The Clouds in Their Heavens

by Cal Meacham

The way we represent and picture the world in our minds and in our art seems to be a perfect copy of the physical world. We assume that our depictions would be easily identifiable not only by people in our culture, but by people from other cultures.

In fact, we seem to think that nonhumans could recognize such drawings, as well. Countless stories depict humans communicating with aliens using pictures, or leaving pictorial records for aliens in the future to read. Even outside of science fiction this is the case: the plate attached to the Voyager space probe holds drawings of a man, a woman, the solar system, and the Voyager itself.

No doubt the ancient Egyptians felt the same way, yet their flat, twisted-perspective drawings look extremely unnatural to us. Objects farther away are depicted above nearby objects, though we would draw them as partially obscured. Objects are shown flat-on in front or side aspects, with no use of three-quarter views or vanishing points. The sizes of people correlate not with relative distance, but with relative social importance.

Similarly, the art of Early Medieval Europe, or of Persia in the same period, or of China, would have seemed the very mirror of reality to the artists and their patrons, yet it seems stilted and stylized to us.

Surely that’s no longer the case, though, is it? Since the discovery of the laws of perspective, people have been making illustrations that mimic photography in the way they capture reality, haven’t they?

Not really. We carry our cultural baggage with us, and are blissfully unaware of it until it’s highlighted in some way, often by some circumstance that gives us a new perspective. In particular, the artificiality of our conceptions shines through when we are not simply reproducing a scene before our eyes, but imagining something we can’t look at directly.

For example, consider the depiction of underwater life. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, artists used to show the creatures arrayed on shore, out of the water. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century that depictions showed the creatures in their natural habitat, underwater — in fact, the way they would if viewed through the side of an aquarium tank. Gould credits the rise of public and private aquariums, also in the mid 19th century, for this new, more natural view of underwater life.

A similar revolution in depicting a commonly imagined scene happened much more recently, and was just as dramatic. In fact, when I mentioned it on the Straight Dope Message Board, at least one responder could not believe that depictions such as the one I described existed. But not only did they exist — they were the norm.

I’m referring to the Earth as seen from space. Today the image is a familiar one, with the earth wrapped in an obscuring blanket of white clouds, and the familiar features of the globe visible only through breaks in the clouds. This, however, was not the common image of the world even as recently as my childhood.

The earliest pictures of the spherical world from space show a pristine, cloudless Earth, with all continents depicted as on a globe. The earliest example I know of — although there must certainly be older ones — is near the end of Jules Verne’s 1877 interplanetary novel Hector Servadac (released in the US as the two volume set To the Sun? and Off on a Comet, and often known only by the latter title). One illustration depicts the unwilling space travelers contemplating the Earth, with Europe prominent and cloudless before them. (The 1960s Classics Illustrated adaptation, on one of its two covers, depicts a similarly cloudless Earth.)

Winsor McKay’s 1921 cartoon The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House calls attention to the accuracy of its depiction of the world from space through a title card — but it’s clearly tongue-in-cheek, since the depiction is blatantly distorted. Nevertheless, it does give an animated view of the earth rotating, while the moon orbits around it. The Earth is totally without cloud, and the continents are pretty distorted, although recognizable.

The Universal logo has always featured either the Earth or a globe — it’s not always clear which — and it has always been completely cloudless (although from the late 1950s until the 1980s it was adorned with a Van Allen radiation belt type cloud). The 1936 science fiction film The Invisible Ray from that studio has an interesting sequence that is supposed to be a view of a meteor falling to Earth, seen from a vantage point in space. The Earth is as cloudless as the company logo.

Not long after, the Superman cartoons didn’t give you a good look at the Earth, but the planet Krypton appears during the opening sequence briefly, before exploding as the rocket bearing little Kal-el “streaks through star-studded space” to Earth. Krypton itself has imaginary continents and oceans — and no clouds. (As an added unscientific feature, many of those stars studding space are seen to twinkle, an effect of the Earth’s atmosphere that isn’t visible in space.) Science fiction magazines of the period aren’t much better — the Earth as seen from space is a clean, cloudless globe with easily recognizable continents.

