Becoming an Earthling – David Oliphant
I have been thinking seriously for some time about being an Earthling. Laurel and Edwin have encouraged me to write about it. I was also encouraged along the way by none other than Germaine Greer. During her appearance on Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, she rejected being labelled with any specific national home, declaring instead, “I am an Earthling.” ‘Yes’, I thought, ‘that’s what I am’. I wonder if my reasons for thinking about myself this way are the same as hers.
It is not that I want to depreciate or deprecate in any way that I live in Australia, that I am an Australian. On the contrary. It is a wonderful country; I am very pleased to live here. That’s it really; I live here. It is not who I am in an ultimately defining sense. My sense of identity is searching for something deeper, bigger. I did play for a while with thinking of myself as an Anglo-Celt, that this was my ‘indigenaity’. My grandfather came out from Scotland in the 1880’s. It is true that I have appreciated getting more in touch with my racial roots in my old age. In 2015 my family attended a Gathering of the Clans in Scotland, followed by a conference of the Oliphant Clan at which I met Oliphant’s from around the world, especially North America. But the deal was clinched when I learnt that two of my daughters have the ‘Celtic curse’, Hemochromatosis. It is primarily caused by a mutation in the HFE gene, which disrupts the body’s ability to regulate iron absorption from food. It is exceptionally common in people of Celtic, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern European descent.
Strangely enough, emotionally connecting with my Celtic roots opened my heart to how important ‘being aboriginal’ is to First Nation people in Australia. I began to not just acknowledge this with my ‘head’, I felt it. Landscape or Country does identify us somehow. Something moves me in the landscape of northern Scotland, and Britain generally, in a way that is a bit different to the ways the landscape moves me in Australia. Both are fundamentally important, but the first time I drove through the British countryside I ‘teared up’ with the thought I had ‘come home’.
Something runs deep here, but nonetheless my search for a sense of identity was still somehow not yet quite satisfied. ‘The issue’ a friend said to me ‘is what it really means to be a human being’. A human being! Of course, we are all ‘human beings’. This is true, but why doesn’t it help all that much I wondered. I am a human being! It is not so much a sense of personal identity as a description of who I am that separates me from other creatures. Given that there was a time when we were not on this little planet, before homo sapiens had evolved, being a ‘human being’ does differentiate me in terms of ‘time’, while also connecting me with all other creatures who are ‘human beings’; but not strongly perhaps and not for long. We quickly revert to being ‘male’, or ‘female’, or ‘transgender’, to being an American, or Russian or Australian, or a Canberran or a Londoner or a New Yorker, or a Carlton supporter or a South Sydney fan or whatever. The problem with ‘human being’ is it is indeterminate with regard to ‘place’. I think that’s it. I think a sense of place makes all the difference for a sense of personal identity.
I somehow knew this before I knew I knew it. I have told the story before of picking up my youngest daughter, who is now a middle-aged woman, from primary school when she was less than ten. Her class had watched a video of Planet Earth taken from space. As she watched, the thought had come to her that she was down there somewhere, running around. I was amazed. She was standing outside the place that gave her her existence, her being, her ‘home’, and seeing it over and against her in genuine photographic images which no doubt she was also internalising. At the same time she was also imagining herself in her ‘mind’s eye’ as ‘down there’ somewhere. This surely was a very significant shift of consciousness. It was as if her imagination could take the photographs and use them to project herself in her ‘mind’s eye’ into space and there to ‘see’ or ‘look at’ the planet, and herself, from space.
I remembered the time when I first read that the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, as early as 1948, had famously written: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available… a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose”. In his 1950 book The Nature of the Universe, Hoyle argued that seeing our world in its sheer cosmic isolation would fundamentally shift human consciousness. I had been very taken with this. This had happened to my daughter, it would seem, to some degree, spontaneously. Could this happen to me, intentionally?
Such photographs came to pass when the iconic Earthrise image captured by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968, followed by the 1972 Apollo 17 Blue Marble photo, were published. Many other photos have followed. However, it was not only the actual photographs that caught my attention; it was also the experiences of the astronauts themselves at the time. One aspect of those experiences has been called the ‘overview effect’.
