Dr Sian Proctor brings Earthlight back to Earth
What do Leonardo da Vinci and Poet-Astronaut Dr Sian Proctor share in common besides science and art? 600 years apart, they both independently discovered the phenomena of Earthlight.
When Inspiration4 crew mates chose the callsign “Leo” for mission pilot Dr Sian Proctor during their training together, it was aowing to their consideration of her as a Renaissance woman. With her expertise in science, tech, engineering, arts, and mathematics, their crew mate matter-of-factly was the embodiment of a modern day Leonardo da Vinci.
It is then perhaps to the credit of her crew mate’s perceptiveness and intuition that upon the Inspiration4 crew’s 2021 mission to space — as the first commercial astronaut crew of private astronauts — and their 3-day orbit together around the Earth, Dr Proctor and da Vinci would uniquely share an experience that would connect the two polymaths across time and space.
da Vinci’s “Ashen Light” of Earthshine
In 1510, Leonard da Vinci published the Codex Leicester. Over 700 years later, the Codex Leicester remains the only of da Vinci’s extant notebooks, in total numbering approximately 50, that is in public hands: Bill Gates won it at auction in 1994 for over $30 million dollars.
Inside the Codex Leicester is found the start of the connection between da Vinci and Dr Proctor. It is da Vinci’s realization that light from the sun reflects off of the Earth and creates Earthlight.
In true validation of his definitive stature as a Renaissance man, da Vinci’s realization predates German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s proving it by one hundred years.
Today we call the “ashen light” of light reflected from the earth to the moon and back to us again here on Earth “earthshine” (or planetshine).
Choosing a Poet
In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, and film by the same name, when astronaut-scientist Dr Eleanor Arroway finds herself in the midst of traveling incomprehensible distances across a boundless universe, the experience of the journey becomes so profound and so moving that at one point the character loses her capacity to describe what she is experiencing. “Some celestial event. No — no words — no words to describe it,” Sagan writes as Dr Arroway, “Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…I had no idea. I had no idea.”
In an epic representation of life imitating art, it was specifically Dr Sian Proctor’s being a poet and and an artist that got the scientist and Maricopa Community Colleges professor selected for her mission pilot seat aboard the Inspiration4 three-day mission to space.
Part of the Inspiration4 application process required “virality” on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. For her candidate video statement, Dr Proctor included her poem, “My Space2Inspire”. And in just three days, her tweeted candidate video garnered nearly 100k views.
And she was indeed selected. Training began immediately for Dr Proctor, and fellow selectees Hayley Arceneaux and Chris Sembroski, led by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, the Inspiration4 mission commander and sponsor–as documented in the Netflix series, “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space”.
It was in the training leading up the flight, her fellow crew mates unanimously chose and decreed Dr Proctor’s call-sign name in honor of her own nature being a parallel of Leonardo da Vinci:
“Leo”
Dr Proctor’s Earthlight
In addition to both being the first all-civilian astronaut mission to space and flying further from Earth than any human spaceship since the Hubble Telescope repair missions in 1993, Inspiration4 had yet another important distinction.
As the Inspiration4 mission would not be rendezvousing with the International Space Station, SpaceX replaced the docking mechanism of the Crew Dragon spacecraft with an extraordinary feature: A human-rated transparent dome, the largest single-piece window ever flown to space.
In fact, the SpaceX Cupola is the largest single-piece window on a spacecraft.
It was this cupola that allowed the crew to have a nearly-full torso exposure to the marvel of space and to behold the Earth from space from within the sanctity and security of their own spaceship. It was a singular viewing experience that in 2024 remains unique to every astronaut who has ever been to space.
It was this experience that would enable Dr Sian Proctor to see and take in the light that reflected from the Earth into the Inspiration4’s Crew Dragon spaceship–as a scientist, poet, and human being in space.
