Richard Underwood was keen to get the photographs that came back from the Apollo 17 mission developed as quickly as possible. He took some of them home to show his children, sure in his own mind that they were going to be influential. As he began to lay them out on the table, his son said: ‘Uh oh, Dad’s going to show us some more of that junk from space.’
NASA photograph AS17-148-22726, popularly called the ‘Blue Marble’, was released to the public on Christmas Eve 1972, four years to the day after Earthrise had been taken. NASA’s press office made much of the image, though in the mission’s official report the photograph isn’t mentioned at all. Nor did the astronauts refer to it when – as was traditional after each mission – they reported to Congress.
Jack Schmitt had taken the photograph with Antarctica at the top, but NASA released it the ‘right’ way up. By continually orienting photographs of the Earth with Antarctica at the bottom we are encouraged to hold on to an old paradigm of what the Earth is. The enlightenment that came to most of those who had seen it for themselves, was to experience the Earth as a globe falling through space. We can understand it intellectually but to truly get it – that we live here on the surface of a sphere, rock and water bounded about by a skin of atmosphere, forever plunging through black space – that is something else. Can a photograph alone provoke that Zen-like leap of understanding? Certainly a photograph with Antarctica at the ‘bottom’ does not help. The Blue Marble showed a full (or, to be precise, an almost entirely full) Earth seen in full sunlight. Because it had been taken relatively close to the Earth there was also a lot of detail in the photograph. It was centred on Madagascar, which meant that the world got to see for the first time how truly enormous Africa is. As it is projected on most maps, Africa appears much smaller than its true size – as do all countries around the Equator. Even now most people do not realize quite how vast Africa is. The landmasses of all of China, the United States, India and Japan added together, plus nearly all of Europe, fit within Africa’s coastline. Appropriately enough, one of the first people to see the photograph was Victor Hasselblad, who happened to be visiting the Manned Space Center at the time. It was his modified camera that had gone to the moon on all the Apollo missions, his camera that had taken Earthrise and the Blue Marble photographs.
In 1948 the physicist Fred Hoyle had predicted that ‘Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.’ What he hadn’t predicted was that the photograph would need to be of the highest quality and in colour. Two such photographs spanned the Apollo era: Earthrise, taken during the first manned mission to the moon, and the Blue Marble, taken during the last. They have become two of the most reproduced images of all time. In Life magazine’s 2003 publication: 100 Photographs That Changed the World’ wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called Earthrise ‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’.
In 1966, a 28-year-old rock promoter named Stewart Brand started a campaign to persuade NASA to release what was rumoured to – but did in fact not then – exist: a colour photograph of the whole Earth. Brand was a member of Ken Kesey’s 1960s commune ‘The Merry Pranksters’, based at Kesey’s homes in California and Oregon, and a contributor to Paul Krassner’s The Realist, the magazine for which Madalyn O’Hair also wrote. The idea for the campaign had come to Brand on a February afternoon in San Francisco:
I had taken a mild dose of LSD on an otherwise boring afternoon and sat, wrapped in a blanket, gazing at the San Francisco skyline. As I stared at the city’s high-rises, I realized they were not really parallel, but diverged slightly at the top because of the curve of the earth. I started thinking that the curve of the earth must be more dramatic the higher one went. I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. I imagined going farther and farther into orbit and soon realized that the sight of the entire planet, seen at once, would be quite dramatic and would make a point that Buckminster Fuller was always ranting about: that people act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilization right. I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. And I figured a photograph – a color photograph – would help make that happen. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.
Buckminster Fuller – who was then in his early seventies, and at the height of his fame as a philosopher and inventor – agreed to help Brand achieve his objective. In 1951 Fuller had come up with the phrase ‘spaceship Earth’, a way to try and shock us into enlightenment using words. All of us on Earth are astronauts, he told us, all voyagers through space. To raise money for his campaign, Brand sold 25-cent badges bearing the legend: ‘Why haven’t we seen the whole Earth yet?’ The badges were distributed widely; some were mailed to NASA officials, though no one there has owned up to receiving one. It is not clear how much Brand’s campaign influenced NASA, but a few months after it had begun Lunar Orbiter had been repositioned so that it could take a single black-and-white photograph of the whole Earth, the first ever. And by the end of 1967 the ATS-3 and DODGE satellites, and a camera placed on Apollo 4, had taken the first colour images of the whole Earth. In the style of Warhol’s epic movie Empire (1964) – eight hours of long takes of the Empire State Building – Brand screened 24 hours’ worth of footage from the ATS-3, a film he titled Full Earth.
