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In 1988 as the spirit of glasnost convinced even the US Reagan administration of the power of international cooperation, a Cold War coffee-table book of photographs of the Earth from space was published. American and Russian astronauts and cosmonauts defied Cold War prejudices to create a trans-nati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Lancet (British edition) 2024-02, Vol.403 (10426), p.521-522
Main Author: Francis, Gavin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronauts
Atmospheric circulation
Blood circulation
Climate change
Coffee
Cold War
Cosmonauts
Earth
Earth, Planet
Evolution, Planetary
Galactic rotation
Humans
International cooperation
International Space Station
Neural networks
Novels
Planetary rotation
Planets
Typhoons
War
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Summary:In 1988 as the spirit of glasnost convinced even the US Reagan administration of the power of international cooperation, a Cold War coffee-table book of photographs of the Earth from space was published. American and Russian astronauts and cosmonauts defied Cold War prejudices to create a trans-national Association of Space Explorers, the main priority of which was ahead of its time: to wake humanity up to the devastation it perpetrates against its only life-support machine—planet Earth. Harvey's Orbital follows one day in the life of the International Space Station (ISS), that “great metal albatross” that orbits our planet every 90 min (its speed: 18 000 miles per h). The images of looping cycles in this novel recall the dynamism that sustains life, from the atomic to the cosmic: electrons, neural circuits, the circulation of the blood, the turning atmosphere, those spirals of motion in four dimensions as our planet wheels around a sun which is itself rotating around a hurtling galaxy.
ISSN:0140-6736
1474-547X
1474-547X
DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00201-0