. We're actually injecting chemicals into it and they spread out. And that does have an impact then on this know, lunar exosphere. And it could be very, very, very long lasting. If we send stuff to Mars or Venus even to some extent, let alone to a place like Enceladus or Europa under the ice of those so called ocean worlds of the outer solar system, we have to be aware that, you know, it's not just a robot that arrives, it's also a whole cargo of microbes. And you know, space agencies have been aware of this for decades and there have been sort of sterilization protocols developed. So you subject spacecraft to heat, for example, or toxic gases. And that way you eliminate enough of these microbes that supposedly the microbes that land on Mars or you know, get into the clouds of Venus or what have you are no longer viable. They can't reproduce. That's the hope. But I have severe doubts about the extent to which we can control the microbial universe of the Earth. Right. Can we really be sure that we're wiping out these microbes and that we're wiping out enough of these microbes that they can't reproduce elsewhere. And my belief is that we cannot be sure of this and that there's a real chance that we've brought viable microbial communities to other planets. And if that's the case, that could have been planet altering because there may have already been microbial biospheres on Mars for Example that we've undermined by bringing in microbes from Earth. So that's called forward contamination. And that is potentially not just planet altering, but it alters the whole billions of years old trajectory of life on another world. And you know, so just on this level, accidentally we may have actually altered planets, which is kind of a, a strange thought to live with. Right? That our species can do that. We can just alter billions of years of planetary evolution by accident. It's a remarkable thought.
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B
Absolutely. And I think I'm going to name it backward contamination. That's probably not the right phrase, but you cite a Dr. David Graham's concerns over the threat of contamination from the Apollo 11 astronauts returning. And I'm going to get this wrong, but I think NASA was washing it down with like disinfectant and he was like, oh my gosh, that would actually exacerbate the problem. And I'm guessing things are good. This is, you know, 40 some odd, 50 some odd years later here. But is that an issue too? As we go into the solar system, there could be a risk we indirectly end up altering Earth's ecosystem, environment.
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C
Yeah, see, this is a really, to me, this is maybe the most interesting story in the book, honestly, and it was probably the most disturbing for me to research. And the funny thing about it is that you can see it in two completely contradictory ways. So, and just to give a little bit of background was this idea that when we sent astronauts to the moon, of course we brought them back and we brought back samples from the moon and their spacecraft, we brought it all back. But we weren't actually sure in the 1960s when we did this, that the moon was lifeless. And it seemed possible that there were microbes on the moon and they would come back in the spacecraft, maybe even in the astronauts in the samples they brought back from the moon. And maybe they could reproduce on Earth. And if so, you know, they would run rampant potentially and degrade the biosphere. So this was a real, this was a real thing in the 1960s. And so you can see it in two completely different ways. First way you can see it is as an entertaining sort of sideshow to the moon landing missions. Right. How ridiculous was it that we created a whole sort of protocol around the possibility of these microbes and astronauts were quarantined and they had to spend weeks in a secure facility and the lunar samples were exposed to organisms on Earth and there were mice were exposed to moon dust and all this kind of stuff. Right. How ridiculous is that? Obviously there were no microbes on the moon. So that's one way of thinking about it. And frankly, that's how this story is often portrayed in histories of the Apollo programs, of the moon landing program. But another way of looking at it, which is how I do, how I look at it, is let's climb into the brains of people at the time, right, to assign this in 1960, what would could they, you know, plausibly have thought about the possibility of life on the moon? Could they have known that there was no life on the moon? And to me, the answer is no. They could not have known that it was entirely viable to speculate about lunar life. And for all we knew, microbes could have evolved there and be lurking underneath the surface. And for all we knew, when we brought them to Earth, they might reproduce explosively once they enjoyed Earth's water and warmth. So to me, this is a genuine encounter with what we call existential risk. An existential risk is something that threatens humanity, all of humanity. It threatens to permanently degrade our future, maybe even drive us to extinction. So it's an encounter with existential risk, and sure enough, it's back contamination. So bringing something from outer space back to Earth, like microbes. And it's an encounter that we failed, in my opinion. And we failed because the quarantine protocol that was supposed to keep these microbes from getting out of containment was full of potential breaches at one problem after another was not taken seriously. People lied to the public about it. And it's very chilling because in my opinion, we developed these systems that failed. Powerful officials did not tell the truth to policymakers, to the public. And why. Why did they not tell the truth? Why did the systems fail? Because people were under enormous amounts of time pressure. They were heavily incentivized to prioritize some risks over others. Risks to astronauts, risks to equipment, risks to national prestige were prioritized over potential small but unknowable risks to the Earth. And. And that is chilling to me because I think we can see similar conditions now in things like the development of artificial intelligence. So it's a. It's a disturbing story to my mind. And then there's another part of this that's to my mind, kind of disturbing as well, which is that it is possible that there are microbes lurking in the solar system that, when brought