Prelude

Picture: Earth Dolphins by Daniel McCulloch

The picture on the first page of the book shows two leaping dolphins superimposed on NASA's Whole Earth Image. It is printed in the book with the permission of the photographer Daniel McCulloch, DESIGN SYNERGY, USA, can be accessed on the following website: www.dolphinsynergy.com


Two Earth dolphins, launched as Cosmodolphins in the cyberspace or dream-machine of the computer:
- leaping innocently in the cosmic ocean around our unique Blue Island;
- forming with the S-shape of their bodies a yin/yang symbol in the mandala of Gaia, the Holy Earth Mother, our sacred home;
- happily unaware of the distant camera-eye, observing them and the Blue Planet from the high-tech panopticon of outer space.

Two boundary-creatures,
- confronting us with mammalian life in the strange border zone between water and air;
- signalling with bodies that offer no decisive visual clues as to their individual sex, a sex that is not one;
- but evoking by etymology the Greek word for womb and vagina = delphys, closely akin to the word delphis = dolphin.

Are the two leaping dolphins, as noble extraterrestrial savages, trying to convey to us an ancient wisdom about harmony between macro- and microcosmos?
Or do their spaceship-bodies and artificial environment indicate that they are cyborgs, simulations created in the galactic high-tech laboratory of a distant super-civilization?

Or are they rather jesters who ironically expose ambivalent late twentieth century attitudes of 'civilized' selves vis-à-vis 'wild' others?

This picture, 'Earth Dolphins', was produced by the photographer Daniel McCulloch in 1995 to support a 'Save the Dolphins' campaign organized by the eco-NGO, Earth Island Institute in San Francisco. We have chosen this picture to provide the keynote to our book because, as one in a plethora of related examples, it presents a cluster of late twentieth century icons that are central to the themes we shall explore. McCulloch's picture is a computer amalgamation. It merges the famous NASA photo of the Earth, seen from outer space, with dolphins as evocative icons of interfaces between feminine and masculine, water and air, Earth-bound and extraterrestrial spheres of existence. Popular culture of today is obsessed with the two icons. The picture explores them separately, or combined into one. In merging the two icons, it stirs up an evocative network of circulating meanings, which in different ways will be in our spotlight; gender, race, animal and cosmic nature, spirituality, extraterrestrialism and technoscience are all negotiated by the picture.
In terms of iconography, the picture allows the Holy Earth Mother, Animals (enigmatic sea mammals) and Sacred Nature to displace one another in apparently innocent and idyllic ways. At first sight we seem to be confronted with a New Age pastoral, a dream of a prelapsarian and paradisic state of existence, where wholeness and harmony, joy and natural pleasure reign.
In the late twentieth century, the Blue Planet, Gaia, the Holy Earth Mother, plays a similar role to the nineteenth century Romantic image of the white cottage with a thatched roof, an idyllic garden and a good wife and mother who tends the sacred hearth for children and husband. The Blue Planet Earth is presented as a unique 'pearl of space' (Borisenko and Romanov 1982: 21), a 'sacred blue' planet (Sagan 1995: 156). Floating in the infinite wilderness of black space without visible national borders, the Blue Earth appears as a perfect image of sacred domesticity, intertwined with contemporary origin fantasies of wild and unspoiled nature. NASA's Blue Planet photo presents us with a modern version of the story of the Garden of Eden, mingled with a radically updated narrative of the 'sacred home' of nineteenth century Romantic evangelism, which depicted it as

