On October 24, 1946, a Vergeltungswaffen Vengeance 2 [or
V-2] Aggregat-4 rocket; launched from the Alamogordo White Sands New Mexico
Guided Missile Proving Range [or WSMR] by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory [or APL]
principal staff engineer Clyde Holliday; captured grainy, barely legible black
and white photos every second and a half from an altitude of 65 miles [343,200
feet]. [7] These were the first photos ever taken of Earth as seen from beyond
the atmosphere. [3]
In 1948, University of Cambridge Plumian
Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that
the first images of Earth from space would change forever our view of our own
planet.
On August 23, 1966 the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration [or NASA] Samuel Langley Research Center’s
spacecraft “Lunar Orbiter 1”
transmitted two crude black and white images to the California Institute of
Technology [or CalTech]’s Madrid
Deep Space Communications Complex [or MDSCC] in the Community
of Madrid, Spain. These were the first photos of Earth from the distance of a
spacecraft in the vicinity of the moon.
On
the evening of December 24, 1968, during a live Christmas Eve television broadcast,
the most-watched television program ever at the time, Apollo 8 Lunar
Excursion Module [or LEM] pilot William Anders, one of
the first three human beings to ever leave low Earth orbit, took NASA image AS8-14-2383, of the Earth’s terminator touching the lunar
horizon. [6] “The vast loneliness is
awe-inspiring;” Said Apollo 8’s Command
Service Module [or CSM] 103 Pilot James Lovell in the
Christmas Eve broadcast; “And it makes
you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” In early 1969, NASA’s Lyndon Johnson Manned
Spacecraft Center Operational Applications Office Photographic Technology
Laboratory Manager Richard Underwood gave AS8-14-2383
the name “Earthrise”. [1]
In Life
Magazine’s August 1, 2003 book “100
Photographs that changed the World”, Sierra Club Ansel Adams Award for
Conservation Photography winner and International League of Conservation
Photographers Honorary Fellow Galen Rowell called “Earthrise” “The most
influential environmental photograph ever taken”. [4]
On December 7, 1972, University of
Wisconsin—Madison Adjunct Professor of Engineering Physics Harrison Schmitt [B.S., Geology, California Institute of
Technology; Ph.D, Geology, Harvard University]; pilot of the Lunar Module 12 “Challenger” for Apollo 17, the sixth and final Apollo lunar
landing and the last mission of the Apollo program; took NASA photograph AS17-148-22727,
or “The Blue Marble”. [5] It was the first image to show a fully
illuminated Earth; at a distance of about 28,000 miles [147 million feet], at
5:39 AM Eastern Standard Time [or EST], 5 hours and 6 minutes after
the 12:33 AM EST launch of Apollo 17
from John Kennedy Space Center Launch
Complex 39 [or LC-39], and 1 hour and 54 minutes after leaving
Earth orbit. Mike Gentry of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration speculates that “The
Blue Marble” is the most widely disseminated image in human history. [2]
On February 14, 1990, the California
Institute of Technology Jet
Propulsion Laboratory [or JPL]’s spacecraft “Voyager 1”; when it reached the
edge of the solar system at a distance of 40.11 Astronomical Units [3.7 billion
miles] having completed its primary mission on November 20, 1980; was commanded
by Caltech’s Candice Koharcheck and University of Colorado—Boulder Pace Science
Institute Adjunct Professor Carolyn Porco to photograph 60 frames of the Earth
at the Request of Cornell University Professor of Astronomy and Center for
Radiophysics and Space Research Laboratory for Planetary Studies Director Carl
Sagan [B.S., M.S., Physics; Ph.D.
Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago].
In one of these grainy photographs,
composed of 640,000 individual pixels, the Earth shows up as a fraction [0.12] of a single pixel in size in the
center of one of the scattered light rays. Traveling at the speed of light, the
image took 5 hours and 30 minutes to reach CalTech’s NASA Deep Space Network [or DSN].
In his 1994 book “A Vision of the
Human Future in Space”, Sagan named this image the “Pale Blue Dot”:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth
might not—even to a very advanced alien being—seem of any particular interest.”
Wrote Sagan in “Pale Blue Dot”.
“But
for us, it’s different. Consider again this pale blue dot. That’s here. That’s
home. That’s us. On that dot everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve
ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Every act
of human heroism or betrayal, the sum total of human 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.”
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast
cosmic arena.” Sagan says. “What is
the glory and triumph of the greatest conquerors and builders of empires? Think
of the rivers of blood spilled by all those general and emperors so that in
glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a
blue dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one
corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other
corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one
another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely
speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this
vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere outside to save us
from ourselves. Doing that is up to us.”
“The
Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life.” Sagan wrote in 1994.
“There is nowhere else, at least in the
near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like
it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been
said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is
perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this
distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to
deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue
dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” [8]
I remember as though it were just last
month the day when I saw Schmitt’s “Blue
Marble” image for the first time. I remember it in part due to the fact
that, visually, it was severely disorienting for me. Every single map and globe
of the Earth that I had ever seen up until that point has had the borders
between nations and states clearly drawn, and had labels naming them. Every map
and globe had dots and labels where cities were, and lines where roads went.