At this point, an additional folly — the one that inspired this essay — comes in: clouds in space. The earliest example of it I have seen is in the introduction to the movie Casablanca (1942), where the camera pans in to a globe of the world. It’s very clearly meant to be a globe, rather than the actual Earth, because the boundaries between the countries are clearly shown, and the names of the countries are present. But there’s something else — the globe is surrounded by fluffy white clouds, and rests on a bed of them. There was no need for this: the globe could have been shown “in limbo,” supported by nothing, any supports hidden by dark shading and shadow. The use of clouds was a conscious choice.

Less than a decade later, the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still also showed a cloudless Earth, but this time there’s something else. The title sequence starts with photographic views of galaxies and deep space, the camera slowly closing in on each in turn. But superimposed over each are ghostly clouds, as if there are clouds in space. The clouds become clearly visible when we are approaching the Earth.

An even worse example appeared in one of my first school textbooks from the early 1960s. It showed the Earth in a vast cloud bank in space, looking much as the moon would in the sky on a moderately cloudy night.

Why are there no clouds on the Earth in these examples? And why, when artists finally do introduce clouds, do they show them as space-filling clouds extending far beyond the Earth, as if unaffected by gravity? Real clouds ought to form a thin layer adhering closely to the Earth.

The pre-Space-Age illustrators undoubtedly wanted their audience knew to be sure what they were looking at, so the unobstructed view of the Earth was a natural choice. In addition, most of those illustrators themselves probably neither knew nor cared about the proper depictions of clouds. (There may well have been some who did know, or who extrapolated the correct depiction, but they were few in number.)

The depictions started to change when experience began to show more and more people what the Earth must really look like. High altitude aircraft and early rocket-borne cameras showed a defined upper layer to the clouds. This is even depicted in the opening montage of The Day the Earth Stood Still — one of the last photos in the montage is a high altitude shot looking down on clouds, and they are clearly limited in their height. So why did the rest of the montage show space clouds?

In this case, I think it’s a matter of suggestion and artistic shorthand trumping accuracy. Clouds are shown over the galaxies and in space over the Earth because clouds are “up there” in the sky. For the same reason, cartoonists have been known to draw fish in water-filled objects, not because one would expect to find fish there, but because they wanted to demonstrate (wordlessly) that the item is filled with water. A more familiar example is the shiny ball (such as a Christmas tree ornament) that reflects a cross-barred window from its surface — if you didn’t include that reflected window, how would the audience know it was shiny, or a ball?

About the same time, realistic depictions of the Earth, clouds and all, started to appear. The 1950 movie Destination Moon, with its script co-written by Robert Heinlein, and its art direction by famed science fiction and space artist Chesley Bonestell, had the first accurate depiction (that I’m aware of) of the Earth from space, with Earth’s oceans and continents obscured by a surface-hugging layer of irregular clouds. I’ll bet most of he audience didn’t even notice. The 1956 movie Forbidden Planet showed the surface of Altair IV similarly obscured.

Not everyone was with the program. The lavish This Island Earth (1955) still showed a cloudless Earth. So did Project Moonbase (1953), despite the involvement of Heinlein, and both Conquest of Space (1955) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961).

But more accurate times were coming; science fiction art had caught up to reality. John Schoenherr’s October 1962 Analog cover showed proper clouds on the Earth. The TV series Star Trek usually had cloud-covered planets (although for the episode “Miri,” when they wanted the audience to know that the planet was a parallel of Earth, it was noticeably clear, so viewers could see the continents.) And Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) showed a photographically accurate cloud-covered Earth.

By this time, satellite photos of the Earth were so common that they appeared on the local news, as part of the weather report. (The entire point of such photos was to show cloud locations, after all.) But I suspect that nothing had as big an impact as a photograph taken on December 24, 1968 by astronaut William A. Anders aboard the Apollo 8 mission as it rounded the moon. Against the lunar surface, he caught a shot of the green-blue Earth covered in whitish clouds. The image came to be called “Earthrise,” and it was widely reproduced, becoming a famous and popular poster. The “Christmas Eve” mission was itself a popular event, and a moving one. The astronauts read from the book of Genesis as they passed over the moon, and the tape was played and replayed. From the vantage point of a quarter of a million miles, the Earth looked small and fragile, and Genesis seemed an appropriate commentary. Environmentalists took up that image as a symbol of the Earth’s fragility (“Love Your Mother” was printed on some of those posters).

After that, there was no way that anyone could show a cloudless Earth and hope to be taken seriously. After 1968, the cloud-enshrouded Earth became the norm. A new standard image replaced the old one, ushered in not by reason and extrapolation, but by proxy experience.