At the start of a new calendar year, the Department of History at Queen’s University is excited to welcome Dr. Dagomar Degroot to deliver the latest John M. Sherwood Lecture in History of Science and Technology, “Cosmic Contamination: The Cold War Quest to Protect Earth from Extraterrestrial Microbes.” With his talk, Dr. Degroot seeks to return us to a time in the 1960s when prominent scientists and NASA officials alike feared that astronauts coming back from the Moon might trigger a cataclysmic event by unleashing thousands of “lunar microorganisms” into the Earth’s biosphere. Ahead of his highly anticipated lecture, Dr. Degroot sat down with Queen’s History to answer a few questions about his research, his chosen topic, and how sometimes leaving Earth allows us to better understand the largest threats we face today.
First off, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and answer a few questions about your research and this really exciting topic. I was wondering if you might begin by just telling me a little bit about how one comes to work on what you call “an environmental history of outer space”?
I’ve been interested in outer space for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I think my first career ambition was to be an astronomer and I actually bought myself a small telescope using the very modest inheritance I received when my grandmother passed away. I have memories of being out in the countryside where I grew up and looking up at the stars and planets, imagining being very far away from the little town in which I lived at the time.
But I didn’t like math enough to get into the sciences and it wasn’t until I was doing my Master’s in History that I discovered something like environmental history existed. So I decided then to do a doctorate on climate history, which I sort of thought I was inventing as a field (turned out not to be the case), and while I was working on that dissertation, I began to think about what my next project might look like.
A big thing for me was that I did not want to pigeon-hole myself as being just a “climate historian” or a “historian of climate change.” For better or worse, I wanted to strike off in a very different direction. This was, in fact, one of the things I liked most about environmental history: that you could do so many different things with it. And I wanted to try and do something completely new.
My work on climate change had taught me that what happens on Earth is not just about Earth—the sun’s variable influence, for example, has a lot to do with pre-industrial climate changes—and therefore, I’d already started to think about Earth as being part of a bigger universe. From there, I began to ask myself, “Could we write an environmental history of the solar system?”
I also thought about this because I like to write histories about what I consider to be the most important issues of the present and the future, and to me, humanity’s expansion into outer space seems to be accelerating once again. We seem to be on the cusp of a second Space Age and I think that’s going to be one of the most important stories of the coming century; one which I want to be able to speak intelligently about.
So anyway, I told some friends about this project idea and they laughed at me; told me it was ridiculous. But I also started to become aware of scholars whose work was moving in this direction—people like Lisa Ruth Rand, Lisa Messeri, and Valerie Olson—who were starting to think about environments as extending beyond Earth.
My first book got done and I pitched a book about an environmental history of the solar system, about how what I call “environmental changes” on other worlds have influenced our history. I pitched it as a trade press book and a number of publishers jumped at it. Now it’s done and hopefully, it will be published this year.
That’s so interesting! Can I ask you to expand—without giving too much away, of course—about the “lunar microorganisms” you mention in the lecture’s abstract? Are we talking about some sort of flesh-eating bacteria like the kind you’d see in a sci-fi horror film?
Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re talking about! This is actually drawing from part of the chapter in my book about the Moon, and it’s a strange part of the chapter. It’s about what was perceived at the time to be a real possibility: that microbial life could cling to existence on the Moon.
The Moon, I should say, was very poorly understood prior to the 1960s and we had no way of disproving the idea that some sort of sheltered environment existed on it which would permit the existence of carbon-based life. It wasn’t known whether that life might have evolved or adapted to a much more arid, extreme environment as the Moon cooled and lost its atmosphere. People like Carl Sagan, for instance, speculated that microbial life could well have survived just under the lunar surface.
So by the time that NASA started planning its Apollo missions, it seemed plausible that indigenous, microbial life could exist on the Moon. Now if it did, that had all sorts of other implications, because astronauts—by bringing back samples, by bringing back themselves—could introduce that life to Earth. Sagan and others therefore speculated that microbes that had just barely been clinging to existence could suddenly explode in a much more benign environment and comprise the biosphere or maybe even start a pandemic here because people would have no immunity to the Moon’s bacteria.
So, the federal government in the United States actually set in motion plans to protect the Earth from what was called “back contamination,” and this involved a whole quarantine protocol beginning on the Moon. How they cleaned themselves, how the ventilated their spacecraft, how they stored their samples, how they were picked up upon return to Earth: all of these things were to be part of this protocol. When they returned, for example, they were to be shunted into a quarantine facility already on the aircraft carrier that picked them up and then transported to a special complex—8,000 square feet, really unprecedented—that was designed to protect the Earth from the astronauts and the samples they brought back. This whole thing was a very elaborate protocol that consumed a lot of money and involved the work of hundreds of thousands of people.
Ultimately, the argument that I’m going to make is that this was an early attempt at confronting, at dealing with, what as far as people knew was an existential risk and that this attempt would have failed had that risk actually been real, had those microbes actually existed. And so I’m trying to think about what can we learn from that failure which might allow us to better confront our own seemingly real existential risks today.