back to Earth, would cause a real problem. That is a possibility, and it's an unknowable possibility. And unknowable possibilities are often regarded as soon to be small possibilities. But that is not the case for Example, we could send a probe out to Europa and drill through the ice on Europa and get into the ocean and bring back a sample of Europan water. And it's got microbes in it, right? And those microbes have evolved in a way that makes them. Well, the technical term for it is they're sorry, one second, their microbes are reversed. It's a kind of mirror life. It's chirality is, is actually the term for it, reverse chirality. So it's like I'm trying to explain this in the simplest way I can. All the microbes on Earth have a particular handedness, they're oriented in a particular way. The microbes that, the DNA in our microbes. But you can also reverse that. And if you reverse it, then suddenly our immune systems, for example, would not be able to detect that kind of life. So this is called mirror life. And we don't know why life evolved on Earth with a particular handedness, with its triality in a particular way. But we suspect now that if we introduce microbes with a reverse chirality to Earth's biosphere, they could just reproduce without any check. So there's nothing that our immune systems could do, nothing that antibiotics could do, Nothing. No. Predators, zero. So if we bring that water from Europa to Earth and it's got microbes in it, and the microbes escape containment, then we don't know what's going to happen. And so that's not to say there's some kind of huge, imminent, pressing existential risk involved in bringing samples back from the outer solar system. But that is to say that there is an unknowable risk involved that in my view we should start talking about right now and taking seriously, maybe the best thing to do is look for life in situ, meaning you don't bring samples back to Earth until you've thoroughly explored, let's say, Europa or Enceladus. You've thoroughly tested for life there. That's what I believe.
- [25:15]
B
No. And you know, it's so funny because you hit on two big themes. I took away from this and it really came to fruition. The fifth part, when you talk about asteroids and comets, you go into all the detail and I'll be direct here. What is the likelihood of some kind of asteroid or comet impacting Earth and causing a mass extinction event? And I don't want to give away the ending, but ultimately it's non zero, but there's a lot of drama involved. But to your point, everyone has an agenda, whether it's budgets, the military, Funding. And I kept thinking to myself, man, we don't know what we're playing with. And I go back to that. David Graham, the contaminants, the Apollo astronauts and on the moon you cite, I think it's called water bears. There's a much bigger term, but one of the great. Yeah, yeah, like we're playing with cosmic dynamite that we don't quite understand. And that was my first thought. And my second thought is, who is we here? And please correct me, but it seems to be military, corporate, particularly of now, I guess, three dominant empires. I don't want to condescend to any country, but candidly, the us, the Soviet Union and China. And maybe the Soviet Union's taken a step back, but seem to be making decisions that the rest of us should have input to. I say that as an American, but is this right? I mean, I want to get into the actual book here because you do phenomenal work on mapping the military industrial's approach to space. And it's scary. I mean, these guys are talking about launching nuclear bombs, nuclear weapons. Who are they to be making decisions on something on such a grand scale for the rest of us when it's clear they don't even understand? I don't want you to have to go into a political discussion here, but it is hard to say. There are big decisions and maybe not everyone is getting the input that should be, should be part of this process. Is that fair? And by everyone, I mean the other seven and a half billion or seven billion people on planet Earth.
- [27:29]
C
Yeah. So I think one of the challenges that we face as a species is, is that we lack the ability to have transparent and democratic inclusive conversations about the risks that we now face and how to mitigate them as a species. And those risks include natural risks and cosmic risks that have recently come to light. Everything from solar flares to supernovae to asteroid and comet impacts. But they also include the risks, most importantly actually that have been created by our godlike technological powers. Nuclear risks, obviously, artificial intelligence, climate change, you name it. Right. So there's these two categories now of existential risk. One that we've become aware of relatively recently and the other that we've been able to create relatively recently. And they really have placed us in a more precarious position than I think a lot of people realize. There's a philosopher called Toby Ord who argues that we're living through something he calls the precipice, which is a sustained period, probably lasting a few centuries, in which there is a heightened existential Risk, heightened risk of us permanently, in some way permanently foreclosing our potential future, maybe even because we've gone extinct. But do we have the ability as a society, as a species to have a genuine conversation about, hey, these risks are dangerous, this is why they're dangerous, this is how much resources we want to commit to mitigating that risk and this is how we want to do it? No, those conversations absolutely are not happening. And I don't actually think a lot of those conversations are happening within governments or even within, let's say, the executive branch of the US Government. Certainly those conversations are currently not happening, many of them. So we've got a real crisis of, I think, democratic decision making in the precipice. And you might argue that our way out of the precipice is to fix that problem. Right. Is to create a genuine sort of infrastructure for deciding, you know, how we want to tackle these problems, these challenges collectively, what kind of activities we want to allow, which ones we don't want to allow, and a kind of decision making that recognizes everybody's best interest. And absolutely, that is not, that is not on the horizon right now. That's what we should be working towards, I think. And the book shows that, I hope.