In September 1968 the first edition of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was published, a counter-culture magazine that promoted the idea of communal living and a self-sufficient lifestyle. It listed clothing, books, tools, machinery, anything that might enable or sustain creativity or self-sufficiency. The catalogue was a response to a world that had become wasteful, nowhere more so than in wealthy America. The magazine encouraged a movement back to the land and a do-it-yourself attitude that was encapsulated in the catalogue’s motto and first sentence, ‘We are as gods, and may as well get used to it.’ In America at that time, an estimated 10 million people were living in communes. Steve Jobs later described the catalogue as ‘one of the bibles of my generation. It was sort of like Google in paperback form.’ On the cover Brand used the photograph of the whole Earth that had been taken by ATS-3 the previous November. Subsequent editions of the magazine followed at roughly three-monthly intervals. ‘Earthrise’ was used on the cover of the 1969 spring issue. ‘It gave the sense that Earth’s an island,’ Brand said of the photograph, ‘surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon among a quite featureless black vacuum.’ The last issue of the catalogue came out in 1972, first to last neatly spanning the Apollo years. On the cover of the last issue Brand used a photograph taken by Apollo 4. It showed the Earth in partial shadow. He wondered later if the shadow might have been off-putting to people, frightening even. A thousand copies were printed of the first issue of the catalogue. The last issue was published by Penguin in an edition of a million copies. Brand immediately launched a new magazine, CoEvolution Quarterly, a platform from which to explore environmental concerns. The magazine published essays from various perspectives by a diverse group of writers that included Ursula LeGuin, Wendell Berry, Gregory Bateson, Eric Drexler, Lynn Margulis, Paul Hawken and Kevin Kelly (future editor of Wired magazine).
Only 24 human beings have ever seen the Earth from space, the 24 Apollo astronauts who went to the moon and were safely returned to Earth again. Only they have ever seen the Earth as if from the perspective of an alien. Only they have seen the Earth as it truly is, a sphere falling through space. Nearly all of them were struck by how fragile the Earth looks. From space the Earth’s atmosphere appears as a thin blue line around the circumference of the planet, a hazy penumbra of a mere 50 miles clinging to a disk 8,000 miles across. ‘It is a pity,’ Mike Collins wrote, ‘that my eyes have seen more than my brain has been able to assimilate.’ And yet of all the astronauts who left Earth orbit, he came closest to describing in words the sense and the feeling of what he had experienced: ‘The moon is so scarred,’ he wrote, ‘so desolate, so monotonous, that I cannot recall its tortured surface without thinking of the infinite variety the delightful planet earth offers: misty waterfalls, pine forests, rose gardens, blues and greens and reds and whites that are entirely missing on the gray-tan moon.’ On his way back home, he looked out of the window and tried to find the Earth:
The little planet is so small out there in the vastness that at first I couldn’t even locate it. And when I did, a tingling of awe spread over me. There it was, shining like a jewel in a black sky. I looked at it in wonderment, suddenly aware of how its uniqueness is stamped in every atom of my body . . . I looked away for a moment and, poof, it was gone. I couldn’t find it again without searching closely.
At that point I made my discovery. Suddenly I knew what a tiny, fragile thing Earth is.
Apollo 17 Jack Schmitt did not agree. ‘I think the pictures make it look a lot more fragile than it is,’ he said. ‘The Earth is very resilient . . . I know what blows it’s taken.’
So which is it, fragile or robust?