When two dolphins are positioned leaping in front of the Blue Planet, using the S-shape of their bodies to transform it into a yin/yang symbol of wholeness, the original, paradisic harmony becomes even more conspicuous. Since the 1960s, dolphins have occupied the cultural imaginary² as bearers of alternative values such as collectivity, compassion, friendliness, creativity, joyful sexuality, androgyny, spiritual wisdom and intuitive intelligence. With their huge brains and legendary helpfulness towards humans, the enigmatic sea mammals have been cast by popular culture as well as by scientific discourse as our extraterrestrial doppelgänger. Like another double, the 'noble savage' of early modernity, the dolphin and the whale will allegedly guide us to insight into the 'true and sacred' pleasures of a simple life in harmony with the natural environment.
Taken at its innocent face-value, the picture reflects the nostalgic imaginary of postindustrial culture, longing for an alternative world where the wounds inflicted by the destructive logic of present-day social relations between humans, technoscience and nature are healed; a world in which humans no longer seek to profit from the technoscientific control and domestication of nature; and where instead we may use the two dolphins as role models and abandon ourselves to nature and its cosmic rhythms; a world in which a primordial mother-child dyad between human and nature, between micro- and macrocosmos has been restored as a stable reference for our lives.
However, the pastoral idyll of the holy Earth Mother, the noble dolphin savage, and a primordial world without technology is not the only story conveyed by McCulloch's picture. An important excess of meanings surfaces when we include what film theory calls a space-off perspective -- that is, when we ask questions about the invisible framing of the picture, the apparatus behind its production, the visualization technologies, the construction of the spectator's position. If we take into account the space-off position, a complex set of intersections emerges that reveals a world quite different from the primordial one that first catches the eye. Seen from the oblique angle of the space-off perspective, the picture becomes pervaded by meanings that link it to high-tech science and the epistemologies of the modern scientific world view.
First of all, space flight technology and advanced photographic techniques are, of course, a sine qua non for 'Earth Dolphins'. Although NASA, following Hollywood rather than postmodern film making, has done its best to keep the high-tech enterprise needed to position photographer and camera in outer space away from the Blue Planet photo, this is an unavoidable part of its apparatus of production. And when we come to McCulloch's recycling of the NASA photo, computer amalgamation techniques also play a vital role in its creation.
Secondly, the lofty panopticon view of Earth, created by space flight, is definitely not an innocent one. This was emphasized in an insightful analysis of the NASA photo by Garb (Diamond and Orenstein 1990: 264-278), and in somewhat different ways by Bordo (Berry and Wernick 1992: 165-178) and Haraway (1992). The spectator position invited by NASA's Blue Planet picture demonstrates perfectly the vantage point of the scientific world view in general, and positivist epistemology in particular: the dissociated gaze, which can command and keep everything under control. The hidden camera-eye, looking at Earth from far away, is obviously placed in the most favourable position for playing the 'god-trick' of modern science (Haraway 1991: 189). The 'God's eye view' (Diamond and Orenstein 1990: 264) of the camera lens sustains the illusion that it is possible to act from an allegedly omniscient and omnipotent epistemological position.
A study of the space-off of the NASA photo also offers an appropriate illustration of the thesis formulated by Heidegger, on the modern creation of the world as picture. According to him, 'the conquest of the world as picture' (Heidegger 1979: 13), as representation, which the subject can stand back and perceive in its totality, is a specifically modern phenomenon. The total condensation of the world into one visual representation constitutes, the German philosopher argues, nothing less than the founding act of modern epistemology. It is the act through which the modern subject 'fights for the position in which he can be that existent which sets the standard for all existence and forms the directive for it' (Heidegger 1979: 13). The synonymy of the totalizing, the dominating and the phallogocentric gaze could hardly be articulated in a clearer way.
Seen from the dissociated extraterrestrial position of the camera's eye, representing humans who have left the 'cradle' ³ of Earth's gravitational field, the innocent idyll of McCulloch's picture becomes thoroughly disturbed. The space-off perspective transforms Earth into a small, and apparently easily manageable, visual object, which can be taken in at one glance -- or contained within the circumference of the thumb, as Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell (a member of the first crew to orbit the Moon) evocatively describes his most amazing experience in space⁴. Simultaneously with the transformation of Earth, the meanings of the two dolphins also begin to change. If their background, Earth, appears as the dominated object of a distant, totalizing gaze, it may well be that we are hoodwinking ourselves when we insist on seeing nothing but wild and free dolphins as referents of the picture. Instead, it seems appropriate to include the staged performances of captive dolphins -- kept for show or research -- in our network of references. Following this line of interpretation, we may acknowledge that the picture's presentation of Earth Mother, noble savage dolphin and wild, 'untouched' nature matches the trinity Woman-Native-Nature that we find in colonialist and patriarchal discourses of early modernity.
Thus it obviously makes an important difference whether we include the space-off perspective in our reading of the picture or not. By alternately including and excluding it, we can switch between an innocent picture of the holy Earth Mother, with her happily leaping animal-human offspring, and a non-innocent view of Nature performing as domesticated object, seen through the distant gaze of an enterprising human manager enacting the god-trick of modern scientific epistemology. McCulloch's picture is in this way comparable to those puzzle pictures where immediate observation shows us, for example, a tree, while closer scrutiny discloses a human face: 'now you see it, now you don't'. As puzzle picture, 'Earth Dolphins' presents us with a significant narrative of deeply ambivalent trends in high-tech culture. It tells the story of a simultaneous cannibalizing and resacralizing of 'Wild Nature', which we consider typical of postindustrial culture, constructing it now as resource for technoscientific, military or commercial projects and now as a site for the inscription of nostalgic desires for a sacred, motherly Eden.
By suggesting a reading of 'Earth Dolphins' as puzzle picture, full of changing meanings and patterns of ambivalence, we wish to avoid one-dimensional interpretations. It would, of course, be naive just to take the picture at its innocent and idyllic face-value. But it would be just as reductive to read it exclusively as yet another homage to the technoscientific conquest of Nature and a celebration of the omniscient and omnipotent subject of positivist epistemology.
Garb is well aware of the excess meanings that still remain after the second kind of reading. Having interpreted NASA's Blue Planet picture as 'magnum opus of patriarchal consciousness' (Diamond and Orenstein 1990: 275), he does wonder why the Whole Earth image, despite the very problematic spectator position, has attracted 'peace activists, environmentalists, and proponents of a new Earth-based spirituality' (Diamond and Orenstein 1990: 275). How can the picture appeal to many of those who rebel against, rather than celebrate, the dissociated and objectifying gaze of the knower of modern science?
We shall suggest an answer by taking our interpretation of 'Earth Dolphins' as a multi-layered puzzle picture one step further, displaying an array of ambivalences present in contemporary culture. We have mentioned some of the contradictions between the immediate message of the picture and its space-off perspective. However, it should be acknowledged that the latter itself is affected by puzzles and ambivalences. To reduce the position of the camera-eye exclusively to the totalizing, objectifying and god-like gaze of the omniscient and omnipotent subject of science is in a sense to confirm the epistemological illusions of positivism. It would be more appropriate to displace them along lines suggested by Heidegger, who tells us how the shadow of 'the incalculable' (Heidegger 1979: 14) intrudes on the quantifying processes that are activated in order to define the world as picture. Moreover, a matching act of displacement can be initiated by reference to social constructivist critiques of modern scientific epistemologies. When pointing out that the technoscientific gaze in total control of its object is an imaginary construction, a conjuring trick (cf. Haraway's term 'god-trick'), these critiques also emphasize that the controlling eye may indeed produce uncontrolled, unintended and subjective side effects and excess meanings.
We therefore suggest that spaceman's 'God's eye' position, which NASA's Blue Planet photo has made vicariously accessible to billions of people, is fraught with ambivalences. As noted by Garb, it represents an instrumentalizing act of technoscientific visualization that reduces Nature to manageable object. Clearly, however, the NASA camera is doing more than just repeating the classic act of mechanistic science and its reduction of nature to material resource for capitalist cannibalism. A high-tech resacralization process seems involved as well, which inscribes Wild Nature in quite different kinds of cannibalistic images than those of industrial society and classic mechanistic science. With the help of highly sophisticated visualization technologies, Nature is being reinterpreted and transformed from object of material consumption to virtual-reality object of worship, awe and aesthetic-spiritual consumption. The multi-billion dollar photo of the Blue Planet, born out of advanced technological apparati, undoubtedly performs as such a virtual-reality icon, displaying the Sublime Beauty of Sacred Nature and Sacred Mother, welcoming her cyborg-sons back to their 'natural' home after their dangerous voyage in the extraterrestrial wilderness of (cyber)space. In all its technicolour beauty, the NASA photo aligns itself with the current plethora of highly aesthetisized photos of endangered species and wilderness areas. Like them, it is circulated as a sacred icon of a mythical Garden of Eden, a lost origin, which, like the flesh and blood of Jesus, may reappear endlessly, transubstantiated through the 'miraculous' intervention of the virtual reality of high-tech images -- through a politics of simulation that pretends to be a politics of 'true' representation.⁵
When McCulloch adds the two dolphins to the Blue Planet photo, these cyber-sacral dimensions of the puzzle picture become even more distinct than on the original NASA image. The two dolphins, leaping in beautiful synchrony in the Cosmic cyber-ocean, without any trace of the real-life sea from which they were originally jumping when the camera shot them, set off the virtual-reality character of the picture. These literally dislocated dolphins, circling like spaceships around the Blue Planet, make it plain that they inhabit a virtual world without any real-life referents. Furthermore, they effectively draw our attention to the links between the original NASA photo and the numerous techno-images of Wild Nature in general, and dolphin or whale pictures in particular. They emphasize its connection with this plethora of images, which, like the NASA picture itself, have had enormous commercial success. These images seem to appeal to strong contemporary desires to worship and sacralize icons which claim to convey the double message that a 'truly' transcendent, Sublime and Sacred Nature exists, and that a happy and carefree high-tech future is on its way.

