Boilers: Man is unacceptable – Business Week

Column by Dieter Schnaas

The data analyst Stephen Emmott wrote an apocalypse reader. His message: We missed the last chance. The “Blue Planet” is exploited, overworked – dead

There are two looks that can be thrown at our world from the perspective of a spaceman. The look of insurance and the look of warning. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg has made us aware than four decades ago. His collection “astronoetischer glosses” in “The completeness of the Stars” to this day survive most enchanting what the German book market has to offer.

The completeness of the Stars

• The book

  Hans Blumenberg, The completeness of the stars, Suhrkamp ( new edition, 2011), 18 €

Blumenberg was immediately clear that the iconographic photo of the blue planet amid deep black infinity the self-consciousness of the people would change (and their sense, part of the “humanity” to be). But the question was: In what direction?

For Blumenberg was no question that the “tele visionary sensation” of the trip to the moon and distant views of our planet all of us to “Weltanschauern” emancipated to Earthlings in the narrow sense of the word, say, to creatures that necessarily know that their fate is inextricably tied to their existence on earth. The obviousness of the lunar desert and the experience of the “Total presence” of the earth in the midst of a dusty, icy, dead Allunendlichkeit have a sense of the preciousness of the “blue planet” awakened “When we knew until now what we have, since we know how it looks like on the moon. “

Armed with this awareness, so Blumenberg, a man is aware not only of his universal nothingness, but Forwarding with” his “Earth paradoxically again in a center position, a non cosmological , of course, but probably practically live – because he knows that it is for him no cosmic, only a global perspective is: this world is all. Your trivial expression found the Ptolemaic counter-revolution then in the “simultaneity of Mondbezwingung and environmental protection”:

When Neil Armstrong in the summer of 1969, his foot from the “ Eagle ” to be the first man to walk on the moon, we taught in the German Ministry of the Interior Department just released a new “environmental protection” field. Admirable can not short-circuit that we discover all our cosmic expeditions only one place that “our species stay of some duration promises”, it has Hermann Luebbe once formulated following Blumenberg, “namely the Earth” *.

Civilization ecumenism

• The book

  Hermenn Luebbe, Civilization ecumenism, Wilhelm Fink 2005 14, 90 €

Of this, however, that the new view of the Earth has led to her people the to make it appear as finite home, again we can not speak; even before that Blumenberg even then warned the contrary: “The earth looked like there man, his works and his filth, his Desertifikationen not No trace of man A purity of precious, as it was flawless And it!.. a still untouchable and unused ground for fatal to imaginary growth. It was an insurance thing you saw no warning. “

It was not until 1972, when the report of the Club of Rome on” The Limits to Growth ” got the melancholy existential original meaning of the image of the “blue planet” environmentally-curative note. That has not changed anything – once you refrains that the ecologically-curative semiotics of the image, in turn, transforms, and more and more adopted alarmist nihilistic trains. From auto insurance the look on the earth is a warning and become bad news from the alert, more precisely, the message from an “unprecedented emergency planetary scale.” That at least Stephen Emmott is convinced his bestseller “tens of billions” has just been published in paperback.

Ten billion

• The book

  Stephen Emmott, tens of billions, Suhrkamp (Paperback 2015) 7 €