Can I ask you, then, about how you understand your work to be engaged in bridging of “the sciences” and “the humanities”? Are there ways in which these sorts of labels which have traditionally separated these two disciplines are breaking down as a lot of historical research is now becoming more and more “interdisciplinary”?
Of course, in some ways it’s true that the work that I do doesn’t fit neatly into a sort of “history” mould. I work with scientists to publish scientific papers in scientific journals. I write environmental history that seeks to figure out the interactions between the human world and the non-human world—or universe, I would argue—and that requires me to use the so-called “archives of nature” in the form of scientific data. And then increasingly, I also write the history of science.
Similarly, I work with policy makers and policy advisors to glean lessons from the past that can be used to inform more effective policies around issues of climate adaptation and existential risk mitigation. I do a lot of work, for example, with the United Nations Development Programme, and I recognize that some of these things would not come naturally to most historians. As such, it may seem perhaps a little weird calling me a historian.
At the same time, I think, there is something distinct that historians do: we work with historical sources—texts, in particular—and we are trained to analyse those texts and to allow them to come into conversation with other kinds of sources in ways that scholars in other disciplines may not. In that sense, I am a historian.
And to me, it’s important to cling to that identity. Instead of being a bad scientist, I am able to be a good historian and work as a part of interdisciplinary teams where the distinct perspectives, methods, and questions of every person contribute to a bigger whole. I guess, then, I still think of myself as a historian, although I will admit I’m definitely an atypical one. I care a lot about the past and gaining an understanding of why things changed over time, but I try to develop my projects to reflect the fact that I likewise care a lot about the present and the future. I would like to contribute to us addressing what I consider to be some of the biggest threats that we face in the twenty-first century, and acknowledging that to be the motivation for my work makes me a little different from many—though not all—historians.
Turning with that in mind to our present moment, I want to finish by asking how you see our own, regrettable familiarity with things like an existential threat posed by an invisible virus or poorly enforced quarantine protocols as informing the story you’ll be telling on Thursday.
It shapes it quite a bit! To be honest, the book from which I’m drawing my material for this talk ended up being about existential risk to a much greater extent than I thought it would be. I found that these cosmic changes and the ideas around them illuminated threats to human wellbeing and potential that were never before imagined. I go over things like solar storms, the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Mars, asteroid and comet impacts, and nuclear winters in the book; all things that seemed to offer new perspectives on our future as a species. And in exploring these ideas, the work sort of took on a life of its own and became something very unexpected.
Now, with regard to the talk that I’m going to give and the paper it’s based on, it was just random chance. I was in NASA Headquarters going through folders on the Moon and I just happened across these folders on “Lunar-Receiving Laboratory.” I had actually taught about the Apollo Program before, but I never really spent any time thinking about the biological dimensions of the program, so this was all very new to me. And I started to realize that there was this whole other story about “back contamination” that hadn’t really been told before. That was just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which of course got me thinking even more about the relevance of this sort of strange story and it motivated me to get something out there, not just in the book but in a separate article.
The resulting piece ended up being about risk and risk analysis, and it was really interesting because there were no “bad guys” in the story. Of course—and maybe this is obvious—historians don’t really think about “bad guys” often, but you can argue that this was an example in which an existential risk has been mismanaged and at the same time it made perfect sense not to take it seriously and to focus on risks that seemed more likely, even if they were potentially less catastrophic. And so it really is an analysis of how some risks end up being prioritized over others, and whether it made sense or not was up to each individual to decide.
In the same way, there are lots of existential risks we face today. You mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s no shortage: nuclear war, artificial intelligence, runaway climate change. And questions arise again and again of how we will assess those risks and what policy responses they merit; we’re always making trade-offs, right? A good example might be supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression. We’re running a small risk—but a real risk—of nuclear war in doing so, but we’re doing it to protect an international order in which countries don’t just annex parts of other countries in a piecemeal fashion.
So, it really is a story with pretty broad relevance for the present in many different dimensions and that is why the book I’m writing now—the one after the environmental history of the solar system—dives into this question of existential risk management to an even greater extent and explores what our recent history in handling these threats has to tell us about things like AI, preventing the next pandemic, or whatever else we might face in the coming century.
Please join us for the 2024 John M. Sherwood Lecture this Thursday, January 18th, at the University Club at Queen's, beginning at 5:30 pm. A reception with light refreshments will follow.
Look out for Dr. Degroot's forthcoming book, Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Humanity's Place in the Solar System, expected sometime in 2024 through Harvard University Press and Viking. If you'd like to read more on existential risk management and back contamination, be sure to see the recently published article mentioned in the latter stages of this interview: "One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Moon Microbes? Interpretations of Risk and the Limits of Quarantine in NASA's Apollo Program," Isis 114, no. 2 (2023): 272-298.
(Interview edited for clarity and concision)