     As vehicle for this kind of wishful thinking, 'Earth Dolphins' inscribes itself in the new religious utopianism, which since the 1960s has invoked in varying forms the coming of a new era of human history, simply called 'the New Age' or named along the lines of the ancient astrological calendar as the 'Age of Aquarius'. It is an age that is expected to call forward a higher human consciousness, which, sustained by feelings of global oneness and empathic communication across the borders of space and time, will bring salvation and heal the spiritual relations between human beings, technoscience and Earth Mother.

From 'Earth Dolphins' to this Book...
As multi-layered puzzle picture, 'Earth dolphins' causes the spectator to waver between nostalgic longings for an original bliss, the triumphant gaze of the distant technoscientist and conqueror, and awe-struck worship of new cyber-sacral miracles of transubstantiation. In so doing, it both re-enacts and displaces classic colonialist and patriarchal self-other images. It is a high-tech reconfiguration of early modern constructions of the trinity of others: Woman-Native-Nature. Not a mere repetition. There are continuities at play, but also transformation and excess meanings.
The colonial quest for an elsewhere in the European Renaissance and early modernity gave rise to constructions of the wild and the savage with the trinity Woman, Native and Nature as central icons. They were cast as wild others: good or evil, challenging or threatening, inherently inferior and lacking, but also capable of producing sublime experiences in the observer. Their opposite emerged as Universal Man, the 'civilized', enlightened self. In contrast to Woman, Native and Nature, he was supposed to carry the 'white man's burden'.
One of these 'burdens' was that the projects and endeavours of the white man seemed to link up in an ambivalent picture. The overall project could be unambiguously defined: to civilize and modernize the world, and to pursue freedom and happiness by seeking control and mastery over wild others through technoscience, and colonial and capitalist power. An intrinsic goal lay, moreover, in secularization: the liberation of knowledge-seeking and political institutions from the obscure twilight zones of occultism and superstition, identified, for example, with the 'childish' and 'irrational' attitudes of Woman and Native. However, the fact that civilization, secularization and Enlightenment reason obviously failed in any simple or unambiguous way to bring about the utopian goal of paradise on earth, engendered cultural ambivalences and contrasting trends. Rebuking the civilized world for having alienated itself from the true and sacred pleasures of the natural life, embodied by the trinity of others, became itself an integral part of early modern philosophy.
Our book is a feminist cultural study of contemporary transformations or re-enactments of these classic constructions of ambivalent self-other images. We shall focus on the entangled stories of space flight, New Age spirituality and dolphin mythology, which are all evoked by McCulloch's picture. We will read them as significant post World War II narratives of quests for a wild elsewhere. With this perspective, we will analyze how they reproduce or displace the classic colonialist, patriarchal and 'naturist'⁶ oppositions between 'civilized' selves and 'wild' others, as well as Enlightenment constructions of occult and spiritual thought systems as the reverse of 'masculine' ratio.

Notes

1. Quoted in Dawson (1994: 65).

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2. 'The imaginary' is a concept originating in Lacanian psychoanalysis; here it refers to the self-images of the child in its mirror stage (6-18 months of age). In a broader sense, the concept is used within cultural studies to characterize the fantasy images in which a culture mirrors itself, and which thereby come to act as points of reference for its identity-production.

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3. With genealogies in a quote from the writings of the Russian 'father' of modern space flight, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, American as well as Russian space flight discourses often depict man's future in space with the metaphor 'out of the cradle', cf. e.g. the title of a popular US book on this theme Out of the Cradle. Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth (Hartmann et. al. 1984). Cf. also our Chapter Four.

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4. Cf. Jim Lovell's comments on the NASA tape that was played during the sight-seeing tours on the premises of Kennedy Space Center in 1998.

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5. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which a politics of simulation can be used critically to go beyond a politics of representation instead of uncritically simulating it, see the analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian trilogy in Markley (1997).

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6. The term 'naturism' was coined by ecofeminists in analogy to sexism and racism (Warren 1990: 132-133). It refers to abusive and violent treatment of non-human nature.

