Earthrise

Earthrise

Imagine seeing yourself in a mirror for the very first time. On December 24, 1968, humanity as a whole saw itself for the first time—thanks to Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman and William Anders. As we learn in Earthrise, their first photographs of Earth rising over the Moon’s surface fundamentally altered our view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Robert Poole recounts the events leading up to these historic images as well as their far-reaching consequences.

As Poole notes, NASA was so preoccupied with the Moon that it initially forgot about Earth: “Photographs of Earth,” he writes, “featured hardly at all on the official [Apollo] mission plans.” But Anders’ color shot changed that. “Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance,” Borman later commented. “We are one hunk of ground, water, air clouds, floating around in space.” A second iconic shot of Earth, the famous “blue marble” portrait of the whole Earth, was taken by Harrison Schmidt aboard Apollo 17 in 1972, and it has become the single most reproduced image in human history.

Following a look at the Apollo 8 mission, Poole reviews how pre-Space Age humanity envisioned what Earth might look from space, and identifies the first satellite images to reveal Earth’s curvature. We then see how the Apollo images helped inspire not only the rise of the environmental movement, which stressed the precariousness of Spaceship Earth, but also James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, wherein Earth’s living systems act together as a kind of superorganism that shapes its own environment. What began as a technological metaphor ended as an ecological one. Later chapters highlight even more distant images of Earth, revealed, in the words of Carl Sagan, as a “pale blue dot” in the cosmos. “Earthrise,” notes Poole, “was an epiphany in space.”

Earthrise offers a fresh look at a turning point in humanity’s vision of itself.

Hardcover: 236 pages

Publisher: Yale University Press ( November 06, 2008 )

Item #: 68-7214

ISBN: 9780300137668

Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 8.6 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 17.0 ounces