Thecultural perspective onEarth, or theworld, varies bysociety andtime period.[1]Religious beliefs often include acreation belief as well aspersonification in the form of adeity. Theexploration of the world has modified many of the perceptions of the planet, resulting in aviewpoint of a globally integratedecosystem. Unlike the remainder of the planets in theSolar System, mankind did not perceive the Earth as a planet until thesixteenth century.[2]
Unlike the other planets in the Solar System, in English, Earth does not directly share a name with an ancient Roman deity.[3] The nameEarth derives from the eighth centuryAnglo-Saxon worderda, which means ground or soil, and ultimately descends fromProto-Germanic*erþō. From this it hascognates throughout the Germanic languages, including withJörð, the name of thegiantess of Norse myth. Earth was first used as the name of the sphere of the Earth in the early fifteenth century.[4] The planet's name in Latin, used academically and scientifically in the West during theRenaissance, is the same as that ofTerra Mater, the Roman goddess, which translates to English asMother Earth.
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The standardastronomical symbol of the Earth consists of a cross circumscribed by a circle. This symbol is known as the wheel cross, sun cross, Odin's cross or Woden's cross. Although it has been used in various cultures for different purposes, it came to represent the compass points, Earth and the land. Another version of the symbol is a cross on top of a circle; a stylizedglobus cruciger that was also used as an early astronomical symbol for the planet Earth.[5]
Earth has often been personified as adeity, in particular agoddess. In many cultures themother goddess is also portrayed as afertility deity. To theAztecs, Earth was calledTonantzin—"our mother"; to theIncas, Earth was calledPachamama—"mother earth". The Chinese Earth goddessHou Tu[6] is similar toGaia, the Greek goddess personifying the Earth.Bhumi Devi is the goddess of Earth inHinduism,[7] influenced byGraha. TheTuluva people ofTulunadu in Southern India celebrate a Three Day "Earth Day" calledKeddaso. This festival comes in usually on 10th,12th,13 February every Calendar year. InNorse mythology, the Earth giantessJörð was the mother ofThor and the daughter ofAnnar.[8]Ancient Egyptian mythology is different from that of other cultures because Earth (Geb) is male and the sky (Nut) is female.[9]
Creation myths in manyreligions recall a story involving the creation of the world by a supernaturaldeity or deities. A variety of religious groups, often associated withfundamentalist branches ofProtestantism[10] orIslam,[11] assert that theirinterpretations of the accounts of creation insacred texts areliteral truth and should be considered alongside or replace conventional scientific accounts of the formation of the Earth and the origin and development of life.[12] Such assertions are opposed by thescientific community[13][14] as well as other religious groups.[15][16][17] A prominent example is thecreation–evolution controversy.
Tiāmat is a sea monster known as the monster of monsters. She is killed and her body is cut in half in order to createheaven andEarth. The upper part of Tiāmat is used to create heaven with her belly as the separation line. The lower part of her body was used to create Earth, but the way that specific body parts were used to create other things is not described.[18]
Odin and his two brothers killed the frost-giantYmir and took his body with them. From Ymir's body Odin and his brothers created the Earth. As Ymir's blood drained from his body, Odin created oceans and lakes, from his teeth they formed broken bits of rocks and placed them on mountains, from his bones they made boulders, his skull fashioned the sky and respectively his brain formed clouds. After Odin's creation of Earth he sent four dwarves down to each corner of the Earth one beingAustri meaning east, another calledVestri meaning west, another namedNordri meaning north, and the final one namedSudri meaning south. This is where directions came from. Odin and his brothers then set out to make the first people. Odin and his brothers gathered wood from the seashore and created the first people, Ask being the man and Embla being the woman. Light and dark was the final step that Odin had to create. He took Night who is the daughter of a giant that is dark in color. Odin gave Night a chariot pulled by a horse calledHrimfaxi. He instructed Night to ride around the Earth and with her she brought darkness, from her horse's saliva dew was created. He then took Day, the son of Night andDelling of theAEsir, who was bright and attractive and gave him a chariot pulled by a horse namedSkinfaxi. He instructed Day to ride around the Earth and with him he brought light and from his horse's mane streamed light.[19]
In the myth of the godTlaltecuhtli, her dismembered body was the basis for the world in the Aztec creation story of the fifth and final cosmos.[20] Before thefifth sun was created, the "earth monster" dwelled in the ocean after the fourthGreat Flood. The godsQuetzalcoatl andTezcatlipoca descended from the heavens in the form of serpents and found the monstrous Tlaltecuhtli. The two gods decided that the fifth cosmos could not prosper with such a horrible creature roaming the world, and so they set out to destroy her. After a long struggle, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl managed to rip her body in two — from the upper half came the sky, and from the lower came the Earth. The other gods were angered to hear of Tlaltecuhtli's treatment and decreed that the various parts of her dismembered body would become the features of the new world. Her skin became grasses and small flowers, her hair the trees and herbs, her eyes the springs and wells, her nose the hills and valleys, her shoulders the mountains, and her mouth the caves and rivers.[21]
In theYoruba religion, there aremany deities, but the Supreme One is calledỌlọrun and they are said to be perfect. BeforeAyé (the Earth) was created there was onlyỌrun (the sky or heavens) above and water, swamps, and mist below. One day, one of the deities namedỌbatala asked Ọlọrun if he could make a world out of what was below. Ọlọrun granted him permission to make a world from the things down below. Before taking action, Ọbatala consulted withỌrunmila (the deity ofdivination) who told Ọbatala to get a golden chain and lower it from Ọrun to the waters below so that he could eventually return to the other deities. Ọrunmila also told him to take a snail shell with soil in it, a hen, a black cat, and a palm nut. Ọbatala heeded his words and descended down the golden chain with all of the things he was told to take. Once Ọbatala reached the waters below he poured all of the soil onto the water. He then set the hen down, who spread the soil out by pecking and scratching at it. After the soil was spread, he planted the palm nut which grew and produced more nuts which respectively grew more trees. Obatala thought that this new world needed more light, so he consulted with Ọlọrun through theirchameleon servant and then Ọlọrun created the Sun and Moon and sent fire on a vulture's head for light when the Sun was gone. Ọbatala got lonely on this new world of his, so he fashioned human beings out of clay and asked Ọlọrun for help. Ọlọrun breathed life into the clay figures and humans became alive. Ọlọrun also gave life to animals, plants, rivers, and language for the people to utilize. When Ọbatala was pleased with his work he climbed back up the golden chain and lived with the other deities in the sky above.[22]
While in general, a planet can be considered "too large, and its lifetime too long, to be comfortably accommodated within fiction as a topic in its own right", this has not prevented some writers from engaging with the topic (for example,Camille Flammarion'sLumen (1887),David Brin'sEarth (1990), orTerry Pratchett's,Ian Stewart's andJack Cohen'sThe Science of Discworld (1999)[23]).[24] The iconic photo of Earth known asThe Blue Marble, taken by thecrew ofApollo 17 (1972), and similar images of Earth from space, might have popularized Earth as a theme in fiction.
