Robert Poole is Professor of History at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and lives in Greater Manchester. He is the author of Earthrise: how Man First Saw the Earth (Yale, 2008) and he has written articles on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the space advocate Arthur C. Clarke. In 2011-16 he was an associate of ‘The Future in the Stars’ research programme at the Free University of Berlin, contributing to the European Astroculture series of conferences and publications. He has been a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Sorbonne, and Durham University, and has appeared on public radio and TV in the UK, US, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain. In a parallel life he is the author of Peterloo: the English Uprising (OUP, 2019). An extended second edition of Earthrise: a Short History of the Whole Earth will be available shortly on all platforms both as an e-book and in print.