💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › whole-earth-gallery captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:24:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Whole Earth Gallery

Intro

Humanity has become desensitised to the power of photographs of the whole Earth, taken from space. At least, I have to assume we have. This kind of photo has been around my entire life. I have no personal experience of living in a world where we *know* we're all on this one round, mostly blue thing suspended in a void, but nobody has ever actually seen that fact with their own eyes, not even indirectly via photography. But, hard to believe as it is for people born afterwards, that really was the way it was right up until the 1960s. Nobody really knew, in an palpable way, what our planet, humanity's cradle, humanity's home, in all likelihood humanity's grave, looked like. And then we did! And while I can't imagine what that experience was like, I can and have read about its effect on people of that time and their mindsets toward our planet. The hippy and environmental movements unsurprisingly siezed on this powerful new image. Stewart Brand famously incorporated the image into his "Whole Earth Catalogue". Full colour photos of the whole Earth started coming in from space in the mid-to-late 1960s, and the first ever Earth Day happened in 1970 - *before* the 1973 oil shock - and that's almost certainly not a coincidence. Seeing the face of our beautiful, deliate, fragile home from a new perspective gave *us* a new perspective.

These images did good things, but they haven't worked miracles. People are a lot more aware of environmental issues today than they were in the early 60s, but let's be honest, we're not exactly crushing it when it comes to planetary stewardship. And I don't really think that presenting Geminispace with a curated and annotated gallery of images of the whole Earth and jumping up and down trying to remind everyone just how incredible those images are - both what they show and the very fact that we're able to see them - is going to suddenly wake us up and fix that. But it can't possibly make things worse, and I really wanna do it for my own sake because it's the perfect synthesis of my space exploration geek childhood with my clinging-to-hope-in-the-face-of-impending-doom environmentalist adulthood, so, well, here we are...

Gallery criteria

Everybody has seen, whether they're aware of it or not, the "Blue Marble" photograph. Taken in December of 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17, it is one of the most reproduced photographs in human history. It is the classic, go-to image of Earth from space. The scope of this gallery is all the photos of Earth from space taken *before* that one. The early days of the whole undertaking, when you had to lug your camera up out the gravity well *both* ways and guess the aperture setting from a rule of thumb and you never knew if you were gonna get a clear shot or not. The times when every new photo had a decent chance at a new claim to fame, the first one to show this, the first one taken like that. None of this false-colour computer composite nonsense. Proper good old fashioned Earth from space.

It has to be the whole Earth, obviously, hence the title. You won't find here any of those early photos of the Earth taken from sub-orbital rockets, where you can see a cheeky curve of the horizon but not the whole disc in all its glory. It doesn't have to fully illuminated, of course, there'll be no terminator shaming here. Okay, maybe I won't be super-duper-hyper strict on the whole disc criterion, it *was* hard to really nail the framing in those early days. If the photo gives the clear impression of a sphere but there's 10% or 15% cropped off one pole, I'll give it a pass, especially if it has some claim to fame. Speaking of...

I don't know just how many photos meeting the above two criteria were ever released to the public. Maybe it's feasible to include them all, maybe not. But to try and stop the gallery for really ballooning out of control, I will prioritise "firsts". First colour photo, first photo taken by a human being holding a camera, rather than a remote controlled satellite or something on a timer, that sort of thing.

Without further ado..