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The first inspiration for this book grew out of an alien encounter. In 1987 we participated in the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, which took place in Dublin. The congress was attended by well over a thousand Women's Studies researchers from all over the world. They discussed their work in about 250 different workshops on topics covering a broad spectrum from 'Feminization of poverty in a global perspective' to 'Experiences of women on test tube baby programmes'; from 'War and patriarchy' to 'Goddesses and feminist spirituality'.
The alien encounter took place in a workshop on 'New technologies as a challenge to women's work roles'. One of the papers was given by a high-ranking NASA employee, JoAnn Morgan, who had taken on the amazing mission 'to inform the community of international women about one aspect of the depth and variety of responsibility women have in the United States civilian space program' (Cullen et al. 1987: 433). The congress had attracted a diversity of women in terms of different disciplines, approaches, and cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, the majority of participants shared political commitments, inspired by feminist and left-wing orientations, and in this context Morgan appeared to be alien and politically out of touch. Nobody was inclined to celebrate the statistics on which her paper was based, nobody seemed impressed by her figures that showed a small increase in women's participation in academic work at NASA's Kennedy Space Center from only a few to around nine percent. Her presentation was questioned from quite different angles than the liberal affirmative action politics for which it argued. Her undisguised and proud promotion of American nationalist goals created a great deal of hostility in the audience. Feminist peace activists asked inquisitorially about NASA's concealed involvement with the military. African feminists, engaged in programmes for poor rural women, angrily pointed out that the billions of dollars spent on man's space adventures should have been transferred to initiatives that sought to counter the feminization of poverty, especially in Third World countries. All in all, the workshop session was transformed into a veritable confrontation between liberal and left-wing feminism.
In itself, this confrontation did not stir our imaginations. Having been committed ourselves to left-wing feminist activism for many years, we were thoroughly familiar with the differences between the two sides. This was not new. But what did catch our attention was the extra-ordinary and amazing topic of the discussion. Should feminists embrace or repudiate space flight -- not as a theme in science fiction, but as a real-life issue? Although we had worked within the field of feminist cultural studies of technology for several years at that time, it had never occurred to us that space flight might be a feminist issue. Peace feminists had for some time, of course, been bringing a critical focus to bear on war technologies, including rockets and missiles, which obviously played important roles in the development of space flight technologies, and vice versa. But space exploration in general appeared to be a totally 'dark continent' in the otherwise extremely diverse and multi-faceted landscape of feminist concerns.
The heated debate on space flight was evoked, like a bolt from the blue, by JoAnn Morgan's unlikely presence in this left-wing and radical feminist setting. While listening, it suddenly struck us as somewhat conspicuous that the otherwise mistrustful and vigilant feminist cultural critics had turned a deaf ear to what was happening in this highly political and sociotechnically powerful field. The more we considered the forceful historical marks left on post World War II culture by the space race between the USA and the Soviet Union, and also its technological consequences, the more we asked ourselves why a critical feminist gaze was lacking in this field. The same questions raised themselves when we looked at Morgan's statistics which, contrary to what she had been trying to argue, showed space flight to be, not the next step in women's liberation, but rather an extreme residuum of the unfolding of classic, national-romantic and phallocentric myths of masculine superheroes.
Besides wondering about the conspicuous lack of critical feminist eyes in the no-woman's land of space flight, a different train of thoughts and feelings caught our imagination as well. We had to admit that we were attracted by the adventure tale that performed as a hidden layer in Morgan's very matter-of-fact and down-to-earth presentation. The extra-ordinary point of reference for the speech made by this nice, white North-American middle class woman was the amazing and fascinating story of real-life travel to distant and alien worlds. Our childhood fascinations with Jules Verne's novels of thrilling voyages to exotic places beyond the dull, mundane world of everyday life and with Tarzan's adventures amongst the apes in jungles far away from the conventions of European upper-class life were re-awakened. Morgan had actually spent most of her adult life sending people and human-made things into 'the unknown', the vast world beyond the limits of Earth's gravitational field. She appeared alien not only because her patent nationalism and her liberal feminism clashed with the left-wing and radical feminist audience. She also carried a touch of a much more thrilling kind of alienness -- that of the world beyond. Seen in retrospect, this was obviously one of the reasons why her appearance in Dublin remained intriguing to us and prompted us to write to her three years later when we were due to visit the USA for another interdisciplinary world congress on women. This time, Morgan did not attend, but she kindly invited us to visit her at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This visit became the actual starting point of this book. It was impressive in two respects.
     On the one hand, we felt much more amazed and awe-struck than we had expected. Everything smelled of adventure. We interviewed people for whom preparations for the cosmic exodus of mankind was not science fiction, but the way they earned their living. On the sightseeing tour for special guests, we were allowed to touch the tiles of the space shuttle Discovery and inhale the cathedral-like atmosphere of the building, which during the days of the Apollo project had been used to assemble the gigantic Saturn V rocket -- the one that launched the moonships. Although we do not normally consider ourselves to be gadget-fetishistic techno-freaks, we were, nevertheless, caught by the spirit of adventure.
     On the other hand, the visit confirmed us strongly in the belief that the story of space flight is not only amazing and fascinating, but also very much in need of critical inquiries. The more so as the military's reliance on space grew in the 1990s in both the old spacefaring nations, the USA and Russia. A recent analysis of the space politics of the two nations notes that 'U.S. Department of Defense space spending exceeded NASA's budget every year from 1982 to 1995' and points to the remarkable integration of space in the military operations in the Persian Gulf War (Von Bencke 1997: 190). Moreover, Reagan's Star Wars project has not been buried, only redesigned (Newsweek, 22 February 1999). And Russia, whose government is unable regularly to pay salaries to coal miners, teachers and medical doctors, not to mention old-age pensioners, has managed not only to 'maintain its military space constellations at Cold War levels', but actually to improve and expand certain aspects (Von Bencke 1997: 190-191). So, whether seen through the lens of post World War II high politics and post Cold War military strategies or from the perspective of the adventure story, it is a tale in need of feminist deconstructions and critique far beyond the limits of Morgan's liberal affirmative action politics.

To Rewrite the Master Narratives of Space Flight
In her book NASA/TREK, Constance Penley (1997) rewrites the NASA story from the point of view of feminist cultural studies. She provokes sceptical European readers like us by declaring herself a fan of NASA, and surprises us by cleverly emphasizing the critical potentials of the reading strategies of fans. In her opinion, critical fans transgress the impasse of standpoint criticisms and Enlightenment critiques of ideology. In particular, she underlines the subversive potential of the many female slash-writers¹, who for years have been rewriting the Star Trek series as a pornographic and utopian romance of male homosexual love. Her intention is to view the NASA story from the oblique angle of the Star Trek adventures, which in their turn she rereads from the consciously improper and inappropriate perspective of the slash writers. NASA's high-flown rhetoric of masculine superheroes, national symbols of the USA, is by contiguity associated with the slash fans' lustful constructions of a homosexual love affair between Star Trek's Kirk and Spock. In this way, Penley builds herself a platform for a critical discussion of NASA's extremely repressive attitude towards the taboo subject of sexuality, and also of 'its inability to manage the meanings of women in space' (Penley 1997: 3).
Like Penley, we want to engage in a cultural critique without excluding our fascination with the space adventure. We also feel a feminist urge to rewrite the master narratives of space flight in a Bakhtinian way, i.e., to subvert their national-romantic and phallocentric rhetoric via reading strategies that put improper and carnivalesque contiguities on display.
Our book is, however, different from Penley's. First of all, we are too sceptic to write as critical fans and, unlike her, we did not grow up in the neighbourhood of the Kennedy Space Center launch site. We are, on the contrary, offspring of a small North European nation that constructs its national identity around an unheroic, pragmatic, down-to-earth attitude that makes the high-flown, national-romantic NASA rhetoric sound very alien and pompous in our ears. Rather than writing as fans, we write as implicated, but sceptical strangers since, due to the cultural hegemony of the USA in the post World War II period, we are both a part of American culture and also outside it. But although we do not share the enthusiasm of American NASA-fans, we bluntly admit that the adventurous quest stirred our imagination.
Secondly, our focus is not only on the USA. We have expanded our perspective to include Soviet Russian versions of the master narrative of space flight. We take into consideration the space race and the competition between the political superpowers over global hegemony, both of which have left their historical marks on the master narrative of space flight. The early space race was, amongst other things, a discursive battle over entitlement to represent Universal Man in the biggest story told in modern times. Who was going to be the script writer and the protagonist of the master narrative of mankind's cosmic exodus? This was and is a question that matters a great deal when the official story of space flight is retold in the two countries. The Russian Yuri Gagarin is inscribed in world history as the unmarked representative of universal man by being 'the first man in space'. In return, the authors of the American version of the master narrative have had to construct a marked category; John Glenn is celebrated as 'the first American in orbit'. To appropriate the prestigious unmarked position is, of course, not only a matter of linguistics, but a serious question of national pride. By drawing on both American and Russian materials, we can follow such constructions with a cross-cultural perspective.
Thirdly, we share Penley's desire to subvert by putting improper contiguities on display, but we link the space narrative with other kinds of mock images, carnivalesque representations and inappropriate others. In our story, the spaceship icon of the heroic master narrative of the American and Russian space adventure will be confronted with the horoscope and the dolphin, two popular contemporary icons which, like the spaceship, have significant genealogical roots in the 1960s. Invoking the eagerly-awaited New Age as the Age of Aquarius, countercultural movements of the time initiated a revival of astrology and other ancient occult practices. Also coinciding with the space race, the scientific discovery of the 'intelligence' and outstanding communicative skills of dolphins made its first and much debated headlines around 1960. In this way, our three icons touch one another in terms of historical emergence on the cultural scene of post World War II society, while the stories they generate put strange and inappropriate interference patterns and reversals on display.
     We stumbled upon the dolphin icon as a mock image of spaceman and his alter ego, cosmic high-tech aliens, because in a literal sense it interfered with the space narrative and the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the early 1960s. The horoscope icon came forward as the other improper mirror, because, to our rationalistic and matter-of-fact minds, it appeared to match the space narrative in weirdness, while reversing the way gender was discursively invested in the story.