Even though the different continents and
oceans are clearly visible in the “Blue
Marble”, one will never find a single national boundary anywhere on it.
No cities or roads are visible either. Looking at the image, one has little
choice to wonder, as I did at the time, why it is that the borderlines that are
drawn on every map and globe appear nowhere on this image.
The answer is, of course, that they do
not actually exist in reality. All borderlines are nothing more than imaginary
lines drawn across a planet with no nations or states. The only boundaries
dividing the Earth are those which have separated people throughout the
overwhelming majority of human history: oceans and mountain ranges. But oceans only divide continents from one
another, not countries, and many countries including and especially our own span
entire continents across multiple mountain ranges.
So why draw imaginary lines in the dirt?
An answer that is at all rational or logical always has and continues to elude
me. Nevertheless, I believe answering this question to be the quintessential
starting point for any discussion or study of international relations. Paradoxically,
in order to make any sense of how different nations interact with one another, I
find it is frequently helpful to keep in the forefront of one’s mind the
reality: That none of the nations you are studying actually exist at all.
As English songwriter John Lennon wrote
in his October 11, 1971 song “Imagine”:
“Imagine
there are no countries. It isn’t hard to do.”
And why did Lennon believe it was so easy
to imagine that countries aren’t real? Because they aren’t.
Once one comes to terms with the concept
that all of the borders separating nations are entirely imaginary, I find that
all of the various interactions between the people of those countries that
Sagan lists in “Pale Blue Dot”
begin to make a lot more sense.
While buying into these imaginary borders
is, admittedly, a prerequisite for studying what is, somewhat arbitrarily
therefore, referred to as “foreign”
policy; I think trying to make any sense of out of international interactions
is not helped by the presupposition that the relatively petty and superficial
differences the citizens of different countries draw between themselves and
those of other countries have any objective basis in perceptible reality.
This is best illustrated, I believe, by
the current “crisis” on the Southwestern
border of the United States with the neighboring country of Mexico. This border
is, like all others, entirely imaginary and somewhat arbitrarily drawn. However,
as Sagan mentions in “Pale Blue Dot”
what constantly both astounds and disgusts people such as myself is the blind
dogmatic zealotry of the hatred and vitriol felt by citizens of this country
toward those of the neighboring ones. Thought about from any objective
perspective, such as that the alien intelligence Sagan mentions, it strikes one
as unreasonable to the point of delusion for an American citizen of a border
state such as Arizona, California, New Mexico or Texas to so fervently despise
a child born perhaps only couple of dozen miles to the South on the other side
of the imaginary borderline, and thereby, through no fault of their own, in a
different country than the person who hates them was.
I remember that my Race, Ethnic, and
Diversity Studies Professor once showed the class a video which asserted that
the solution to racism was to become more aware of racial differences. I
remember it in part because of how passionately I did then and do now disagree
with such a statement. As, on any biological or physiological level, there
exists only one human race, the logical conclusion is that race, and therefore
by extension racism, only exists because we say it does. Therefore, buying in
more to the myth of there being different races does not alleviate the problem
of racism, it perpetuates and exacerbates it
The same, I believe, is true of national
borders. Since, as Schmitt’s “Blue
Marble” image clearly shows, there really are no such thing as nations
or countries, it is logical to conclude that the number one cause of all international
conflicts such as the one on America’s Southwestern border with Mexico is,
above and beyond all else, people buying into the myth that imaginary lines
drawn on a map are somehow not only real but, as Sagan notes, worth killing
over.
1.
Connor, Steve. “Forty
Years since the First Picture of Earth from Space”. The Independent. Saturday January 10, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/forty-years-since-the-first-picture-of-earth-from-space-1297569.html
2.
Cosgrove, Ben. “Home
Sweet Home: In Praise of Apollo
17’s “Blue Marble”. Life Magazine.
2014. http://life.time.com/history/blue-marble-apollo-17-photo-of-earth-from-space/#1
3.
Garber, Megan. “The
First Image of Earth Taken From Space”. The
Atlantic. August 6, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/the-first-image-of-earth-taken-from-space-its-not-what-you-think/260755/
4.
Klueger, Jeffrey. “Earthrise on Christmas Eve: The Picture that Changed the World”. Time Magazine. December 24, 2013. http://science.time.com/2013/12/24/earthrise-on-christmas-eve-the-picture-that-changed-the-world/
5.
Monamney, Terence. “No Place like Home”. The Smithsonian Institution. December
2002. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/no-place-like-home-1-73426396/
6.
Neuman,
Scott. “On Anniversary of Apollo 8, How
the “Earthrise” Photo Was Made”.
National Public Radio. December 23, 2013.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/23/256605845/on-anniversary-of-apollo-8-how-the-earthrise-photo-was-made
7.
Reichardt, Tony. “The First Photo from Space”. Smithsonian Institution
National Air and Space Museum. November 2006.
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-first-photo-from-space-13721411/
8.
Rosen, Rebecca. “An
Early Draft of Carl Sagan’s Famous “Pale Blue Dot” Quote”. The Atlantic.
February 3, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/an-early-draft-of-carl-sagans-famous-pale-blue-dot-quote/283516/