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterised the effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative. Immersive virtual reality simulations have been designed to try to induce the overview effect in earthbound participants. (Wikipedia)
Earthrise
The Blue Marble
I could relate to this ‘overview effect’, to some degree, or so I thought, from my own experiences. I wondered if it was like ‘seeing’ something for the first time that had been looked at many times before, but never really seen. In the moment I actually ‘see’ that something it is a particular and not just an example of something general. I don’t dismiss it in its generality as I so often do, I stop and am taken by its particularity. I sense its presence. I enjoy to do that regularly with what I can see from my window or when I am walking in nature. The secret is not to analyse it in any way, or even to name it, but to just take it in and let it ‘speak’, let it reveal itself. This is in fact the basis of the science advocated by the great German thinker and playwright Goethe.
It is a science based on relationship rather than objectivity. When we give anything or anyone its ‘being’, its presence, an idea can be awoken within us that we can ‘feed’ on and respond to in our imagination. It is an affirmation of spirit rather than its negation. It is a sense of participation in the world around us. The breeze in the trees becomes life and spirit within me. Both my thoughts and my feelings are engaged. I experience this directly. Rightly or wrongly I take it that this is an experience similar to the First Nations’ experience of country and dadirri. It is about felt relationship and what converses between us. I am investing something personal and relational in my own planet, much as the ancients invested something personal and relational in the Sun and the stars. It was just such a sense of relationship with the Sun that led Copernicus, and also Kepler, to devoutly think about the Earth and the solar system from the point of view of the Sun, as if they were standing on it; and they went from such personal imagination of wonder to mathematical science from this new perspective. A great shift of consciousness heralded the modern world and changed us all.
But now in our time a further shift has occurred, and we need to catch up with it. Now human beings can not only just imagine being in space as Copernicus and Kepler did, we have actually been in space, and have photos to prove it. This very year we have even seen the far side of the moon, something never seen by a human being before, and we have all been invited to directly share in this experience, if we can let ourselves be so represented. When the crew of Artemis II first spoke to the gathered crowd after their splash-down, having just seen what no human being had ever seen before, the other side of the Moon, the Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hanson, in finishing his words, said: “I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you”.
‘This is you’. The overview effect was still strongly at work within him, I would suggest, and he was clearly experiencing a sense of representing us in what he had experienced. It was our experience as much as his, if we can believe that? I can. I want to. That planet, ‘down there’ is where I am running around and it is my home. I am an Earthling. I can stand outside myself and the place where I come from, and imagine the whole human story before me on that little planet to which I belong. I can in my own faltering way grasp the ‘Whole’, in both time and space, however the details might be progressively filled in.
Google AI tells me that the word ‘Earthling’ was first recorded in 1593 by the English writer Thomas Nashe in his pamphlet Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. In the 1590s, the word was a religious and philosophical term used to describe mortal, physical humans tied to the dirt, contrasting them with God and angels in heaven. An older related Old English word, yrþling or eorþling, meant a “plowman” or farmer, but the modern re-formation meaning an inhabitant of Earth appeared in the late 16th century. The modern planetary meaning, contrasting humans with space aliens, was popularised later in science fiction.
In other words in being an Earthling I can imagine myself to be an alien to myself and think and imagine the whole human Story, from the Big Bang to wherever and whenever we may be heading, a Story that I am both outside and viewing in my imagination, and yet at the same time part of, along with every one else. I am held by the ‘Whole’. We all are, but most of us don’t realise it. Saying I am an Earthling for me is not being ‘cute’. It is asserting a sense of identity that includes both a sense of place and a sense of time, and is entirely inclusive. And it is a Big Story. It is a shift of consciousness. It is a Becoming. It is a commitment. I will be working at it for the rest of my life.
I remember once sometime ago fantasising that it would be a good thing if all our world leaders were bundled into a spacecraft and taken into space to witness Blue Marble and Earthrise for themselves, to really ‘see’ our planet in its ‘cosmic isolation’ and experience the ‘overview effect’ for themselves, to understand the fundamental importance of wanting to be Earthlings for the sake of our planetary Home. The time has surely come that this sense of identity needs to touch us all if we are going to “beat ‘our’ swords into plowshares, and ‘our’ spears into pruning hooks; and nation not lift up sword against nation, and neither learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3). We are all Earthlings; we just have to know it and live it.
David Oliphant
October 2026
