On 24 December, 1968, Bill Anders took this photograph of the Earth as his spacecraft, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. At one time, Earthrise was the most widely reproduced photograph in history (it’s probably since been overtaken by something really important: the cover of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for example, or maybe Kim Kardashian’s behind).
As we approach the 50th anniversary of this image, it is fitting to reflect on the context in which this image appeared, how it was interpreted at the time, and what has become of the message since then.
This photo was huge for my generation. Remember, it was a time of growing awareness of the environmental disaster we were busy creating, the disaster we are still living in and still continuing to create today.
Rachel Carson had published her landmark book, Silent Spring, six years before, raising awareness among a generation of future environmentalists of the effects of pesticides on wildlife. The following six years saw a series of mine disasters, nuclear reactor incidents, opposition to the building of certain dams, government reports, the passing of the Water Quality (1965) and Air Quality/Clear Air Acts (1967), the founding of the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund and Greepeace, and the publication of Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb.
The first Earth Day was just over a year away, and in general, the environmental movement was gaining steam, with increasing activism against corporate polluters, tree plantings, pro-environment ads on TV, sitcom references, and so on.
And then came this photograph, taken from some 240,000 miles (386,000 km) away, which seemed to capture something both moving and spectacular: Many of us saw our planet in a new way. We saw a little blue marble with swirling white clouds, teeming with life and yet limited, confined to one remarkably small sphere. The whole wide, wonderful world could be captured in one frame. It was beautiful, and sobering at the same time.
Can you call a photograph of your own home planet "iconic"? An icon is something that stands in for something else. This image was beyond iconic: the image was the message. It spoke with reference to itself, in a language far beyond the merely visual. It was a message about the environment, rich in emotional content. We saw our home as a space ship, glorious and fragile.
A message we absolutely need to hear once again!
And to drive home the point, here is another image, taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February, 1990:
That pale blue dot in the beam of light on the left is the same planet Earth, seen from some 3.7 billion miles (5.95 x 109 km) away, beyond the heliopause — the point at which our sun’s various electromagnetic fields no longer keep out cosmic radiation, effectively, the boundary of our solar system.
No one captured the message of this image better than the man who published it, the great Dr. Carl Sagan:
That’s here. That’s home. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
I love Dr. Sagan and his work. His vision carries just the sort of optimism that is so sorely needed in these trying times.
As he says in his book, The Final Frontier could be both a proving ground for technologies that can help humanity, a source of important data about our place in the universe and the fragility of our little blue space ship, and a source of forward/outward thinking that just might give us a reason to cooperate so that we can cohabitate, rather than obliterate.
Unfortunately, thus far, the results have been less than spectacular — not due to any fault of the science or the technology, but because by and large, the First Worlders who have the means to help lead us toward that better future remain immersed in a wealthy stupor, while the majority who all too often lack even the means to feed themselves are too busy to notice.
But despite that, I want to say: here's to the future, the better future that Earthrise and the Pale Blue Dot call us to. Let us all wake up tomorrow or the next day, and re-dedicate ourselves to the great task before us: The revival of our planet and ourselves!
Bless you, bless you one and all!
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