- [30:35]
B
Yeah, I actually want to get into the book. Last question on this high level theme here. Are you suggesting a space version of the UN or more treaties? I mean, candidly, I agree with you. It's going to be tough to get the genie back in the model on progress, the industrial revolution, AI and space exploration. That just doesn't seem like it's happening. How do we regulate and control and make sure we don't do something really bad?
- [31:02]
C
Well, first thing I'll say is, I don't know. I'll be, I'll be humble about and just, you know, put my cards on the table and say, I'm not sure yet. I think there is a utopian vision for how things are, things should work. And in that utopian vision we have genuine, powerful, you know, robust democracies. Right. And those democracies band together in multilateral institutions that are responsive to voters. Right. And are able to tackle global challenges. And we see some, I think, examples of that in the history I actually sketch out in ripples. Like the Montreal Protocol, I think, is a great example of international multilateral collaboration to address truly global threat, which was the ozone hole in the 1980s. And if, if we had allowed that hole to keep expanding, all of us would be in enormous amounts of, of danger right now. But luckily we aren't so there are examples of this. We are, the world is obviously trending in exactly the wrong direction. But you might also argue that an alternative, a much darker future, but a darker future in which we can address existential risks and is one in which there is a kind of global hegemon that values stability above all else. So let's say there's a future in which China becomes absolutely what the United States was in the 1950s, let's say.
- [32:43]
B
Right.
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C
Or even in the 1990s, there's another unipolar moment and the pole now is Beijing rather than Washington. And you know, China is able to direct global responses to, let's say artificial, the possibility of artificial superintelligence or climate change or even solar flares, what have you.
- [33:06]
B
Right.
- [33:07]
C
Or maybe, you know, there's another future in which Washington, you know, gets its dominance back and is maybe has a different, different political orientation than it has, than it has now. So in those futures, perhaps it is also more possible to address global challenges. But the way the world is going right now, of course, again, is not in the right direction. It's fragmenting. We've got a return of old style imperialism and it doesn't leave me optimistic for the short term future. At least we're addressing risk in the short term future.
- [33:49]
B
Yeah, definitely sobering. And you may not have the answers, but you definitely, I think, highlight the problems in a very clear fashion. I do want to move into the book. It's laid out in five parts, not surprisingly. The first part is the sun. Nagamar, you write, quote, just about everything on Earth depends on the sun. Could you briefly talk about the Earth's relationship with the sun?
- [34:11]
C
Yeah, if it wasn't for the sun, we would all be dead. In fact, we would not have evolved in the first place. The sun keeps Earth, Earth habitable. Right. It's just that the energy from the sun is what allows life to exist on the surface of the Earth. And below the water there are hydrothermal vents that create energy. But without the sun, the water would all be frozen anyway. So we depend profoundly on the sun and on its radiation in every way that you can imagine. So in that sense we are creatures of the sun, right? We are, we are the offspring of our star as much as our planet. And I think that alone binds us to environments, what I call environments beyond Earth. And this is a point I think that's worth emphasizing as well. For me, an environment doesn't have to have living things in it. And you know, that's one peculiar maybe definition of an environment, but it might not be yours, but environment is a term you can stretch in many different directions. So for me, the sun has environments. It's a dynamic and constantly changing thing, very, very complex. And it's changes because it's so big and we depend on it so much. Even small changes on the sun can have a big impact here.
- [35:42]
B
Absolutely. You write, as early as the mid 19th century, solar storms have threatened communication networks, then transportation networks, and then military systems that controlled nuclear arsenals. Now, at last, they seem to imperil the foundation of modern civilization. The networks that channel energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed. How, how worried should we be about solar storms or geomagnetic storms?
