Arcatan Sunset 2

These bright days and these sunsets may not be normal for us here at this time of year, but why ignore them?

Six Days to Change

"...for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth."--Emerson

Arcatan Sunset

We've had uncharacteristically bright days this week (this should be the rainy season), with spectacular sunsets. I've seen most of them from the patio at Wildberries--hence this photo. I'm still learning this little digital job--more pixels but I like it less than my old one. It's much more temperamental. Click photo to enlarge so it actually looks like something.

One Year Ago: Yes We Can

The New Hampshire primary was on the second Tuesday of January one year ago. Though Hillary Clinton unexpectedly won it, the night is likely to be remembered for Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech, which led to--among many other things--the best-known political video of all time. It's never a bad time to watch and listen to it again, but tonight might be an especially good time.

Seven Days to Change

"Are you sure you can get to the Inauguration that way?" (By the way, I've received my official invitation in the mail. But as it didn't include an airplane ticket and hotel voucher, I'm going to have to watch it from here...in one week!)

Eight Days to Change

One more "playing with the moon" photo because that's what I just did: we've had a weekend of clear night skies and the brightest moon of the year--for several more years, since the moon is closer than it will be for awhile--and even though it's started waning tonight, it was directly overhead and I cast a dark if foreshortened shadow, which I jumped around with for awhile. And since this is a peace sign of sorts, we'll also make it part of the pre-Inaugural countdown.

Born to Be Wild

The Sierra Nevada mountains, one of the areas newly protected in the omnibus wilderness protection bill passed in the U.S. Senate on Sunday.

9 Days to Change

"Hang on, Captain--in just 9 days this Bush brain torture will be over!"

The Era of Big Irresponsibility is Over

"Throughout America's history, there have been some years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare, and then there are the years that come along once in a generation, the kind that mark a clean break from a troubled past and set a new course for our nation. This is one of those years.

We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime, a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks..."

"This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won't get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past. We arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, D.C."

"Now, the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it's not beyond our ability to solve. Our problems are rooted in past mistakes, not our capacity for future greatness. It will take time, perhaps many years, but we can rebuild that lost trust and confidence. We can restore opportunity and prosperity."---Barack Obama, January 8. For specifics from the speech, see post below.

The Era of Big Responsibility Has Begun

In his speech (transcript here) at George Mason U. in Washington on Thursday, President Elect Barack Obama outlined his American Recovery and Reinvestment plan. Here are more excerpts, beginning with a brief summary of where we are now.

"Now, I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years. The unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. We could lose a generation of potential and promise, as more young Americans are forced to forgo dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future. And our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and our standing in the world. In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse...

That's why we need to act boldly and act now to reverse these cycles. That's why we need to put money in the pockets of the American people, create new jobs, and invest in our future. That's why we need to restart the flow of credit and restore the rules of the road that will ensure a crisis like this never happens again."

Some of the programs and goals he outlined:

"To finally spark the creation of a clean-energy economy, we will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years. We will modernize more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improve the energy efficiency of 2 million American homes, saving consumers and taxpayers billions on our energy bills. In the process, we will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced -- jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, constructing fuel-efficient cars and buildings, and developing the new energy technologies that will lead to even more jobs, more savings, and a cleaner, safer planet in the bargain. "

"To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years all of America's medical records are computerized. This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system.

To give our children the chance to live out their dreams in a world that's never been more competitive, we will equip tens of thousands of schools, community colleges and public universities with 21st-century classrooms, labs and libraries... "

"To build an economy that can lead this future, we will begin to rebuild America. Yes, we'll put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects, but we'll also do more to retrofit America for a global economy. That means updating the way we get our electricity by starting to build a new smart grid that will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation. It means expanding broadband lines across America so that a small business in a rural town can connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world. And it means investing in the science, research and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries, and entire new industries.

And finally, this recovery and reinvestment plan will provide immediate relief to states, workers and families who are bearing the brunt of this recession. To get people spending again, 95 percent of working families will receive a thousand-dollar tax cut, the first stage of a middle-class tax cut that I promised during the campaign and will include in our next budget. To help Americans who have lost their jobs and can't find new ones, we'll continue the bipartisan extension of unemployment insurance and health-care coverage to help them through this crisis. Government at every level will have to tighten its belt, but we'll help struggling states avoid harmful budget cuts, as long as they take responsibility and use the money to maintain essential services like police, fire, education and health care... "

"The true test of the policies we'll pursue won't be whether they're Democratic or Republican ideas, whether they're conservative or liberal ideas, but whether they create jobs, grow our economy, and put the American Dream within reach of the American people.

Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made transparently, and informed by independent experts wherever possible. Every American will be able to hold Washington accountable for these decisions by going online to see how and where their taxpayer dollars are being spent. And as I announced yesterday, we will launch an unprecedented effort to eliminate unwise and unnecessary spending that has never been more unaffordable for our nation and our children's future than it is right now."

Now, this recovery plan alone will not solve all the problems that led us into this crisis. We must also work with the same sense of urgency to stabilize and repair the financial system we all depend on. That means using our full arsenal of tools to get credit flowing again to families and business, while restoring confidence in our markets. It means launching a sweeping effort to address the foreclosure crisis so that we can keep responsible families in their homes. It means preventing the catastrophic failure of financial institutions whose collapse could endanger the entire economy, but only with maximum protections for taxpayers and a clear understanding that government support for any company is an extraordinary action that must come with significant restrictions on the firms that receive support. And it means reforming a weak and outdated regulatory system so that we can better withstand financial shocks and better protect consumers, investors and businesses from the reckless greed and risk- taking that must never endanger our prosperity again."

Some of these efforts have begun, even outside this plan, as Obama's economic team looks at the remaining $350 billion of the $700 billion already allocated (half of which has been spent with little visible effect--and little accounting-- by the Bushites) to determine what the Washington Post calls a "new approach that would expand the program's aid to municipalities, small businesses, homeowners and other consumers."

Though politicians are already quibbling, Obama's Recovery and Reinvestment plan, otherwise known as the stimulus package, is already very popular, especially the Green Deal investments in alternative energy and green retrofitting. America knows: This is our moment, this is our time. Let's get busy.

Any Day Now

Barack Obama announces his economic plan today, and his presidency unofficially begins. But the official part comes in less than two weeks, and the excitement is building. This is the official Inaugural poster! I strayed to the Huffpost's Style page the other day, and almost everything was about the Obamas and the Inauguration. But for all the glitter, what's really exciting is that it's the people's Inaugural--and Washington especially is taking it to heart. The people of Washington, that is, who voted for Obama by a margin of 93%: “For D.C., this inauguration is less like hosting a visiting official and more like throwing a homecoming party for a family member,” said Ronald Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. Dr. Walters added that normally the inauguration was an exclusive black-tie affair. “This time,” he said, “it feels like the city has taken ownership of what is becoming a people’s party.”

The Times story recalls the parts of the city that were burned during the 1968 riots following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. I worked in one of those sections nearly a decade later, when it had still not recovered.

But things are different now. “What happened here along U Street on election night when Obama won was the exact inverse of those race riots,” said Mr. Ali, recounting how on Nov. 4 the streets filled with racially diverse crowds who were initially kept out of traffic by a large and somewhat jittery police force. Eventually, he said, the police opted to close down the area and let the partyers celebrate freely.
Across the Anacostia River, in one of the city’s poorest sections, Thomas Thorton, 82, sat waiting for a bus. “For us, for this side of the river, the inauguration is personal,” Mr. Thorton said, standing in front of the hilltop Washington View Apartments, not far from the former home of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.... “This city considers Obama as one of our own,” Ms. Mukabane said, “and I think that will show on inauguration."

Reaching for the Moon

ken ytuarte forwarded this and similar photos, which seem to have been making the rounds, though without attribution, on the theme of playing with the moon. Some of them looked photoshopped to me, but I like the feeling in this one.

The Survival Value of Hope

Do you believe in meaningful coincidence?

In my regular reading, watching, listening, I don't run across the word "tyranny" very often. Yet one recent cafe afternoon I read a sentence ending with that word, and looked up from the book to see someone wearing a t-shirt with that word on it (something like "Anti-Tyranny Squad.")

I don't know what that means exactly. But yesterday, through my waking-up thoughts came the name of John Brockman, who I met many years ago. And last night while writing the post below on the Climate Crisis, I followed a link to an online article I'd bookmarked, which sent me to the site I referenced, the Edge, run by the same John Brockman.