Inappropriate Contiguities: The Spaceship, the Horoscope and the Dolphin
Our Prelude presented a first description of some inappropriate contiguities between Space Age and New Age narratives. In the analysis of McCulloch's picture, we pointed out how New Age stories of unity with a 'pure', 'authentic' nature clashed with the master narrative of technoscientific power and control in the shaping of the ultimate story of the world as picture and manageable object. What came to the fore, seemed to be a mixture of attraction and repulsion, embrace and collision. We will define this as inappropriate contiguity, while drawing inspiration from the notion of 'the carnivalesque' of the Russian cultural historian Mikhail Bakhtin (1984).²
'Earth Dolphins' negotiates the proximity between two opposing kinds of discourses that the adoption of NASA's Blue Planet photo by New Agers, deep ecologists, etc. has engendered. The picture bonds together stories of a mystical unity with 'nature', Earth Mother Gaia³ and her dolphin-human offspring, and narratives of the controlling gaze of the distant scientist-engineer. But the discursive bonding is clearly not based on mere harmonious attraction. Indirectly, the picture also reveals the repulsion which such a misalliance is bound to evoke. In order to mediate between the discourses on unity and detachment, of merging and control, of mystery and technoscientific rationality, the picture has to repress and police the surfacing of certain obvious links. Thus the technological apparati of production: the spaceship, the camera of the astronaut-photographer, etc., were kept away from the eyes of the spectator. To sustain the illusion of unity, merging and sacred mystery, the emblems of detachment, control and rationality had to be hidden and repressed, relegated to the invisible space-off. To show the contiguity openly would be inappropriate and make the picture ambiguous.
The specific mixture of attraction and repulsion, which apparently ensures the New Age career of NASA's Blue Planet photos (with or without dolphins) as spiritual symbol of holism and healing, is, however, not the only way of working out the complex relationship between the Space Age and New Age narratives. A kind of reversed version of the repressions of the Whole Earth image seems also to be operative. When we shift the focus to the national romantic American and Russian narratives of the spaceship and the rocket as vehicles of the heroic 'conquest of space', we see a high-tech aesthetics and a gadget-fetishism brought into full play which show how the 'technological sublime' (Nye 1994) is celebrated intensively in both countries. The USA and Russia have both sustained their space narratives by celebrations of the powerful hardware and the super-brave steel men who made the 'conquest' possible. This has been done through innumerable pictures, videos, books, exhibitions, official events (parades etc.), which run counter to the conspicuous erasure of any trace of technology from the surface of the Whole Earth image, but which at the same time maintain their own set of repressions. Whereas the Blue Planet picture keeps the question of technology, power and control out of sight, it is precisely these issues that the fiercely nationalistic American and Russian demonstrations of spaceships, rockets, launch-pads, astro- and cosmonaut equipment, mission control centres etc. put on display. Conspicuously absent from these gadget-fetishistic representations is, in return, any shadow of the incalculable and any trace of the uncontrollable, even though these are an inescapable part of any story of interactions between human and nature. Both the USA and Russia like to demonstrate their technopower and indulge in narratives of technological infallibility and the highest potency of human power, control, cool detachment and rationality. In its own way, the traumatic shock evoked by the Challenger catastrophe in 1986 shows how forceful and persistent the myth of infallible technopower and complete human control is. The disaster clashed too discordantly with the narrative of total calculability and controllability to which NASA had contributed heavily, underplaying risks and safety problems when promoting the 'teacher in space program' which the 'ordinary school teacher' astronaut, Christa McAuliffe should have conducted on board the space shuttle.
     We will explore the attractions and repulsions between Space Age and New Age discourses through analyses of a range of stories clustering around our three icons: the spaceship, the horoscope and the dolphin. After a contextualization of our epistemological position and theoretical approaches (Chapter One), we present the patterns of similarities and differences, oppositions and reversals, binding together the three icons (Chapter Two). In the following chapters (Three to Eight), we analyze them further one by one. The concluding Chapter Nine returns to the general question: whether or not this contemporary configuration of stories reinvents and recirculates the classic trinity of others, Woman-Native-Nature, in new versions. Through a brief analysis of three subversive novels, Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra (1996/1992), Jeanette Winterson's Boating for Beginners (1990) and Vonda McIntyre's Superluminal (1983), we also summarize the acts of de-stabilization and de-naturalization at which the book has aimed.
The spaceship icon, which is the focus of Chapters Three and Four, will serve as a signifier of the gadget-fetishistic dream of unbounded power and control that is articulated by the American and Russian space narratives. We unravel some of the stories in the spectacular quest for an extraterrestrial elsewhere, for a place never before visited by earthlings. We discuss how the spacecraft refers to a web of myth, politics, reinvention of nature and technoscientific desires to domesticate as yet untamed wilderness areas, and how intermingling stories of steel men and heavenly powers sustain the illusion that the god-trick of modern science, the vanquishing of incalculable and uncontrollable coincidences, is possible.
As part of the discussion, we look at the consequences of the cultural historic semantics that lends significance to the spaceship icon as a vehicle designed to bring humans to the sphere that, for centuries, has been associated with the divine realm of the white Christian Fathergod. In addition, we analyze how space exploration, in both an American and a Russian context, invokes a discursive field in which classic, national-romantic myths of the masculine hero seem able to survive in immaculate form. True to tradition, this hero is totally dedicated to performing sacred deeds for the benefit of the nation and all mankind (Dawson 1994). Just a brief glimpse of the tough, serene and determined faces of the astronauts in Hollywood's blockbusting film from 1995 about the Apollo 13 disaster (Apollo 13) is enough to convince that the myth of the Man made of the 'right stuff' (Wolfe 1988) has not yet become extinct. In his screen incarnation, he appears to be as absorbed as ever in the effort to carry out his national-heroic duties. He may be threatened by Fate -- the film plays on the ominous number 13 -- but the will of the genius Godfather of technoscientific controllability and calculability, the modern Cyber-Apollo, is definitely on the side of our heroes. Therefore, they survive the near-fatal attacks of the hostile wilderness 'out there'.
In order to analyze the reverse side of the inappropriate contiguities between Space Age and New Age discourses, to which recyclings of the Blue Planet picture as Earth Mother, Gaia, call attention, Chapters Five and Six zoom in on New Age astrology. In contrast to the high-tech gadget-fetishism, which sticks to the spaceship, the horoscope icon mediates the same kind of nostalgic longings for holism, healing, home-coming, which have also been projected onto the Whole Earth image. New Age astrology reinvents ancient, occult symbols of spiritual and bodily unity between micro- and macrocosmos, human and universe, and promises salvation through a 'pure' and sacred bond to Cosmic Nature.
Other popular New Age revivals of ancient forms of occultism: tarot, I Ching, channelling etc., might just as well have sustained our discussion. But we chose the horoscope, because it provides a particularly good match for the spaceship in its explicit reference to cosmic themes. In addition, the horoscope has a special iconographic value since the upcoming astrological Age of Aquarius has served as a powerful explanatory metaphor for the fundamental shift of mentalities that the New Age is supposed to bring about. A third reason for taking the horoscope as our direction finder is that astrology, more than other kinds of New Age occultism, makes visible an obsession with calculability and predictability that matches the technoscientific rationality of space flight as a mock-image. Like modern science, the practice of astrology is based on complex computations and calculations that, at the same time, are inscribed in a totally 'unscientific' context of intuitive feelings and a mystic interconnectedness between human and cosmos.
We will interpret New Age astrology as a paradoxical counter-image to the spaceship. As an icon of the Space Age, the spacecraft embodies modern scientific epistemology and the will to technoscientific power, knowledge and control. In significant contrast to this, the horoscope icon of New Age astrology signifies a will to give up the cult of ratio, command and control and instead to accept the guidance of occult messages created by the rhythmic movements of Earth and cosmos, which, nevertheless, has to be decoded by means of a 'quasi-scientific' grammar of calculable astronomical constellations.
As a kind of reversal of each other, the spaceship and the horroscope can illustrate a lability that may be characteristic of high-tech societies. For many people, the semantics of cosmos seem able to change as easily as a puzzle picture, now displaying a 'frontier to be conquered' by technoscientific power and reason, and now a screen full of occult messages of holism and healing. Such lability may be an expression of widespread present-day oscillations between belief in the explanatory frameworks of science and a bricolage of alternative world views (Eastern mysticism, ancient occultism, etc.). The latter seems to be evoked in order to explain existential excess meanings, for which science, obsessed with total rational control, command and calculability, cannot account.
When exploring the inappropriate contiguities between the master narratives of Space Age and New Age, we will also consider how gender reversals is at stake. The configuration of the spaceship and the horoscope thus refers to a certain division of labour by gender. On the one hand, the victorious mission of the spacecraft is discursively linked with the sacred image of the masculine national hero, whose voyage shall bring us closer to the omnipotent cyber-godfather. On the other hand, both popular New Age and spiritual feminist stories of astrology and horoscope casting evoke the feminine; they tell of salvation via (re)constructions of ancient world-views, based on the celebration of a mother-child symbiosis of macro- and microcosmos. This may remind us once more of the lability of the present-day disourses on cosmology, gendering the universe now masculine, now feminine.
While the configuration of spaceship and horoscope will give us the opportunity to highlight patterns of repulsion, opposition and reversal, our third icon, the dolphin, is by contrast fitted to stress the contiguity and proximity of Space Age and New Age discourses. Chapters Seven and Eight present a wide spectrum of cetacean stories that unfolds an extreme polysemy. Included are both dolphin and whale narratives, for, in spite of some differences in life style and iconography⁴, there are so many parallels between contemporary constructions of these two marine mammals that we use them interchangeably. As generic term we prefer the evocative word 'dolphin' instead of the, strictly speaking, more precise 'cetacean'. It will be evident from the context whether we refer to dolphins or to whales.
As a multi-layered image, the dolphin can link up with the opposing themes evoked by the other two icons in our configuration. Adapted to be one with their oceanic element as well as to perform as 'mind in the waters' (McIntyre 1974) and 'intellectuals of the sea' (Belkovich, Kleinenberg, Yablokov 1965 and 1967), dolphins leap smoothly into the role of boundary figures. With the same effortless ease, they relate to narratives of a wet and symbiotic, motherly past and a future enlightened by consciousness, communication and brain-activity, to New Age spirituality and to the master narrative of space flight, to ancient beliefs and to high-tech science, to a feminization and to a masculinization of the universe. Therefore, they can also perform in the carnivalesque role of the jester and the mock-hero, who expose the improper proximity and deconstruct the opposing spheres of meaning of the other two icons. In this way, they function analogously to the 'undecidable' signifier 'Woman', which Jacques Derrida (1979 and 1987) promoted as the perfect expression of différance, the unending chain of displacements characteristic of signifying processes.
One part of the dolphin stories allows the enigmatic marine mammals to perform as noble savage in a pastoral, pre-technological environment, or as spiritual messenger from an other-worldly site, endowed with similar alternative, feminine values to those evoked by New Age astrology. But the flexible animal can equally well take up a role as emblem of high-tech communication. We encounter them, for instance, in computer and telecom ads, signifying global communication, speed, nomadism and a carefree future in cyberspace; in the 1960s they even popped up as stand-ins for the cosmic cyber-godfather. The second part of the paradoxical post World War II dolphin script thus connected this animal icon with space flight and its new science project: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the vast cosmic ocean. All of a sudden, these sea creatures jumped smilingly out of the blue as stand-ins for the citizens of the cosmic super-civilizations that possessed techno-godfatherly wisdom, and with whom it was believed the Space Age would bring us into contact.