- [36:09]
C
I would say we should be worried enough to do more about it, and in part because there's a level of uncertainty here. So what we're talking about with solar storms, the ones that really impact us are coronal mass ejections. So these are magnetic bubbles that lift off from the sun, carry a whole bunch of charged particles. And if we're unlucky, we're in the way. And those charged particles flow through Earth's magnetosphere, down towards the crust, and create rapidly alternating currents that do bad things to our electrical infrastructure. And the reason this is a problem is actually specifically because of transformers, which are essential parts of electrical grids. And rapidly alternating currents probably are able to profoundly damage, maybe even destroy, large numbers of transformers if this, if the bubble is, hits Earth fast enough, hits our magnetic field fast enough, and creates what we call then a particularly bad geomagnetic storm. So we don't know how bad these storms can actually get, is the first problem. The worst storm that's been encountered is called the Carrington event from the 19th century. And if it happened now, honestly, we don't know exactly what would happen to Earth, to our electrical infrastructure. There are some people who suggest that if we're unlucky, and this Carrington event occurred, let's say, in January 2026, and it, you know, it really was most effective in the northeastern United States, we would lose hundreds of transformers, and that would cause a massive collapse of the electrical grid. Tens of millions of people would be without power, maybe more. And the thing is, with these transformers, they're really hard to replace. They are huge machines, really complicated machines, and they've got all kinds of little customizations, each one of them. So it could take well over a year to replace a transformer. And if you lose hundreds of them, probably might take even longer. And so you just imagine what would happen if you, let's say, knock out power for 100 million people in the northeastern United States? So everything grinds to a halt. Water, medicine, food, warmth, you name it, it's all gone. Right? So not only that, but think of the financial infrastructure on which the world depends. The world really still is routed through the northeastern United States in profound ways. So what would happen? This could be a global economic collapse. Millions of people could die if the Carrington Event happened now. And so that was 150 years that a storm this bad happened. And we don't know when it could happen again. There's modeling work that's been done. We might be overdue for another Carrington event. We're really not sure. At the same time though, we can use the growth rings in trees to determine when other really bad storms might have happened in Earth's past. Because when you have a really bad storm, that alters what are called isotopes in tree rings. Isotopes are variants of atoms with more or fewer neutrons. But long story, the upshot is that we can find evidence in tree rings. The sun is capable of generating much, much, much worse storms than the Carrington Event. Not only that, but we can actually observe seemingly sun like stars across the Milky Way galaxy. See that they have huge explosions on them, much bigger than anything the sun has produced, at least in our recent history. So there's a reason, real chance that the sun can produce something much, much worse than the Carrington Event. The Earth's magnetosphere puts a cap on how bad the impacts can be on our electrical grid, actually. So it probably can't be like an order of magnitude worse than the Carrington Event, but it might be twice as bad. And something like this could happen, really, it could happen any, any month. And if it did, we wouldn't have much noticed. So this is all to say that there are defenses. We could build defenses against powerful geomagnetic storms. We could harden our electrical grid. These things might also protect us from EMPs, for example, which are created electromagnetic pulses created by nuclear weapons. So we could do these things. They would be costly. And so you can see the problem right away.
- [41:22]
B
Yeah, funding and I want to talk about that. But you describe a particular event in May of 67. It wasn't Carrington event, but a series of violent soul flares accompanied with the collision of the colossal CME coronal mass injection when Earth's magnetosphere. This seemed to come pretty darn close to a nuclear apocalypse. Can you briefly describe what happened there?
- [41:45]
C
Yeah, there are powerful solar Flares created really powerful radio signals that, that jammed NORADs. So NORAD is United States came a kind of missile detection system and jammed their early warning radar systems. And it's exactly what this, it seemed like the Soviets would do if they were launching an allout attack. 1967, pretty much the height of the Cold War, a lot of geopolitical tensions around the world. And it certainly seemed plausible that this was it, this is doomsday. And so, you know, nuclear capable bombers were ready for takeoff. If they had taken off, they had orders to continue on to their targets and drop missiles unless they were recalled. But the flares also made wireless communication a very dodgy prospect. So if these things had been launched, if they had taken off, then it seemed like there was a real possibility that nuclear weapons would be dropped. And only at the last minute did solar weather forecaster inform military officers that hey, this is actually a solar flare, not Soviet jamming. So it depends, right? There's a number of ifs here. So you know, what if that hadn't happened and officers had declared, you know, we're going to take, have these bombers take off. And then of course the other thing is, well, what if they hadn't been able to reach the bomber? So it's not exactly sure how likely it is that a nuclear war could have happened, but it seems at least plausible that in that moment, 1967, if somebody hadn't realized in the Air Force hadn't realized that solar flare is happening and that's what's knocking out these radar systems, we might not be here to have this conversation right now.