“I first noticed something interesting when we opened the forward hatch to reveal the cupola for the first time,” say Dr Proctor. “I was video taping my crew members, just to capture that moment. And as Chris [Sembroski] pulled back the forward hatch, I was video taping Hayley [Arceneaux] and Jerad [Isaacman], and I just noticed this amazing amount of light flooded into our capsule. It was later on, when I was up in the cupola, when I was able to make the connection,” she explains, “‘The solar panels are designed to be facing the sun, and the cupola facing away from the sun and towards the earth. Wow, I am being bathed in Earthlight!’”
And just as Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci took in the reflected light of the Earth reflecting back to Earth from the surface of the moon–stimulating both his sense of aesthetics and his vaunted appreciation for scientific processes–and realized for the first time Earthshine, now, with the phenomena of sunlight reflecting back to space from Earth and bathing her and her crewmates stirring those same sensibilities and mind in New Renaissance poet, artist, and scientist Dr Sian Proctor, the poet-astronaut realized a brand new understanding of Earthlight.
Fully extended into the remarkable cupola of the spaceship she piloted, Dr Proctor embraced the awe of the experience with her mind and the wonder of it with her artist’s soul. It was at that moment the realization dawned upon her. The Overview Effect was not only the experience of seeing the Earth from space, the Earthlight that bathed astronauts as they beheld our world from orbit was the catalyst of the experience!
Having done extensive training prior to being selected for Inspiration4, Dr Sian Proctor was not only aware of the nearly-mythical Overview Effect, the experience of awe and connection that was unique to nearly all astronauts who had had the opportunity to see and take in the totality of the Earth from orbit, she was friends and peers with the person who had identified it in the first place, researcher and author Frank White.
Dr Proctor had been prepared and waiting for this canonical astronaut experience. Meditatively stationed above the Earth from the vantage of her majestic Cupola window, witness now to both the totality of the planet Earth in space and the noticeably physical nature of exposure to Earthlight, a deeper insight presented itself to the astronaut-scientist-artist.
The reflected light of the sun pouring over her as a shower of terrestrially-imbued photons, Dr Proctor understood that the Overview Effect as an experience was contingent on more than simply bearing witness to our entire world from space. The Earthlight itself was what was creating the unique connection with our home and our origins. The perspective was that she took in was that on Earth, Earthlight was literally the medium we as creatures lived and operated “within”. Only from space, separated from yet bearing witness to Earthlight, could we gain the perspective of it being as essential and unconsciously natural to who we are as beings as is the water and air we rely on so consciously.
It was the perspective of noticing Earthlight from beyond it, beholding rather than being in it, that we gained separation enough to experience the awe, wonder, and holistic connection of the Overview Effect. The Overview Effect was realizing that Earthlight is to human beings what water is to fish and soil is to plants. The Overview Effect was simply the perspective gained about who and how we are generated by being outside — but not removed — from the humanly vital wonder of Earthlight.
And in that spectacular moment a circuit completed uniting Leonardo da Vinci and Dr Sian “Leo” Proctor, as epiphany transcended centuries and the two Renaissance figures independently realized the scope of our human existence is beyond grasp but not measure.
Indeed, the Earth is a warm and shiny spaceship of phenomenon and life, and along with the sustaining air and giving water, there is the phenomenal and translucent medium that fulfills our definition of what it means to be home.
It is Earthlight.
Earthlight
I thought the moonlight was my guiding light
Until that day when my soul shimmered
Eyes wide and dilated with realization
For there I was being bathed in Earthlight
Tasered by the pulsating Earth glow
My weeping ego quivers
Spellbound in awe at the Cosmic Chaos
Perched against the death
A clear beacon of hope and longing
Etched by complex molecules and spiraling DNA
Golden strands of energy cascading outward
Encapsulating hopes and dreams
Existence and affirmation
–
The baby’s blanket ripped away
I howl at the sensation
Lovestruck in suspension
My mind struggles to comprehend
So much meta transcending time and space
Who will hear the cries of the generations
AfroGaia simmers under the weight of memories
I hold court among the stars and I testify to the cosmos
All our hopes set adrift
Let us be set free in a sea of forgiveness for what we have not seen
If only we could all be baptized by Earthlight
–Dr Sian Proctor
