I am Eagle! I am Eagle!

Cosmo-Homie.gif

In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement.

With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to Brand's haranguing is debatable -- and has been steadily churning out increasingly crystalline photographs of outer space ever since. A quick visit to the NASA online photo archives inevitably leads to a psychedelic visual assault of purple nebulas, sun flares, and mighty cosmic rings, all decked out in surreal dusky pinks and muted greens. It's enough to make one forget how recently we first saw our whole planet -- round, mostly blue, and swampy with clouds -- lying amidst a field of stars and darkness. Further, it seems impossible, now that we have access to such a panoply of space images, to conceive of what it would have been like to see such an image for the first time.

It's hard to imagine living somewhere without knowing what it looks like, although humankind did exactly this for millennia; yet the photograph of Earth from space has become so omnipresent that we can't envision a time before it. This picture, in the relatively short span of time between the 1960's and now, has somehow become devastatingly banal. In iconographic terms, the photograph of Earth has become so ubiquitous, so completely subsumed into popular culture, that we have managed to separate it from what it actually represents. With alarming postmodern flair, I find that I immediately associate this image more with Earth Day t-shirts and children's science projects than with its real correlative -- which is, of course, the very pile of rock on which we all stand.

To a certain extent, that picture of Earth from space is the most important photograph in history. After all, we're all in it, regardless of our self-imposed notions of "country" or "border." It's the ultimate family portrait, and perhaps it is this massiveness -- the literal size of the planet as well as the image's philosophical implications -- which has caused us to quickly, and possibly in self-defense, dull this ideologically threatening image. At this point, not very much can shake us from this unwarranted apathy. Not very much, that is, except being shot into outer space ourselves.

Of course, seeing a photograph of Earth is one thing, but seeing our planet -- the very foundation of all our understanding about existence -- shrink to the size of a pea first-hand is something else entirely. The particularly phlegmatic Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"

Neil Armstrong, seemingly the master of withering space quotes, once said, "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

Although the US Space program alone has logged more than 58 person-years in outer space -- and heaven knows how much time the Russians have been spending up there, considering that their Soyuz ships still hold the record for the most consistently successful human-to-cosmos ferrying -- being acquainted with outer space is still a perfectly rare characteristic for a person to have. Only a smattering of people and dogs, despite how routine low-orbit space travel has become, have ever left the planet. Very few humans, then, can understand Gherman Titov's elation, the feeling of human smallness described by Neil Armstrong, or even the wonder of a first encounter with a photograph of the Earth in its lonely entirety.

Stewart Brand was right. We can't let ourselves forget, no matter how much of a mental trip it is, that the "jewel-like icon" on which we live floats alone in the darkness of the cosmos. Bringing home a photograph of this perspective-shattering reality is one of humanity's most powerful achievements.

Tags
Categories

More like this

"Geologists have a saying: rocks remember." -Neil Armstrong Looming up above us, hundreds of thousands of miles away, is the largest moon in the inner solar system: our Moon. Image credit: © 2004 by Ulli and Christian 'Pete' Lotzmann. One of the greatest achievements in the history of our planet…
Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography? Read Rimbaud! - Phillipe Diolé   I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean. When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson,…
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." -Neil Armstrong It still boggles my mind when I think about it, every time I look up at the…
Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even…

I was reminded of comments made by the Apollo 8 astronauts (Borman, Lovell, and Anders) who saw and photographed the first earthrise from the moon - "they were overcome by the realization that our fragile, tiny, blue ball of a planet is a, "grand oasis in the big vastness of space". The astronauts of Apollo 8 were the first humans to observe that earth is a very vulnerable place. They saw that onion skin thin blanket of an atmosphere from lunar distance and realized that we have very little protection from the radiation and hazards of our single planet existence. You cannot see political borders on the globe from space. All the Apollo 8 crew saw was a bright but tiny ball where billions of people seemed to be unaware that they were clinging to a precarious existence" Jim McDade. Kids in school are/were taught that the atmoshpere is like an orange peel but onion skin is a much closer representation; the troposphere is 15 miles deep versus the earth's radius of 4000 miles.