Cosmos and Ocean: the Extraterrestrial 'Commons'
Besides the inappropriate contiguities displayed in the patterns of repulsion and attraction between the spaceship, the horoscope and the dolphin, another shared, but much more streamlined, framework of meanings links the three icons. In different ways, they all refer to twentieth century stories of two rather special kinds of wilderness areas: the cosmos, and the world beneath the ocean surface. This joint framework of reference is analyzed in Chapter Seven, which marks the transition between the chapters on the cosmos (Three to Six) and the dolphin (Eight); the latter features the animal icon leaping energetically up and down between the cosmic and the oceanic world.
There are several reasons for choosing to study the role of the cosmos and the ocean in the search for answers to the question we posed in the Prelude, as to how the classic trinity: Woman/Native/Nature is re-enacted or displaced in present-day quests for a wild elsewhere.
One reason is the difference of both spaces from the current terrestrial abodes of 'civilized selves' that makes them a perfect match for contemporary desires for a 'truly' wild and vast elsewhere. For they present us with images of alien sites that today are very difficult to conjure up on the dry land of Earth. Domesticated land and cities have extended their space at an ever-accelerating pace throughout the last few centuries. The remaining wilderness areas on Earth's continents have been more or less transformed into the opposite of wilderness, being now predominantly well-ordered nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries with paths, picnic areas and tagged animals, or else vast eroded and polluted wastelands. However, this terraforming⁵ or domestication process has so far only begun to touch upon the cosmos and the ocean. Underwater national parks have indeed emerged; industrial fishing, off-shore oil drilling, sewage discharges etc. are placing increasing pressure on marine environments, and the pollution of orbital space is beginning to create problems. But, unlike the continental areas of Earth, the cosmos and the ocean can still represent vast spaces, different and distinct from the domesticated environments of everyday life in postindustrial societies.
As vast wilderness spaces, the cosmos and the extraterrestrial world beneath the ocean surface constitute a joint frame of reference for our three icons. A shared semantics can be found in the fact that the images these extraterrestrial spaces evoke have obvious points of resemblance to one another.
One resemblance is that outer space and the oceans are both regarded as 'global commons', to use the official language of the United Nations (UN). This concept was espoused by the organization in the early 1970s, and applied to outer space, the oceans and Antarctica in a later, much debated report from the UN's World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland 1987). In an ambivalent act of revitalizing and transforming the classic discussion of the 'tragedy of the commons' that occurred in seventeenth century England, the 'global commons' of today are depicted as reservoirs of rich resources waiting for a human manager. Guided by a rather ill-concealed wish to exploit these resources, the Brundtland Report refers suggestively to 'managing the commons' (1987: 261). At the same time distancing itself from the worst excesses of capitalist greed, the report constructs the 'development' of the global commons as a 'common', international project. In this way Brundtland indirectly claims to promote a different attitude from the one that governed the classic transformation of the English commons into private property.
A further affinity concerns the way in which the two spaces, the cosmos and the ocean, are cast as settings for human experience of the unbounded, vast and natural sublime. Both represent borders between 'human civilization' and 'wild nature' that cannot easily be transgressed. In this sense, they resemble the terrestrial landscapes that two hundred years ago sustained the creation of classic theories of sublimity in nature (Burke 1990). However, unlike those once-powerful terrestrial wilderness sites, both the cosmos and the ocean depths, so-called 'inner space'⁶, can still perform as vast and sublime areas beyond human control. Both continue to be apparently unfathomable and therefore terrifying and awe-inspiring in a classic sense. The 'insurmountable' mountains, 'impenetrable' forests and deserts of early modernity have long since been 'conquered', as have the 'dark' continents and 'virgin lands' of the classic colonialist period. But outer and inner space are still unchanged in embodying powerful natural barriers to human enterprise.
Consequently, in the USA, outer space is often referred to as 'the high frontier'. The expression echoes the conquest of the American West, but it also signals the enormous obstacles confronting anybody who attempts to travel even a short distance beyond the atmosphere of Earth. The dark side of the Moon is still the most exotic place humans have ever visited. Compared to the nearest star, the Moon is, however, very close to home.
Just as the imaginary world maps of contemporary culture are marked by a 'high frontier', so they are also demarcated by a 'deep frontier', an expression used by marine explorers. It is true that electronic listening devices, scuba diving technology and bathyscaphes (deep sea exploration vessels) have changed our relations to the world beneath the ocean surface. However, like the cosmos, this world still remains a wilderness outside of human control. Indeed, many more humans have been to the Moon than to the deepest part of the ocean. 33 astronauts took part in the American Apollo project, of whom twelve set foot on the Moon; so far only two human beings have descended the 37,800 feet down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960).
As our 'high' and 'deep' frontiers, the two extraterrestrial commons fit perfectly into the role of objects to satisfy the desire for vast and sublime wilderness areas. Challenging and awe-inspiring, they fill our mindscape with new imaginary sites, whose significance we will attempt to decode with the spaceship, the horoscope and the dolphin icons as prism.