I don't know what that means exactly either. Then later, as I was doing email business, I followed a link sent to me to one of the proposals on change.org, where second round voting would determine which 10 ideas will be presented to the Obama administration. It sent me to the idea on "bridging the empathy gap." I'm happy to vote for one of what I've been calling skills of peace. But while I was at the site...

I looked at other ideas, and followed the green energy one to the "Stop Global Warming" blog. The top post happened to focus on comments by Bruce Sterling. It had been only minutes since I'd written here that I tended to see the Climate Crisis future sort of the way Bruce Sterling does. (As you probably know, he's a noted science fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on the web and elsewhere, about the future, design, etc.)

That blog post linked me to his latest (and ongoing) comments at the granddaddy of all community blogs, San Francisco's The Well. This time, I know what this coincidence means. It means I have the latest Bruce Sterling comments to quote: (with my paragraphing and emphases.)

" Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil.

It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it.

The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions. Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet.

Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.

None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.

Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.

People need to LOOK AND FEEL they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up. When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable. "
Which all ties in with the idea I keep trying to get across: hope isn't some vacant emotion. It's motivation, it's living, it's activity, a way of life. Hope for the future is enacted in the present. The only future that exists now are the futures we envision and work to create or prevent. For us, that future is present. In our living moments, it's the only future that's real.

No Pause in the Climate Crisis

We've got big economic challenges, and a massive amount of Bushite damage to fix. We need universal health care, state governments are going broke, schools are crashing. Everything is a priority.

So the Climate Crisis, which isn't obviously affecting a lot of people (though in fact it is winnowing away at the life support of all of us) and which doesn't do its apparent worst for decades, doesn't seem like it should be high on the To Do list.

But the Climate Crisis doesn't pause for holidays, ceremonies or even an entire list of other crises. In fact, what's happening in the Arctic and Antarctic is really scaring scientists. Most indications are that global heating is happening faster and is likely to end up being worse sooner than the scientific consensus just a year or two ago.

Fortunately, the Obama administration is aware of this, and there is pent-up public interest and support for paying attention to the Climate Crisis, as well as a lot of scientific and public policy ideas and organizations out there ready to go.

That also means that the meaningful debates are just beginning. What are the best policies, and at what level are they best applied? Do we concentrate on carbon--what about methane? Cap and trade, or some kind of carbon tax? And so on.

It gets technical, and the technicalities are important. It's going to take individuals and families and communities doing relatively small stuff, along with bigger regional, national and global efforts. It's going to take simple conservation measures, and startling innovations. Some of it is going to sound harder than it will turn out to be, and vice versa.

We can expect some positive action soon. There will probably be money in Obama's economic recovery package to jump-start green energy and energy conservation measures. An end to official Climate Crisis denial will unleash scientific and diplomatic efforts to confront the issues. I believe moves to a clean energy economy will be popular--so much so that it will surprise a lot of people. But reasonable proposals like the kind of carbon tax James Hansen supports probably won't get anywhere for at least a few years.

So in the near future, we're probably going to move in the right direction along a number of promising paths at varying speeds. The Climate Crisis will be taken seriously. The question remains how soon its effects in the present will be large enough to require attention, and whether we will acknowledge these phenomena (floods, droughts, epidemics, etc.) as effects of global heating. Then we will face the need to distinguish between cause and effects, acknowledge both and resist the (political) urge to choose action on one and not the other.

It's a good thing that the Climate Crisis will soon become part of the normal mix of public concerns. Because in future decades, it's pretty inevitable that the Climate Crisis will become the major public concern.

Worldchanging has a story on the 2009 Edge Question of the Year: "What Will Change Everything?" And, more specifically, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" (The Edge is an online forum run by the not-so-late John Brockman. (That's an almost private joke.)) A couple of participants said it was the Climate Crisis. I'm not sure I agree with that their reasons are definitive: I'm more of the Bruce Sterling school, who thinks it simply will dominate what people will be doing and coping with, and what science will be grappling with--what, in fact, everyone will be grappling with, when coastal cities face flooding, all kinds of public emergencies and public infrastructure are constant issues, and climate has made life more difficult and even unlivable in some places. And all of that will inevitably affect how we feel and see the world, personally and culturally. It will affect everything, including philosophy, the arts and religion.