The ecology movement had had a mystical and spiritual component to it from its origins in the late nineteenth century. ‘The Earth is holy . . . We are here, part in the creation,’ wrote the American botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey, a writer who had been influenced by the American transcendentalist Henry Thoreau, and who was one of the first scientists to promote the newly rediscovered works of Gregor Mendel. In 1926 the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky – a proponent of cosmism – wrote about the Earth using the holistic terms geosphere, biosphere and noosphere. The geosphere described the totality of the world’s inanimate matter, the biosphere the world’s living forms, and the noosphere human knowledge. The palaeontologist Loren Eiseley (1907–77) – also influenced by Thoreau – went further and wrote of the whole Earth as something living that could repair itself: ‘Like the body of an animal, the world is destroyed in one part, but renewed in another.’ Eiseley wrote of the need for anthropologists to take time not just to observe and speculate but to dream. The idea of the Earth as a giant ecosystem was popularized by the American biologist Eugene Odum (1913–2002) in the 1950s. In later editions of his Fundamentals of Ecology (1953) he reproduced the Earth-rise photograph, which also hung as a poster on his office wall. In 1969 the American microbiologist René Dubos (1901–82), credited with coining the environmental slogan, ‘Think globally, act locally’ (although it was actually first coined by Jacques Ellul, who wrote about the tyranny of technology), said that seeing the Earthrise photograph had made him realize ‘that the Earth is a living organism’. Like Eiseley he thought that the Earth was resilient and adaptable, and had evolved the ability to heal itself. He wrote that humankind was not pitted against the Earth but was part of the Earth’s system: ‘Earth and man are two complementary components of a system, which might be called cybernetic, since each shapes the other in a continuous act of creation.’ Dubos called his ideas a ‘theology of the Earth’. There were ‘sacred relationships between mankind and the physical attributes of the Earth,’ ... ‘A truly ecological view of the world has religious overtones.’ Stewart Brand, who had trained as an ecologist, said that ecology as a science is pretty boring, but ‘ecology as a movement, as a religion, is tremendously exciting’.
In the 1960s NASA employed the biologist James Lovelock to come up with experiments that might answer the question: is there life on Mars? Lovelock thought it unlikely. He suggested testing the planet’s atmosphere as a way of deciding the question, but his idea was rejected. In 1965, when it was discovered that Mars’ atmosphere is mainly made up of carbon dioxide, Lovelock’s hypothesis that it was a dead planet with a dead atmosphere was strengthened. Lovelock intuited that Earth was home to life in part from seeing the Earthrise and Blue Marble photographs. Scientists in the past had been able only to guess that the Earth looked different from other heavenly bodies; for the first time, here was visual evidence that it did in fact look different. In the seventeenth century the French astronomer Adrien Auzout had conjectured that the moon was probably not home to life. In a thought experiment, Auzout had tried to imagine what the Earth must look like seen from the moon and had guessed that it would appear much more vibrant than the moon seen from Earth. In the 1920s Vernadsky wrote that ‘the face of the Earth viewed from celestial space represents a unique appearance, different from all heavenly bodies’. In his science-fiction novel Star Maker (1936) the British philosopher Olaf Stapledon describes the Earth as having ‘the intricacy and harmony of a living thing’. It took high-quality colour photographs of the Earth seen from space to confirm what they had intuited: that from space the Earth looks different from any other heavenly body we know of. In black and white the difference is hardly apparent, but in colour we are forced to ask why the Earth looks different
Lovelock formalized his thinking into a testable theory that become known as Gaia: ‘The entire range of living matter of Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as a single entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.’ The Earth, together with its atmosphere, is evolving, not moving to an equilibrium state. In that sense the totality of life on Earth behaves as if it too were some living entity. The Earth looks different because it is alive. And, as with any system that is alive and evolving, we cannot know what the Earth is evolving into; we have no idea where we fit in. We can get no true perspective. Lovelock wondered if, as a species, we might eventually come to see ourselves as part of some ‘Gaian nervous system and a brain which can consciously anticipate environmental change’.