To Cannibalize and Worship the Wild: in Early Modernity and Today
Last, but not least, we shall emphasize the joint frame of reference of our three icons that lies in their shared relationship with the concept of wilderness in both its cultural historical and current meanings.
We consider the classic dichotomy between 'civilized' masculine selves and the trinity of 'wild' others to be an invention of so-called civilized society. Just as madness, according to Foucault (1989), emerged forcefully in the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, so are the topos, the wilderness, and the tropes, such as 'wild' and 'savage', used to characterize features of a site and its inhabitants, constructed by the 'civilized' self. Madness became an important object of cultural interest when the modern subject began to define itself as governed by the light of reason. Likewise, the wild and the savage caught the attention of white Europeans of the Renaissance and early modernity as they began to engage in the technoscientific and colonial enterprise aimed at the control of nature and the opening up of a globally unrestrained access to raw materials and slave labour. The wild and the savage were the human and non-human others who inhabited the wildernesses beyond the frontiers of civilization.
A high priority of the early modern age was to 'civilize', i.e. tame, domesticate, control and enslave the 'wild' other in order to transform her/him/it into a docile object and a resource for the greedy colonizer and the enterprising frontiersman. But, as earlier suggested, the civilized self of the Enlightenment and Romanticism sometimes characterized the wilderness in other ways as well, defining the wild other as noble savage or sublime nature, both of which might guide a civilization gone astray back to 'authentic' values. The powerful resonances of Rousseau's philosophy and the call for a 'return to nature' may be seen as the early beginnings of a modern sacralization process and a wilderness cult (Nash 1982), in which the securely-positioned civilized self could indulge.
Thus, from the beginning, modern constructions of a civilized self versus a wild other were criss-crossed by intersecting approaches, and linked together in a pattern of ambivalence. We will discuss what has happened to these ambivalences, and explore the thesis that the simultaneous act of cannibalizing and worshipping the wild, which shaped early modern patterns of ambivalence, is being replayed today. Powerful new versions of deeply ambivalent and contradictory self-other images are surfacing. They appear in discourses on the extraterrestrial commons in general, and in stories of our three icons in particular.
At the end of the twentieth century, the colonial quest for new territories on the continents of Earth, which in early modernity engendered the problems of civilized selves versus wild others, has in a way become obsolete. The goal of 'modern man', limitless growth and unrestrained cannibalizing of terrestrial territories, has proved itself to be dangerous to our survival on Earth. Nevertheless, it seems difficult for ease-loving citizens of the postmodern world to deconstruct this particular part of modern utopianism. The deceased utopias of European and American modernity, and the languishing belief in their 'civilizing' techno-political world-mission, persevere, as it were posthumously, in lending legitimacy to cannibalistic acts and new quests for resource-abundant areas of wilderness. This is one of the important factors behind the interest in the extraterrestrial commons, and partly why they caught the imaginations of post World War II politicians and technoscientists. The resources and riches of outer space and the ocean depths, it is argued, might compensate for the lost terrestrial ones.
At the same time, however, a deep fascination with the wild and a desire to worship it are sweeping millennium minds. The more rapidly our 'civilized' ways of living devour the wild, the more we middle-class people of postindustrial cultures become obsessed with a radical nostalgia for healing the broken bonds between human and wild nature. Vanishing terrestrial wildernesses are reinvented in the shape of 'wilderness parks', or reconstructed as 'virtual reality' images, and new extraterrestrial ones, the cosmos and the ocean, brought into focus. We suggest that an important driving force behind this trend is the longing for a spiritual and metaphysical guarantee of the continued existence of a 'truly' wild and wise beyond-ness. This may also be one of the reasons why astrology and other kinds of ancient beliefs in cosmic messengers experience a renaissance in secularized countries. And explain why selected and ennobled icons of the wild, such as the enigmatically brainy and helpful dolphins, have been turned into cult figures and inscribed in new religious mythologies. There seems to be a strong desire today to merge with the presumed wise and wild extraterrestrial other, be it an astrological constellation of the Zodiac, perhaps conveying messages from the goddess of fate, or a Sibylline marine mammal.

