blue marble

This date is normally commemorated "in infamy," but it deserves to be celebrated for a relatively-unsung photograph that has the power to transform consciousness and expand identity. "It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of the Earth, a photo that came to be known as "The Blue Marble." Photographs of the Earth from space were relatively new at this time.

On Christmas Eve of 1968, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, orbiting the moon, took a photo with the gray, craggy surface of the moon in the foreground and the bright blue Earth coming up behind, only half of it visible. That photo was called "Earthrise," and it really shook people up because it made the Earth look so fragile, and because the photo was taken by actual people, not just a satellite.

And on this day in 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 took another photograph, not only one of the most famous images of the Earth but one of the most widely distributed photos ever taken. It's known as "The Blue Marble" because that's how the Earth looked to the astronauts. It was the first clear photo of the Earth, because the sun was at the astronauts' back, and so the planet appears lit up and you can distinctly see blue, white, brown, even green. It became a symbol of the environmental movement of the 1970s, and it's the image that gets put on flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters.

The crew of Apollo 17 was about 28,000 miles away from Earth when they took the Blue Marble photo. It was the last time that astronauts, not robots, were on a lunar mission — since then, no people have gotten far enough away from the Earth to take a photo like it." Writer's Almanac

POSTSCRIPT. Spaceship Earth was a nice hook for several class discussions today, including Alex's report on the brutalizing impact of war on "nice" people. Carl Sagan observed years ago that the view from out there reinforces a simple but transformative truth: we are one species... "we are all connected." The humiliation, torture, and murder of prisoners and civilians based on the premise of their sub-humanity would make no sense at all to an extraterrestrial observer, and it should be intolerable to all of us. It should also disincline us to consider any philosophy of egoism whose rallying cry is to never live for the sake of another (the topic of Seth's report on Ayn Rand's "objectivism.") And we already have so little regard for our fellow humans, the thought of how we'd react to visiting extraterrestrials is frightening. Winston's report on that very question was provocative, in my case of a long-forgotten "Twilight Zone" nightmare that I have to believe is pure sci-fi. The aliens are bound to be more "civilized" than this, if they ever decide to visit our place. (More to the point: Would we be, were we ever to drop in on them?)