The principles of Lovelock’s Gaia theory were first published in Carl Sagan’s journal Icarus and in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly. The theory was at first ridiculed and then heavily criticized (notably by a young Richard Dawkins) for not being properly scientific. In Earthrise, Robert Poole writes that when Lovelock’s book Gaia was published in 1979, it was resisted by the orthodox scientific community with ‘almost religious intolerance’, fulfilling the first two stages of Schopenhauer’s insight that ‘all truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, third it is accepted as self-evident’. Today, to most of us, it seems almost obvious that our planet is itself a living system.
In 1972 the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson had created The Lindisfarne Association to encourage a new relationship between the humanities and science and technology: ‘to foster a global ecology of consciousness’. Speakers at the conferences included Stewart Brand, the economist E. F. Schumacher, the poet Kathleen Raine and the biologists Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. At the ‘Planetary Culture’ conference held in 1974, Brand talked about his campaign to persuade NASA to take a colour picture of the whole Earth. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart had also been invited to speak.
Schweickart was one of the more intellectual of the astronauts. He chose to take recordings of Vaughan Williams’ late cantata Hodie (This Day), the story of Christ’s Nativity, and Alan Hovhaness’ Second Symphony ‘Mysterious Mountain’ with him into space. Even the most avid devotee of classical music might not come across either piece during a lifetime’s listening. In his programme note Hovhaness wrote that:
Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual world. To some, the Mysterious Mountain may be the phantom peak, unmeasured, thought to he higher than Everest, as seen from great distances by fliers in Tibet. To some, it may be the solitary mountain, the tower of strength over a countryside – Fujiyama, Ararat, Monadnock, Shasta, or Grand Teton.
Dave Scott hid the music until near the end of the mission. He said Schweickart never forgave him. To read, Schweickart took works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thornton Wilder. After returning to Earth from his mission in Earth orbit, Schweickart was drawn to Zen Buddhism. Pete Conrad once described Schweickart as their token hippie. Schweickart grew his hair, not very long but long compared to the usual crewcut, and a beard. His wife, Clare, played the ukulele and sang folk songs. They were part of a book group that read consciousness-raising texts like George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide. In 1972 he took the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on a tour of the Manned Space Center. The Maharishi had become famous for introducing Transcendental Meditation to the West, and for being taken up by The Beatles. He could ‘deliver samdhi, a holy state of expanded consciousness, without going to all the trouble of fasting and endless prayer’. Afterwards, at their home, the Maharishi walked barefoot across the Schweickarts’ lawn and gave Clare her own personal mantra.
Several years had passed after his return from space before Schweickart had been able to work out what had happened to him during his EVA. He had decided not to talk about it at the time. It wouldn’t have been very ‘Right Stuff’, and might have jeopardized his chances of being chosen to go on another mission. He wasn’t chosen again anyway; perhaps for no particular reason, though on the whole Deke Slayton was suspicious of intellectuals, even more so of hippies. In 1972 Schweickart gave an interview to Time magazine during which he told the interviewer: ‘I completely lost my identity as an American astronaut. I felt a part of everyone and everything sweeping past me below.’ National boundaries became meaningless and arbitrary, but also the boundary between self and not-self. ‘There’s a difference [afterwards] in that relationship between you and the planet and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you’ve had that kind of experience . . . And all through this I’ve used the word you because it’s not me, it’s not Dave Scott, it’s not . . . it’s you, it’s we. It’s Life that’s had that experience.’
At the Lindisfarne conference Schweickart decided to speak spontaneously. He found himself talking of his experience in space in the present tense and second person. A member of the audience said it was like listening to ‘a long, pauseless, prayer’. Brand later said that Schweickart ‘seemed amazed at what he was saying, amazed at the gathering he was attending, amazed – still – at the events which led him to drift bodily free between Earth and Universe. Remember the Star Child at the end of2001? Like that?’ Schweickart ended his address with a poem by E. E. Cummings: ‘i thank You God for most this amazing day.’ The poem ends with the lines, ‘(now the ears of my ears awake and/now the eyes of my eyes are opened)’.