In other words, I think getting overwrought about problems like genetic engineering of human beings, etc. is wasted energy (although they are interesting to think about.) Most of the world's economy is more likely to be devoted to dealing with the Climate Crisis, and there's not going to be a lot in the way of excesses resources even for the very privileged.

I don't expect I'll be around to see much of this (although you never know), but some folks now alive probably will. Because the Climate Crisis is not waiting for us to fix it. We know that it's inevitably going to get worse--we just don't know precisely how and when. Our task is to not make it even worse than that, and prevent if we can the truly catastrophic, civilization-ending effects in the farther future, with even more life species lost forever. Our task will also be to recognize and deal with its effects, without giving into the temptation to let up on attacking its causes.

Starting now.

Better Late Than Never

Well, it's the last day of the second and last holiday weekend of the...holidays. So maybe your tree is still up; ours is. Anyway, I meant to post this in a more timely manner--it's called the Christmas Tree Cluster. That's the Cone Nebula towards the bottom. Photo from the European Southern Observatory: Click photo to dramatically enlarge. Hope your holidays were good ones.

Preparing for Hope

The West Wing ran on TV from the beginning of the Bush administration to a couple of years shy of its end, and for many--including us--the fictional President Josiah Bartlet was our real President. As Pat Caddell (a consultant and writer for the series, as well as a real West Winger in the Carter White House) says, "It's a show that gives people hope."

Caddell's statement is on a DVD from the first season of the series, which we are happily watching now. It's altogether proper and fitting that we do so, as a prelude to the Obama Inaugural, since he represents the president we've been hoping for--and which, I am seeing anew--the president that this series has prepared us for.

Lawrence O'Donnell, who does political commentary now but was a producer on this show, pointed out during the campaign the eerie coincidences of the Obama-McCain race to the presidential contest the series did in its last season, in which a character played by Alan Alda based loosely on John McCain was defeated by a character played by Jimmy Smits who was based pretty directly on a charismatic but inexperienced Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. (That's a photo of Smits and Obama, who first met when Smits was researching the role.)

But it was long before that last season that The West Wing was preparing us for Obama. In fact it started the first season with Martin Sheen as President Bartlet. A prime example in a first season episode: once Bartlet and his staff decide to cut back on the political calculation and take some principled stands, Bartlet tells his chief of staff, Leo (played by the incomparable John Spencer) "I'm sleeping better. And when I sleep I dream about a great discussion, with experts and ideas and diction and energy and honesty. And when I wake up I think, I can sell that."

That's the kind of presidency that Barack Obama sold to the American people during the campaign. Right now, more than two thirds of Americans polled by CNN consider Obama a strong leader, and 80% have confidence in him. Not everything he does is going to be popular, and I will be expressing my disagreements as they come. But I do believe that we are going to have great discussion, with experts and ideas and--this has to be my favorite word, thrown in there--diction, as well as energy and honesty. And complexity.

It's going to confuse some people, but sooner or later it's going to change the national dialogue. As for right now, there are these great DVDs. (I wrote a little more about them here.) This was our government in exile, and it showed the way to the change we can believe in.

A New Hope, A New Year

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Emerson
Self-Reliance
Click on photo to enlarge. Photo from Hawaii by ipod484 on Flicker, where the man who holds our hopes for 2009 is vacationing. Happy New Year to him and to you, and to all of us.

Earthrise: The Only Life We've Got

The most famous version of the Earthrise photo, taken by astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968, forty years ago today. It inspired a new awareness and concern for the fate of our home world, the only live planet in the solar system. All photos from NASA; click photo to enlarge.

The Only Life We've Got

Update: a version of this was on the Recommended list at Daily Kos. It was the third most recommended diary of the day.
It was exactly forty years ago, on Christmas Eve of 1968, when millions of Americans watched a television show live from the Moon. Three U.S. astronauts—Bill Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell were the first humans to go beyond Earth orbit and escape Earth’s gravitational influence, to circle another world.

They described the oppressive gray emptiness of the Moon’s surface below them, as viewers saw slowly rolling gray video images of what they were talking about. Then the astronauts read the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis, and sent holiday greetings to the people of “the good Earth.” More U.S. viewers watched this broadcast than any TV program of any kind before, and eventually an estimated one fourth of the world’s population saw it.

