Once upon a time, the sky was everything above the earth, which lay at the center of human experience. The sky was the place of gods. Storms were demonstrations of their powers, and birds their airborne messengers. To attempt to fly, Icarus-like, too high, was a sign of hubris. Vast as it was, the sky remained in some sense “closed,” forbidden to us, unknown and probably unknowable.
The language that had been used before the space age to describe the relationship of humankind and the sky was, to put it in simple terms, pre-Copernican. The English word “sky” originates from the Old Norse “ský,” meaning cloud. The cloud populates, as it were, or provides relief within the space of the air or atmosphere. Individual clouds may appear to extend horizontally or vertically when seen from the earth, but when seen from outer space, they form a shifting, almost unfathomably complex system orbiting and encasing the earth.
The advent of popular air travel did not alter this perception so much as standardize it around the globe. Airplanes could go only so high and could stay in the air for only so long. Additionally, airplanes traveled along fixed routes. By 1919 these routes had been coined “skyways.” They were, and to some extent, remain, extensions of the land, spoken of in the same way as shipping routes. Indeed, much of the literature also describes space as a “frontier” to be crossed, tamed and ultimately conquered in the way that the land and the seas had once been.
For reasons that are not exactly clear, the thinking around this concept of sky shifted at midcentury. The culprit most often cited is the proliferation of unmanned satellites. Filling the sky with all those orbiting gadgets therefore not only has turned the earth upon its axis multiple times and surrounded it with multiple smaller spheres but has also broken it down into almost innumerably detectable quadrants. We now know in precise visual terms that the small blue dot on which we live exists in a vast universe, and some of us continue to refine a particular consciousness of the earth — and human civilization — as existing on an interconnected, interdependent and fragile sphere.