Amazing Stories
Scattered between the chapters are five amazing stories. Some of them we took part in ourselves, others simply sent a current of high voltage amazement through our bodies as we stumbled upon them in various texts. The stories act as prisms for the discussions of the spaceship, the horoscope and the dolphin in the regular chapters. But aside from brief comments, we retell the amazing stories in medias res, leaving it largely to the reader to trace links and draw conclusions about the connections. In this way we hope that others may spontaneously tune in on the amazement we felt ourselves, and which we consider a vital element of analyses. As we will show in Chapter Two, we favour a balancing act between critical distance and amazement. Hence cultural critique and cultural amazement are both cues to a reading of this book.

Notes

1. 'Slash' refers to fiction writing of fan-cultures who rewrite popular television series, inventing homo-erotic relationships, most often male/male, between the characters. Specifically, the term refers to the use of a grammatical 'slash' to signify the relationship, for example Kirk/Spock from the Star Trek series, which is a very popular with slash writers. Women produce most of the slash writings.

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2. According to Bakhtin, the carnival in the Middle Ages was a forum for celebration of inappropriate and improper contiguities between the official ideologies of Church and King and the 'inferior' world of ordinary people -- that is, between 'high' and 'low'. The jester, who ridicules the King, and the Testament of the Ass (a popular text in the Middle Ages) that makes fun of the Holy Scripture are examples of how 'the carnivalesque' works on the basis of contiguities which are both inappropriate and improper when seen from the perspective of the official ideology. The role of the jester plays on a pattern of contiguity or attraction: he acts as if he were the King, but in doing so he produces mock-images of the royal performance. Since everybody knows that the jester is not the King, the contiguity or attraction is countered by a pattern of difference and repulsion. The laughter, evoked by the jester, is based on the interference of the two patterns.

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3. The theory of Earth as Gaia, i.e. as one organism, which has become a popular part of New Age thought, was developed by the British scientist Jim Lovelock (1987). His first inspiration for the theory came during his work for NASA in the 1960s. It had two important sources: his engagement in the search for life on Mars and the idea of looking at Earth from outside (the Blue Planet picture). His own story and the popularity of his Gaia-hypothesis illustrate the intertwinement between the Space Age and New Age stories from another angle than McCulloch's picture.

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4. Dolphins can be classified as small whales. Since dolphins are much more easily studied -- and captured -- than the large whales, they were the first to enter the oceanaria and laboratories, and to draw public attention to the species (cf. Chapter Eight). The main iconic difference lies in the serene distance and majestic monstrosity of the whales as opposed to the lively dolphins that often live closer to land.

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5. The concept 'terraforming', to which we return in Chapter Four, is frequently used in futuristic space flight discourses. Normally, it describes the processes by which other celestial bodies may be made habitable with Earth, Terra, as the model. Cf. also Fogg (1995: 9).

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6. The expression 'inner space' was deliberately coined in the USA in the late 1950s in order to reinforce the parallel between deep sea exploration and space flight; cf. the expectations that 'the rush into outer space will be matched by an international invasion of inner space' (Piccard and Dietz 1961: 182-183); see also Science (1960: 1592) on oceanography as 'the exploration of "inner space"'. For a more recent example, cf. Earle (1995: 13).

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