But the event of December 24, 1968 with the most lasting impact happened when no one was watching—when the astronauts were cut off from communication on the dark side of the Moon. They had been concentrating on the lunar surface, when Frank Borman caught a glimpse of color on the gray horizon, a conspicuous glow of blue and white against the black sky. It was the Earth. While he excitedly snapped photos in black and white, Bill Anders loaded his camera with color film, and got the shot that became historic. We know it as “Earthrise.”

According to Robert Poole’s fascinating new book, Earthrise: How We First Saw Ourselves (Yale University Press), the idea of photographing the Earth was foreign to NASA’s ethos and sense of the Apollo mission. NASA wasn’t interested in where the astronauts were coming from but in where were going: into space, to the Moon. Only the stubbornness of a few individuals, especially Apollo’s photography chief, Richard Underwood (who emerges as something of a hero in Poole’s book) led to the photos we do have.

The engineers and mission planners snubbed earth photos as “touristy snap shots,” and astronauts often didn’t see the point of them. Until they got out there. Then, as several admitted, seeing their home planet whole became the most memorable aspect of the voyage. In fact it was the Earth that made the impression from the start. “How beautiful our Earth is!” exclaimed Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.


But it was the Earthrise photo that became a spectacularly popular image—splashed across magazine pages, and posterized for posterity and dorm room walls. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later suggested that it caused people to “realize that we’re all jammed together on one really kind of dinky little planet, and we better treat it and ourselves better, or we’re not going to be here very long.”
[continued after photo]

Pollution visible from space, over Italy and China. NASA photos.

Forty years later, that Earth has changed. Twice as many people live on its surface. The pictures from space show more gray and brown in the white clouds—evidence of more widespread pollution. “The brilliant, clear photos were the Gemini photos of the mid-60s,” Richard Underwood observed. “The air pollution was a lot less then, and it shows.”

Some of the evidence of global heating is also obvious from space. Noting that the later and at least equally famous full-face “Blue Marble” photo taken from the Moon’s surface in December 1972 during the last Apollo mission showed the “relatively undeveloped southern hemisphere,” Poole points out that its view of the Antarctic in winter already looks different.

“Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the knowable universe,” Poole writes. “Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will probably become apparent before too long.”

The Blue Marble photo, taken in December 1972 from the surface of the Moon during the last Apollo mission. It is now the most familiar image on the planet.

Forty years later, the Apollo program (and its 11 missions, nine voyages to the Moon and six moon landings in just four years) seems like a dream. With budget cuts, management problems and controversies, unfunded missions and the planned end of the Space Shuttle, NASA faces an unpromising and uncertain future.

But even with the election of Barack Obama, a NASA supporter who recently suggested he wants to have “lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars,” there is a sense that NASA’s future is not only in exploring space, but in once again looking earthward.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, NASA announced its fifteen year program called “Mission to Planet Earth,” for earth observation satellites. That program suggests an opportunity for the future.

A recent essay by former NASA Johnson Space Center director George Abbey and former Clinton Science Advisor Neal Lane on “How to Save the U.S. Space Program” suggested that earth observations be restated as a top priority for NASA, and that coordination with other earth sciences agencies be strengthened.

One prominent reason for this mission is the Climate Crisis—a harrowing possibility known mostly by a few scientists and science-fiction writers in 1968, but now the most dangerous example of the planet’s life being seriously altered by human activity. As the federal government gets serious about addressing it, more detailed knowledge is needed about what’s actually going on in the atmosphere and on the planet’s surface. Some of that information is best gathered from space.

It’s a mission NASA is aware of, and may now be eager to take on. After all, America’s most respected scientist on the Climate Crisis (and next to Al Gore, the number one target for climate crisis deniers) is NASA’s own James A. Hansen. His own post-election statement minces no words: “Now our planet itself is in peril. Not simply the Earth, but the fate of all its species, including humanity.”
In an Orlando Sentinel oped endorsing Barack Obama for president, former astronaut Sally Ride cited his support for expanding NASA’s research capabilities “to study things like global warming…” But even under the recalcitrant Bush administration, NASA was already engaging in this work, with an upcoming mission specifically related to the Climate Crisis. Scheduled for January launch, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be its first spacecraft dedicated to studying the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. NASA satellites have also recently measured changes in Arctic sea ice and Alaskan glaciers.

