From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward

Sylvia Engdahl

Nov 2019 · Collected Essays Book 2 · Sylvia Engdahl

About this ebook

Much has been said about the positive effect of the photos of Earth obtained by Apollo 8, which for the first time showed our planet as a globe, a fragile refuge amid barren surroundings, and thereby launched the environmental movement. The negative impact--the subconscious apprehension resulting from realization that space is an actual place containing little that's familiar to us and perhaps much that we'd rather not meet--is not spoken of. But it may be no less significant. Could this be one of the reasons why widespread interest in space died so soon after the first moon landing?

For the past fifty years space advocates have been puzzled and frustrated by the slowness of progress in space and the failure of the public to grasp its importance not only to the future of humankind, but to the preservation of Earth's environment. But is it really cause for discouragement? In this book Sylvia Engdahl argues that in the light of history, it's not surprising that acceptance of a new outlook on the universe is slow. All past human advances have been made by visionary minorities without the support of their contemporaries, and our transformation into a spacefaring species will be no exception.

This book also includes all of Engdahl's earlier essays about space, such as "Space and Human Survival," which has been popular on the Web for nearly twenty years, plus new ones about the priority of Mars and the question of whether we'll ever meet hostile aliens. In addition, an Epilogue contains the quotations from her Web page "Space Quotes to Ponder" about why a presence in space is vital to humankind. X-Ray is enabled and includes biographical information about all the quotation authors as well as the people mentioned in the essays.

About the author

Sylvia Engdahl is the author of ten science fiction novels, six of which are Young Adult novels that are also enjoyed by adults. Although she is best known for her Newbery Honor book Enchantress from the Stars, her other YA novels are for older teen readers and her four latest novels are adult SF. She has also published two nonfiction books. In addition she has worked as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies for high schools (most of the nonfiction books that appear in Amazon's catalog under her name are those edited by her in this capacity). She is a strong advocate of space colonization, and besides a widely-read space section of her website she created the site www.spacequotes.com (now located at www.sylviaengdahl.com/spacequotes/), which contains quotations about why humankind must expand into space. She welcomes visitors to her website at www.sylviaengdahl.com.