Photographs of earth in context
September 7th, 2007The wikipedia entries earthrise, the blue marble, and pale blue dot are pretty good at giving the significance of photos of earth from various NASA missions.
The photographs provided humanity with an epiphany equivalent to revelations such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Alvarez team’s discovery of an iridium layer at the K/T boundary (and comet Shoemaker-Levy’s subsequent impact on Jupiter), and Hutton’s observation of deep time, as revealed in the Jedburgh unconformity.
For the first time, we had not merely an abstract understanding of the scale of our planet; rather, we also had photographs that showed the planet in the context of its local environment.