The less famous black and white Earthrise image, taken by astronaut Frank Borman, also on December 24, 1968.

Many of the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth not only with a new interest in ecology, but with a sense of urgency. Gene Cernan, the last man to stand on the Moon, felt “My destiny was to be not only an explorer, but a messenger from outer space, an apostle for the future.” Michael Collins returned determined “that I would do all I could to let people know what wonderful home we have—before it is too late.” Edgar Mitchell thought about “beneath the blue and white atmosphere was a growing chaos…that population and conscienceless technology were growing rapidly way out of control.”

While universal peace and brotherhood did not immediately ensue after Apollo, Poole believes the Earthrise photo had important impact as a symbol for a new consciousness of the home planet that has changed attitudes, however slowly and subtly. It contributed to the power of new metaphors, from Spaceship Earth to Gaia, that guide our understanding and our resolve.

“The sight of the whole Earth, small, alive, and alone, caused scientific and philosophical thought to shift away from the assumption that the Earth was a fixed environment, unalterably given to humankind,” Poole concludes, “and towards a model of the Earth as an evolving environment, conditioned by life and alterable by human activity.”

Beginning with Earthrise, these images of the Earth from space have contributed to a more widespread sense of the Earth’s fragile status as the one known live world, and as the only Earth we’ve got. They contributed to the metaphors of Spaceship Earth and Gaia that guide our understanding and our resolve. But the urgency remains, and grows.

Though the Earth Blue Marble photo became even more iconic than the Apollo 8 image, there is a particular poignancy to Earthrise, because the planet is not all there. Some of it had not “risen” yet, but visually the missing portion suggests how fragile this life-bearing vessel is. Amidst the immense emptiness between the far-flung fires of stars, it could just as easily be setting, or dissolving life by life, leaving only another gray globe in the cold and darkness.

It’s up to us. We are the future we have been waiting for.

Dead World #8...

The huge, storm-wracked planet Saturn, made of rock, ice and gases is fascinating for its rings, visible from Earth and photographed here by the Cassini space probe. Their variety is suggested by the Cassini photo color-coded for different temperatures. Saturn itself is lifeless, and speculation centers on one of its moons as possibly harboring microbial life--but so far it's just a theory. There's long been speculation about life on other moons of these distant planets, but so far the presence of life has been confirmed on only one celestial body in the solar system--and its photo is below.

...And At Last A Live One

I saved Saturn for last because it was when space probes reached its vicinity--starting with Voyager 1--that they at last found a live world, when they turned a camera back towards Terra: the Earth. It's that distant dot in the first photo, blown up in the inset upper left. The second photo is from Voyager, and the third is color enhanced. What Carl Sagan called this "pale blue dot" is where all known life in the solar system resides. All known life in the galaxy. In the universe, though we admittedly don't know much about that.

Here's more of what Carl Sagan wrote about these photos: "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark...This distant image of our tiny world...underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've got."

Dead Worlds 5, 6 and 7

Two huge and remote planets, Uranus and Neptune, plus one even more remote world recently downgraded from planetary status, Pluto. Not a lot is known about any of them or their respective moons, but we're pretty sure of one thing: they sustain no life and never did. We reserve Saturn for tomorrow, for a special reason.

Happy Solstice

The winter solstice is the shortest day and the longest night of the year, marking the beginning of winter. One of the ancient traditions responding to this long cold night is a fire using the oak Yule log. Ancient and indigenous cultures also celebrate the day as the beginning of the earth's rebirth, for the days now begin to get longer. I attended a Native American ceremony once in which it was explained as the earth's period of pregnancy. Many of the ancient rituals of this day became part of Christmas and other winter holiday celebrations.

Dead World #4

Two (color enhanced) views of Jupiter--the top one an infrared from earth-based telescope, the second from a space probe. Huge, dynamic, alien: there is much we don't yet understand about this massive planet, its atmospheric storms and surface features, but life is undetected and unlikely. Its moon Europa is a better candidate, but only theoretically. Although the planet has been observed from earth for centuries, and several space probes have photographed it since 1979, better knowledge requires future missions. Click photos to enlarge.