- [43:47]
B
Yeah, that's amazing. And I guess that goes back to our earlier conversation about do we understand our own solar system?
- [43:54]
C
I mean, it goes back to that. And honestly, it also goes back to something else that I think about a lot lately, which is we were pretty lucky to get out of the Cold War without a nuclear war. A lot of close calls. And you get those close calls when you have these massively complicated systems operating with enormous amount of tension and really global peace sort of dependent on powers having this capacity to threaten and signal each other with destruction, with possible destruction. And that kind of world is one again, that we were lucky to survive. We really don't want to go back to that. But that's exactly what, you know, leaders of the world's current great powers seem in a haste to want to get back to. And I just don't think that the risks of accidental nuclear war are sufficiently appreciated by policymakers or by the public.
- [45:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely, it does seem. Yeah, I would agree with all of that. Second part, Venus. In what way is Venus Earth's twin?
- [45:15]
C
Well, it's about the same size as the Earth, and it's made of some of the same stuff in basalt. It's possible it once had a big ocean as well, or oceans. So it is very possible that, you know, several billion years ago, if you.
- [45:33]
B
Had.
- [45:35]
C
You know, pulled into the solar system in the spaceship and looked at Earth and Venus, you'd have said, hey, those are. Those are two twin. Two twin worlds, each with an ocean. But then the sun has been gradually increasing in its luminosity, and it seems that that created a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus by beginning to boil away the oceans of Venus. And water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. So the more oceans you boil away, the hotter the planet gets, meaning the more oceans then boil away and the hotter it gets. And this is called a positive feedback. So eventually, Venus got extremely hot, its atmosphere got extremely thick, and because of chemical reactions in the atmosphere, the water vapor dissociated and basically all the water disappeared. And so you're left with a super thick atmosphere, a super hot planet that can provide a kind of warning of what can happen if you really supercharge the greenhouse effect. Here's a planet same size as Earth, made of some of the same stuff, and it's now absolutely unimaginably hellish. So let's stop that from happening here.
- [46:55]
B
Yeah, a lesson for us. And I think you also, when you talk about Mars, the dust there, and the implications for the Earth as well, in the beginning of the book you mentioned, you want to also highlight scientific failures. With that as sort of the backdrop here, what is the lesson of Immanuel Velikovsky and his book World and Collisions of the Scientific Community? It's a. Another fascinating and somewhat bizarre incident.
- [47:25]
C
Emmanuel Velikovsky is a really strange figure, as you say, a strange figure in the history of science and 20th century culture. So here's a guy, he's a Zionist who made it his way to New York City and in New York, had this idea of writing something about Moses and the miracles that are associated with Exodus. And he lands on the idea that spectacular stories and many different myths can actually be traced back to real cosmic events. Mythologies all around the world are reacting to something real, and those real events are transformations really in the solar system. And bizarrely, he has this notion that a chunk flew off of Jupiter and became Venus, and Venus then passed close to the Earth and caused untold disasters on Earth, that these different myths are incorporating into their stories and devastated Mars as well and finally settled into its present orbit. And it's again, very strange story, but it left him with the ability to make a series of predictions. Predictions like, well, Jupiter should still be active, so it must still have powerful radio signals that it must be sending out into outer space. Venus, because it went through all these disasters, must be really, really hot. And a series of other predictions like Mars must be lifeless. And when he came up with these predictions, they sounded very strange to a lot of people. But bizarrely, a lot of them were proven to be accurate. And of course, Venus was really, really hot, much hotter than people expected. And Jupiter is indeed sending out all of these radio waves. And that seemed to at least convince some scientists that he was onto something. Eventually, most scientists condemned him, criticized his work, often without reading his work. And he became a kind of symbol for the counterculture, this kind of rejection of some elements of modernity, widespread rejection of where science was going, science increasingly allied with government and the military, kind of rejection of that kind of model for science. And so he became a real kind of icon for young people across United States, on university campuses, and also just for historians of science, many of whom at the time taught his work as a kind of, again, alternative to mainstream science. I find people like him to be really underappreciated in at least popular histories of science. And the reason for that is, I think you often, I think our discourse, I think scholarship in general can really advance through bold but mistaken ideas. Those ideas can be incredibly enriching, weirdly enough. And in this case with Velikovsky, what was so special about him is his willingness to integrate scientific evidence, including cutting edge scientific evidence, with evidence from the humanities and from the social sciences. And he kind of created a synthesis at a time that science was dominant in American culture and scientific evidence was perceived by many as being necessarily superior to other forms of evidence. And really the popularity of his synthesis showed at least the potential, the potential reach of scholarship that was more inclusive, that combined different ways of knowing and different forms of evidence and methods. So for me, at least, I mean, there's a number of interesting things here, but one of them is you can be really profoundly wrong and still have a very constructive impact on scholarship, even on culture.
