On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 shot a picture that captured the entire Earth from outer space. The astronaut reduced the Earth to the frame of a lens with a finger click of the camera. The image—a blue orb mottled with white clouds and some brown swatches delineating part of Mexico and the Gulf of California—turned the Earth into humanity's absolute other. The absolute othering of the Earth in a photograph, however, also made the Earth absolutely human. The wholly other, as psychoanalysis teaches, now inhabited as the most familiar. The Earth took on a decidedly human form.

Earth anthropomorphosis, the transformation of the Earth into a human being, is not a backwards premodern or animist vision, but places the Earth at the forefront of new paradigms in different academic fields. Shaping broad-ranged thinking in the field of science, the simultaneous distancing of the Earth as object and its subsequent closeness as subject stimulated the Gaia hypothesis. Following chemist James Lovelock (1919–) and then microbiologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), philosophers of science coined the Gaia hypothesis to propose an earth ethics in which all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated and form a single and self-regulating complex system.