Additionally, it is undeniable that an overwhelming majority of fiction is set on or features the Earth.[25] Earth as a planet has been subject to various works of literary treatments.Its climate itself is related to the entire genre known asclimate fiction, andits future is a major aspect of theDying Earth genre as well as theapocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction.[26][27][28]
In the ancient past there were varying levels of belief in aflat Earth, with theMesopotamian culture portraying the world as a flat disk afloat in an ocean. The spherical form of the Earth was suggested by earlyGreek philosophers; a belief espoused byPythagoras. By theMiddle Ages—as evidenced by thinkers such asThomas Aquinas—European belief in aspherical Earth was widespread.[29]
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The technological developments of the latter half of the 20th century are widely considered to have altered the public's perception of the Earth. Before space flight, the popular image of Earth was of a green world.Science fiction artistFrank R. Paul provided perhaps the first image of a cloudlessblue planet (with sharply defined land masses) on the back cover of the July 1940 issue ofAmazing Stories, a common depiction for several decades thereafter.[31]Earth was first photographed from a satellite byExplorer 6 in 1959.[32]Yuri Gagarin became the first human to view Earth from space in 1961. The crew of theApollo 8 was the first to view an Earth-rise from lunar orbit in 1968, and astronautWilliam Anders's photograph of it,Earthrise, became iconic. In 1972 the crew of theApollo 17 producedThe Blue Marble, another famous photograph of the planet Earth fromcislunar space. These became iconic images of the planet as a marble of cloud-swirled blue ocean broken by green-brown continents. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated thatThe Blue Marble is the most widely distributed image in human history. Inspired byThe Blue Marble poet-diplomatAbhay K has penned anEarth Anthem describing the planet as a "Cosmic Blue Pearl".[33] A photo taken of a distant Earth byVoyager 1 in 1990 inspiredCarl Sagan to name it and describe the planet as aPale Blue Dot.[34] OnEarth Day (22 April) 2023, a collection of images to date of Earth taken from various deep space distances in the Solar System was published.[35]
Since the 1960s, Earth has also been described as a massive "Spaceship Earth," with alife support system that requires maintenance,[36] or, in theGaia hypothesis, as having abiosphere that forms one largeorganism.[37]Since 2010 theCupola of theISS has allowed for a wealth of intricate images of Earth from orbit.[38]
| Year | Event | Image | Refs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1967 | 10 November 1967: NASA's first full-disc, true-color image of Earth, taken by theATS-3 satellite. The image was used for the cover of the first edition of theWhole Earth Catalog the following year. |  | |
| 1972 | 7 December 1972: the widely usedThe Blue Marble was taken by the crew ofApollo 17.[39] The photograph's original orientation had south pointed up.[40] | .jpg) | [39][41][42][43][40] |
| 1990 | 14 February 1990: theVoyager 1space probe took thePale Blue Dot photograph of Earth from a record distance of about6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5AU), as part of that day'sFamily Portrait series of images of theSolar System. Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the brown band on the right. Diagram of theFamily Portrait showing the planets' orbits and the relative position ofVoyager 1 when the mosaic was captured. |   | [43][44] |
| 2010 | Family Portrait (MESSENGER) |  | [41] |
| 2013 | The Day the Earth Smiled - 2013 photograph of Saturn and Earth |  | [43] |
Over the past two centuries a growingenvironmental movement has emerged that is concerned about humankind's effects on the Earth. The key issues of this socio-political movement are theconservation ofnatural resources, elimination ofpollution, and the usage of land.[45] Although diverse in interests and goals, environmentalists as a group tend to advocatesustainable management of resources andstewardship of theenvironment through changes in public policy and individual behavior.[46] Of particular concern is the large-scale exploitation ofnon-renewable resources.[47] Changes sought by the environmental movements are sometimes in conflict with commercial interests due to the additional costs associated with managing the environmental impact of those interests.[48][49][50]
Earth (भूमि,bhūmi) is one of the five primary elements (pañcabhūta)
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