- [52:02]
B
It's fascinating. I want to move to the third section and the Moon, which you describe as the greatest physical change to Earth history.
- [52:10]
C
So it looks like the early Earth had a really nasty encounter with another planet that we now call Theia. It's a planet probably about the size of Mars. And they form too close to each other. And as a result of that, eventually they smashed into each other. Very bad day on Earth. And on Theia, most of Theia merged with the Earth. Obviously, as you can imagine, it was a glob of just super heated matter, glowing matter for a while, but some of it also emerging with the Earth, spun off and ended up forming the Moon. So of just the biggest environment, I think you can call it the biggest environmental change in Earth's history. Earth was reduced to incandescent and liquid sort of sphere for a while. But it also, it also was gifted, the Moon. And I say gifted because the Moon's interaction with the Earth slowly gradually slowed down Earth's rotation and moderated its seasons, gave us the tides eventually when water could form on the Earth again. And in these ways may have been very important for the evolution of life. So it's a profound change and it's one that has deep, deep implications, not only because it tells us something about how we might have come about, right, how life might have emerged on Earth, but it also potentially tells us something about what life requires. So do you need some sort of mega moon, some really big satellite that can, can stabilize rotations and seasons of a planet, that can create tides the way that we have on Earth? You need something like that. And if so, then we would expect worlds that evolve life to be really quite rare because the conditions that created such a big moon for us wouldn't happen very often. So it's an interesting history, not only because it tells us about where we came from, but because it gives us an indication maybe of how unique we are in the universe and whether we're alone even.
- [54:33]
B
That's fascinating. Dagamar, what's a selenographer and how do you.
- [54:38]
C
Cronographer is somebody who studied the Moon, somebody who mapped the Moon and most of them mapped the Moon to look for changes in the Moon's environments. So they were looking for the appearance of new craters or changes in the shape of craters. And the reason they were doing this because they assumed, correctly, that from afar the Earth would be a changeable world, constantly be changing. And its changeability was an indication of its habitability because the Earth is changing all the time because it's full of water, right? There's energy. It changes the state of water. So you've got air flowing and water flowing. It's also changing because of life. So leaves change color, dramatic, you know, dramatic scale every season. Human beings build things. So intelligent life is actually also Changing the surface of the Earth. So in looking for changes on the moon, you are actually looking for evidence of life on the Moon. And, you know, the search for this evidence began in the 17th century for a whole bunch of reasons, including the invention of the telescope, and continued all the way through the 20th century. And even in, like, at the turn of the 20th century, people thought they were seeing swarms of insects on the moon, for example. So it's, it's a long history of looking for life on the moon through its changes.
- [56:09]
B
On that theme of changes, you write, yet humanity's most profound transformations of the moon may be the hardest to detect because they involved Earth's smallest oriented. I briefly referenced this earlier. Could you talk about that? These microscopic water bears, or is it tardigrades?
- [56:27]
C
Yeah, tardigrades. Yeah, yeah. So there, there's no doubt that untold numbers of microbes have been ferried to the moon. No doubt about that at all. The astronauts who landed there alone brought massive amounts of microbes, including in their diapers that they left behind in the. In the lunar modules. So there's massive amounts of microbes that were deposited there. And there is a real possibility that some microbes are still alive. In fact, the astronauts went to the moon. Second Apollo mission. So the second group of astronauts landed on the moon. They landed by a robotic probe known as Surveyor 3. And they, they took off camera housing. And the idea was to figure out how human machines endure the lunar environment. Anyway, they brought this camera housing back to Earth. Her tests on the camera housing have found that there are actually microbes in the housing. And it's entirely possible that those microbes lifted off from Earth on the robot, landed on the moon, and survived for years on the lunar surface deep within the camera housing. And these are not even the most robust microbes that exist on Earth. They don't have. They can't develop spores, which are kind of like armor for microbes. So it's possible that there are still microbes on the moon. And I, you know, I keep coming back to this. I don't think we know what microbes can evolve to endure. There's evidence, for example, that in NASA's clean rooms, like new studies that show that microbes that we thought were dead in those clean rooms were actually just dormant and can be brought back to life. There are microbes that have been detected in the very upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, basically in what we would call space microbes. On the International Space Station, Microbes can endure a hell of a lot and so I'm not convinced that there are no microbes on the moon from Earth. I think we've, we might very well have seated the lunar subsurface with our microorganisms.
