AAS 248 Film Screening of "Humans Lived Here Once" by Steve Rowell

The AAS Sustainability Committee welcomes attendees to a film screening of Humans Lived Here Once by Steve Rowell at the upcoming 248th AAS meeting in Pasadena, California, on Tuesday, 16 June, at 6:30 pm in Ballroom DE of the Pasadena Convention Center.

Humans Lived Here Once is a film rooted in experimental documentary, presented as a meditation on deep time, the geological, and the existential threats of climate change and technology. These forces act as specters deeply intertwined with our daily lives. We are forever entangled with our own destructive potential. Britain, home of the industrial revolution and the first computer, is the landscape featured. The work is structured around a journey that begins in melancholy and entropy, moving sequentially toward the hopeful perspective of the Overview Effect. The film uses the Apollo 17 mission recordings (featuring Harrison Schmitt, the photographer of the iconic Blue Marble image) as its narrative spine, often paired dramatically with these terrestrial scenes. For instance, the audio during one sequence is the Apollo 17 conversation between Mission Control and Schmitt, including the camera shutter sounds of photos being taken while Schmitt speaks in awe about seeing the planet as fragile and irreplaceable — the only living world in the known universe. This serves as the film’s optimistic conclusion, offering the astronaut’s profound moment of recognizing Earth as a single, fragile system and a shift from despair to potential course correction.

Ultimately, the film asks whether the profound change in perspective offered by the Overview Effect can interrupt the destructive loops our inventions set in motion.

This film was supported by an Erna Plachte scholarship at the University of Oxford and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.