Schweickart might well have been the perfect astronaut to experience going to the moon, but it was not to be. Among the astronauts who did go to the moon, the closest experience to Schweickart’s is probably that of Ed Mitchell, who, after he had returned to Earth, devoted the rest of his life to studying consciousness, in part in order to try and understand what had happened to him out there. Mitchell had been brought up in New Mexico – that curious region of curious energies: home to many and various Native American tribes, where the first rockets and the first atom bombs were tested, and where UFOs are spotted with seemingly greater frequency than most other places on the planet. Mitchell remembered the luminous glow that filled the sky after an atom bomb had been detonated. He had no memories of the early rocket tests from White Sands, but he had heard the stories:
Just a mile or so down the road from where I was raised lived a man who would loom large in my imagination . . . each day as I walked to school along the white gravel road, I would pass the quiet home where a mad scientist was said to live. He was quite literally, a rocket scientist. He was also America’s first, his name was Robert Goddard. This was deep in the bleakness of World War II, and across an ocean this man’s German successor Wernher von Braun, was busy designing the V-2.
Mitchell felt as happy studying consciousness as he had in his youth studying technology. He approached both in the ‘same secular manner’, learning about the non-physical world as he had once learned about ‘the dynamics of an airplane or the model of an atom’. The approach was the same even if the paths went in opposite direction. Scientists are led inexorably back to the beginnings of things, ultimately to the beginning of the universe, mystics inexorably back to the self. But the ‘larger purpose of both science and religion’, Mitchell said, is the same: our human desire, our secret hope, is ‘to find our place in the vast scheme of things’. He said it was the larger purpose of every mission into space.
Mitchell identified what he had experienced in space as a kind of samdhi. It was the same experience that Schweickart had had in low orbit: a sudden understanding that separateness is an illusion and that ‘an essential unity is the benchmark of reality’. After his experience Mitchell said he became more sensitive to his body and to his emotions. He had had ‘a grand epiphany’ and understood that the universe was ‘in some way conscious’. He said he ‘couldn’t honestly call it a “religious experience”’. Despite the allusions he makes to religion, he was looking for a secular rather than a religious explanation for what he had experienced. ‘Life itself is a mystical experience of consciousness,’ he wrote. ‘It’s just that we have grown used to it through the millennia.’ The ecstasy he had experienced was somehow a natural response of his body ‘to the overwhelming sense of unity’ of the universe. For a moment his ego had dissolved: ‘You develop an instant global consciousness; a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there . . . international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles and say, “Look at that!”’ He thought that all astronauts had gone through the experience, but that ‘if you happen to be closed off and are happy with [your] former belief system, you reject the information and nothing happens. Or if it happens to be too challenging or threatening, then it’ll be consciously rejected, thrown out. But otherwise, it can be absorbed and expanded into [your] belief system, and you have a different view.’ If there is an existing predisposition there already, those who have had the experience are convinced of its reality. An atheist might have the experience too, but can describe it only in terms of sensation and feeling. ‘The mystic reels in the mysteries of the ineffable, while the scientist chafes at the lack of specificity.’ He said that what he had experienced was equivalent to the Christian peace that passeth all understanding, or what theologian Paul Tillich called a ‘union with the ground of our being’. After the experience of ecstasy comes a feeling of being cut off, which Mitchell likens in Christian theology to the Fall. The intensity of the experience necessarily fades, but he still got an intimation of it – as Collins also described – whenever he flew in a commercial aircraft. He said that ‘space flight is one of the more powerful experiences that humans can have, and the technological event of breaking the bonds of Earth is far more important than the technology that went into it’. He came to believe that ‘ageless wisdom based on integrity, tolerance, and goodness is still pertinent to the modern experience’. We have not yet grown into our brains, he said. The question remains: can we grow into our brains in time? Are we capable as a species of growing up? Schweickart, too, wondered if humans could keep up with the speed of technological progress: ‘The Earth was at “a balance point in its evolution”,’ he said, ‘teetering between potential greatness and colossal collapse.’ After lives spent at the cutting edge of technology, von Braun and Lindbergh had come to similar conclusions.