- [58:48]
B
Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, that was, that whole issue of bringing back the, some kind of contamination from the Apollo missions was scary. And then, yeah, like you were saying, I think it was a Chinese satellite or something may have impacted the moon's surface. So.
- [59:08]
C
Oh yeah, lots of stuff has.
- [59:09]
B
Yeah, I want to move on part four. No surprise here. Mars, you write. The dynamic environments of the red planet have long inspired both utopian and apocalyptic visions of humanity's future with profound implications for its present. What is the fascination of Mars, at least for the last 400 years here on Earth?
- [59:30]
C
The fascination of Mars is that it seems to be the most Earth like world in the solar system. It is the only rocky world, rocky planet where we can actually see the surface. Mercury is pretty far away, really small, close to the sun, can't really see the surface of Mercury. Venus obviously cloaked with clouds. The moony, we can see the moon's surface. But the Moon's surface, in spite of the efforts of selenographers, doesn't seem to change much. At least we can't actually see the surfaces of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn from the Earth. We actually have to send spacecraft there. But Mars, Mars looks recognizably Earth. Like Mars has ice caps, Mars has clouds and dust storms, it has dark patches that come and go. Mars looks like a dynamic world. And a lot of the fascination with Mars that developed in the 18th century and the 19th century and even reports of potential life on Mars can be seen as stemming from that, stemming from the changes that are visible on its surface. Even though it's clearly a rocky planet, it's clearly a planet that has a surface that we can see. So part of it comes from that. More recently, part of the fascination with Mars comes from the search for a potential other home for humanity and a kind of planet B as we might call it, and the only place to go to in the solar system. For many people anyway, I think this is wrong. But for many people they believe it's Mars, the only place we can go. So if you want to have a multi planetary species, if you want to have a space faring species in the solar system, then Mars is a logical target. It's also particularly interesting world right now because there's real evidence that it was once habitable and may still be habitable for indigenous life forms. Microbes and that its condition of habitability could be resurrected. It's like Venus. It was probably once a much more Earth like world, but unlike Venus, it's possible to make it more Earth, like, without a completely unimaginable level of technology and effort. And now currently looks like you can't make it into a second Earth without doing some pretty crazy things like bringing comets into the atmosphere. But it does look like you can make it a lot more livable than it currently is. So there's the scientific attraction of Mars, which is actually finding life beyond Earth. A second genesis, we might call that, a second origin of life. And there's the added attraction of we can turn this planet into another home for humanity. We can build a truly interplanetary species by going there. So Mars, with good reason, is particularly fascinating for everybody, from planetary scientists to tycoons like Elon Musk.
- [63:11]
B
Why do you say the canal controversy had contradictory consequences, Alliteration aside, there for astronomy?
- [63:18]
C
Yeah, probably too much alliteration. So the canal controversy was the detection, first of all, of seemingly straight lines on Mars, crisscrossing Mars, covering Mars. And what could possibly build these straight lines? Well, it looked like an alien civilization. Why would they build straight lines? Because these lines were canals that the aliens used to siphon water from the Martian poles to vast fields along the equator. Why did they have to do that? Because Mars was dying. It was drying out. It was older than Earth seemed like, and so it was colder and drying. And the canals were a logical response to the death of a planet, basically. And this became a sensation, as you can imagine. Imagine now if we detected evidence for an alien civilization on Venus, for example, what that would do if millions of people seem to have bought into this. Thousands of people tried to use telescopes to see the canals. Front page news. Every time Mars made a close pass to Earth, Some people believe there were signals being sent by the Martians. There were efforts to send a signal back to Mars. So it was a huge deal in the history of science. And what it did was two things. One is it inspired a generation of young people. And you can imagine that just the idea of there being an alien civilization, how exciting that would be for a young person trying to decide what to do with their life. But also this idea encouraged authors to write science fiction stories that seem recognizably modern, right? Like adventure stories set on a desert planet or alien invasion stories that had a profound impact on young people. Some of those young people then went on to become astronomers or planetary scientists, exobiologists so people who look for life beyond Earth at the dawn of the space age. So in a way, this canal controversy really stimulated the study of other worlds. But in another way, already in the early 20th century, it seemed like either canals didn't exist or there was no way of actually determining whether anything was alive on Mars. And at the same time that there was increasing sort of cynicism and doubt about the existence of canals, there was a revolution in the study of the universe beyond the solar system. So the discovery that other galaxies were not just nebulae, but legitimately other galaxies, discovery of the expansion of the universe, relativity, all these things that really move the cutting edge of space science from Mars and the planets of the solar system out far beyond the solar system. So those two things coinciding discredited the study of planetary environments for several decades, the decades which these young people who were inspired by Martian science fiction, decades in which they came of age. It's contradictory.
