Orbital Sunrise

The Anthropocene Reviewed

John Green reflects on the concept of 'orbital sunrises'—a phenomenon he will never personally witness. Using the historical lens of Albrech

Key takeaways

• Albrecht Dürer's 1515 rhino etching demonstrates how human imagination fills in missing details with familiar cultural motifs like armor.
• The Voskhod-2 mission was marked by extreme peril, including a pressurized suit expansion that nearly prevented Alexei Leonov from re-entering the spacecraft.

Main topics

• Orbital Sunrises
• Space Exploration History

Notable quotes

I will never see an orbital sunrise in real life.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a moving meditation on how art enables us to exp

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Hello and welcome to The Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. I'm John Green, and today marks the last episode in our miniseries to celebrate The Anthropocene Reviewed book, which, thanks to your astonishing support, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for eight consecutive weeks now. I am so grateful to everyone who has read it and for all your kind messages. To cite just one example, a listener named Madeline recently wrote me to say that she and six friends were reading a single copy in turn, with each of them writing notes in the margins about the book and each other. I remember sharing a copy of a Michael Chabon book similarly with friends when I was young, and so that meant a lot to me. Anyway, thank you for reading it and sharing it. There are still signed copies of the Anthropocene Reviewed book available online and at many bookstores, so if you haven't picked one up, now's the time. Alright, on to the episode. Today, I'll be reviewing something I've never seen, and never will. An orbital sunrise. Speaker 1 (1:23) Some of you may know that my wife, Sarah Urist Green, is a curator and writer. Her most recent book, You Are an Artist, features creativity prompts sprinkled with art historical context. And I often use the book when trying to figure out what to write about or even what to think about. One of the chapters in the book is called Never Seen, Never Will, and it features a prompt. from the artist David Brooks, who asks us to think of something we've never seen and probably never will see, and then to find a way to articulate that something. In this context, Brooks discusses a 1515 etching of a rhinoceros by the artist Albrecht Dürer. Dürer had never seen, and as it happened, would never see, an actual rhinoceros. but he'd read a description of a rhino that had been brought to Portugal in 1510. That rhinoceros went on to die in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. But using the description and a small sketch, Durer created a very famous image of a rhino, which depicts the animal as having literal plates of armor, complete with rivets. Speaker 1 (2:43) Dürer's etching does look quite a bit like an actual rhinoceros, which is a testament to his particular genius and more broadly to the capacities of the human imagination. But in the places where Dürer's rhino is different from an actual one, something else is betrayed about the human imagination, which is that we tend to fill in blank spaces or unknowns. with guesses that are deeply shaped by our humanness. When Durer read that the rhino had skin like armor, he imagined 16th century European human armor. Because what else could he imagine? When thinking about what to write, or even what to think, my default setting is to focus on what I know, or at least what someone else knows that I can easily learn. And of course, we do know quite a lot about ourselves and the universe. We know about gravity and the structure of DNA. And we know when the Prophet Muhammad led the Muslim community from Mecca to Medina. And we know how internal combustion engines work and the approximate shape of the coastline of Florida. But the truth is, we don't know almost everything. We don't know what dark matter is or why there is matter in the universe at all. We don't know why agriculture developed or why it emerged independently in different human communities that couldn't possibly have known about each other. We don't know how thought works or why some viruses are seasonal. We know almost nothing about the so-called known universe, including how or if it will end or whether it is the only universe. And we don't know who killed Jimmy Hoffa. And we don't know when people started to have names or what the earliest names were. We also don't know why we make art. Speaker 1 (4:49) Faulkner said that the work of an artist is to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. But it also involves creating out of the materials of the earth something which did not exist before, turning graphite into a drawing, or marble into a sculpture, or sound waves into a podcast. This refashioning is a very old human habit, of course. It is not too distant from toolmaking. And indeed, it may