Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today marks the last episode in our mini-series to celebrate the Anthropocene

Reviewed book, which thanks to your astonishing support has been on the New York Times best

seller list for eight consecutive weeks now. I am so grateful to everyone who has read it and for all your kind messages.

To say just one example, a listener named Madeline recently wrote me to say that she and six friends were reading a single copy in turn

with each of them writing notes in the margins about the book and each other.

I remember sharing a copy of a Michael Schaibon book similarly with friends when I was young and so that meant a lot to me.

Anyway, thank you for reading it and sharing it. There are still signed copies of the Anthropocene Reviewed book available online and at many bookstores.

So if you haven't picked one up, now's the time. All right, onto the episode.

Today, I'll be reviewing something I've never seen and never will, an orbital sunrise.

Some of you may know that my wife, Sarah Eurost Green, is a curator and writer. Her most recent book, You Are an Artist,

features creativity prompts sprinkled with art historical context. And I often use the book when trying to figure out what to write about or even what to think about.

One of the chapters in the book is called Never Seen, Never Will. And it features a prompt from the artist David Brooks who asks us to think of something we've never seen and probably never will see.

And then to find a way to articulate that something. In this context, Brooks discusses a 1515 etching of a rhinoceros by the artist Albrecht Durr.

Durr had never seen and as it happened, would never see an actual rhinoceros. But he'd read a description of a rhino that had been brought to Portugal in 1510.

That rhinoceros went on to die in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. But using the description and a small sketch, Durr created a very famous image of a rhino, which depicts the animal as having literal plates of armor, complete with rivets.

Durr's etching does look quite a bit like an actual rhinoceros, which is a testament to his particular genius and more broadly to the capacities of the human imagination.

But in the places where Durr's rhino is different from an actual one, something else is betrayed about the human imagination, which is that we tend to fill in blank spaces or unknowns,

with guesses that are deeply shaped by our humanness. When Durr read that the rhino had skin like armor, he imagined 16th century European human armor.

Because what else could he imagine?

When thinking about what to write or even what to think, my default setting is to focus on what I know,

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