We don’t think of our religion as detracting from our nationalism, or our affinity with a ball team from our cultural identity-they’re all parts of our identity that supplement and round out a personality. “Planetary identity supplements the many other identities we have. “We don't know that there's life anywhere else, and until such time as we do, we ought to consider ourselves to be something extraordinary in the universe, who are figuring out who we are,” says Socolow. If they’re successful, these scientists and teachers could change not just how we deal with nuclear weapons, global pandemics, and other emerging threats, but help build a new kind of identity-one embraced by future generations of astronauts on their way to Mars and beyond. Many of them are now working to better understand exactly why the change in perspective occurs, and figure out if maybe it can be taught on the grandest scale. Countless other scientists and teachers around the world have been transformed by seeing the Earth as it truly was, floating and alone. Instead of just waiting and hoping things would improve, he’s taking matters into his own hands, teaching a series of small classes that move beyond the sense of patriotism taught by institutions around the world to what he calls Planetary Identity, the sense that the bonds we’ve long experienced from coming from the same place could be extended far beyond tribal and national borders. After co-founding Princeton’s environmental science program in 1971, he joined the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board and served on the committee that earlier this year voted to keep the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. Virtually every university asked itself how it would respond to what was clearly some new agenda?”Īs governments and businesses now prepare to take the first humans to other planets, Socolow’s answer to that question is only getting more refined. “I single out the images of the Earth from space as having a kind of shock effect on our species. The tiny planet floating alone in a vast sea of blackness became an emblem that shifted the eons-old, tribal fight to survive to a planetary scale, says Socolow, now 83 and a professor emeritus at Princeton. So, when the last crew to travel to the moon on Apollo 17 snapped a full-color high-resolution photo of the Earth, now known as The Blue Marble, the image sent shockwaves around the world. Over the course of the next several years, the power of that black and white moment grew, impacting policy decisions and inspiring a new generation of academics. At their rental home in California, physicist Robert Socolow holds his infant son David in the summer of 1969.
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