- [66:35]
B
Absolutely. You write the dust storms of Mars help reveal existential threats to the climate of Earth and the survival of humanity. Can you expand on that?
- [66:46]
C
Yeah. So the dust storms of Mars in the 1970s led Carl Sagan, who's a really well known planetary scientist and science popularizer, exobiologist, to begin a long process of discovery, basically because Sagan was part of the team that sent a probe to Mars and there was a global dust storm. And this probe had nothing to do when it got to Mars because it couldn't image the surface of Mars. But what it could do is measure the impact of dust on temperatures in the Martian atmosphere. And it found that the dust warmed up the upper atmosphere and cooled down the lower atmosphere so around the surface of Mars. And that inspired Sagan to put together teams that then investigated the impact of volcanic eruptions on Earth's climate, found that they could cool the planet. They could cool the planet. And this was a period of now escalating tensions in the 1980s, in the cold War. And so they turned their sights trying to figure out, well, what about a nuclear war? Could that also cool the Earth? Could the firestorms created in burning cities, could they send so much soot into the stratosphere that it would cool down our planet as well? And they found out that, in fact, yes, that would happen. That Earth's temperature in the Northern hemisphere would drop by something like 20 degrees Celsius in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, that this cooling would endure for about a decade, and that it would basically extinguish photosynthesis in the northern hemisphere. That became a really powerful and important discovery in the 1980s because it showed that a buildup, an arms buildup that the Reagan administration had launched and Soviet Union was participating in, was potentially suicidal. You could not recover, as the United States or the Soviet Union from a nuclear war. And that really spurred the peace movement, seemed to have led to a rapprochement between Gorbachev and Reagan, or at least contributed to that, and therefore took some of the edge off of Cold War tensions in the 1980s. And it can all be, can all be traced back to the space mission to Mars and the dust storms that kept Sagan and other scientists from imaging the surface of Mars.
- [69:28]
B
Yeah, that's amazing. That's a great thesis. The fifth part, comet in asteroids we already talked about at the beginning. And you gave your, your, I guess, probability or likelihood of a cosmic encounter with an asteroid. So I want to move to the end of the book. You conclude, and this is my last question, One lesson from the past is that we cannot turn away from space. You propose building solar power plants that would be a better use of NASA's resources and returning astronauts to the moon. Regardless of your proposal, whether or not to adopt it, what do you hope readers and especially scientists and policymakers take away from your book?
- [70:07]
C
Biggest thing is, well, really two things. First is that space matters. We often have this idea, I think, that we're separate from the rest of the universe, that we're separate from the solar system, that we can decide to turn our energies down towards the Earth and focus on fixing things here before we think about what's up there. And the book shows that that's an illusion, that we are, in fact, intimately bound to environments across the solar system. And they're dynamic, they're changing, and we'd better consider them and we better plan for their changes and think about how we might change them in constructive ways going forward to benefit us on Earth. So that's the first thing. Second thing, though, would be that we are going through this period of heightened existential risk. And we know that in part because of space exploration, space science. So, yes, we should fund that a lot more than we are. We shouldn't be cutting NASA budgets, for example, for space science. We should be doing exactly the opposite. But also that we should be developing, frankly, global structures, global frameworks for cooperation that allow us to actually anticipate and to mitigate truly species threatening risks. Because we're going through a period now where we're going to be encountering more of them and they're going to be getting worse. But we also, and this is so important, honestly, it's such a big message from the book. We also have the ability, we truly have the tested the proven ability to actually reduce those risks and you know, to make the world a safer place, make our species safer in the cosmos. So that's another thing I hope readers take away from the book.
- [72:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely. You've certainly done your job by writing this book. Dagomar, this has been a fascinating conversation. Again, the book is Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean by Dagomar DeGroote. I think just having listened to this interview, everyone would conclude it's a thoughtful, wide ranging and deeply original book. No doubt it succeeds in changing how readers think about humanity's place in the solar system and that we all have a stake and our actions matter. Dagomar, thank you so much for joining me today and congrats on really a fantastic book.
- [72:35]
C
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
- [72:37]
B
Thank you.