Earth from Space
First photo of the whole Earth forever changed the way we see our planet, NASA

Perhaps one of the most powerful images of all time, the first photo of the whole Earth, taken November 10, 1967, has had a significant impact on human consciousness. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, had these observations about the image:

[It was] motivating for a lot of people, because it gave the sense that Earth is an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green, and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum. Islands know about limitations. Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] led me to this notion. He said people still think the earth is flat because they act as if its resources are infinite. But that photograph showed otherwise…. This is all we’ve got and we’ve got to make it work. There’s no backup. (Massive Change Radio, March 2, 2004)

After this image achieved wide-scale circulation, Earth Day was founded and gained a broad political following, enlisting support from all kinds of people who are moved by both the limitations and the uniqueness of our planet.

Space Debris
Tracking the junk orbiting our Earth
Aerospace Corporation

There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects larger than a softball in Earth orbit. Of these, only seven percent are operational satellites. The remaining ninety-three percent consists of dead satellites, rocket fragments and debris. While these objects are generally very far apart, their presence and great velocity can potentially interfere with space missions and even threaten the lives of astronauts - a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a quarter-inch hole in a space shuttle window. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been tracking these objects since 1961. Today, before every critical launch, analysts perform a collision avoidance test to make sure the mission will not cross paths with any of these objects.

Earth’s Protective Ozone
The ozone hole
NASA, Ozone Processing Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

In 1983 scientists noticed strangely low levels of ozone, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. They began to produce visualizations that showed an alarming ozone “hole” over the South Pole. These images were key to gaining the attention of the scientific community, the public and governments. By revealing that the ozone was being affected by emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from aerosol cans, refrigerators and air conditioners, these images mobilized action worldwide that led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to eliminate CFC production and consumption. Between 1986 and 1997, global production of CFCs dropped by eighty-five percent, a significant victory for the environment, and proof of the power of visualization. (more…)

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What was Bucky Fuller’s reaction to your button campaign that asked, “Why haven’t we seen an image of the whole earth yet?”
It was all because of LSD, see. I took some lysergic acid diethylamide on an otherwise boring afternoon and came to the notion that seeing an image of the Earth from space would change a lot of things. So, on next to no budget, I printed up buttons and posters and sold them on street corners at the University of California, Berkeley. I went to Stanford and back east to Columbia, Harvard, and MIT. I also mailed the materials to various people: Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, senators, members of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. Out of everyone, I only heard back from Bucky Fuller, who wrote, “Dear boy, it’s a charming notion but you must realize you can never see more than half the earth from any particular point in space.” I was amused, and then met him a few months later at a seminar at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I sat across from his lunch table and pushed the button over to him, asking him what he thought about it. He said, “Oh yes, I wrote to that guy.” I said, “I’m the guy. So what do you think? What kind of difference do you think it will make when we actually get photographs of the earth from space?” There was this slow, lovely silence. Then he said, “Dear boy, how can I help you?”

Why was this image so powerful?
It was motivating for a lot of people, I think, because it gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum. Islands know about limitations. Bucky led me to this notion. He said people still think the earth is flat because they act as if its resources are infinite. But that photograph showed otherwise. Unless and until we find other flourishing planets, this is all we’ve got and we’ve got to make it work. There’s no back up.

What would the iconic image be now?
I grew up with the image of the mushroom cloud, which was the first image seen as potential planetary Armageddon - one great big nuclear exchange, and there we would all be. We cowered in the shadow of that for 20, 25 years. It was thoroughly supplanted two years later by the image of Earth from space, and I have a feeling there’s still a lot of changes to ring on that. I’m a little sorry that Al Gore’s idea of putting up a satellite whose job it was to keep that photograph absolutely daily fresh hasn’t come to realization because it’s the sort of thing that would make it a little more here and now than the still photograph. As far as a new icon, the Long Now Foundation is trying to add one with a clock you can visit in the limestone cliffs of eastern Nevada and look at pictures of, which very plausibly would go on for 10,000 years. (more…)

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How is grid computing today similar to the Internet in the early nineties?
In the early nineties, the Internet made a transition from being something of utility, and really only known to people in academia, to something that was of broad industrial relevance with the emergence of the Mosaic web browser and Netscape. Grid computing is making a similar transition at the moment, from academia to industry. Just in the last two years or so we’ve seen major corporations, like IBM, Sun, and HP deploying grid products.

What is the history of distributed computing?
Grid computing is about the large-scale integration of computing systems to enable new classes of applications to provide on-demand access to computing and information. And that’s certainly not a new idea. Back in 1969, I think, when the very first node of the (then) ARPANET, which became the Internet, was deployed at UCLA in Los Angeles, the people there put out a press release touting the wonderful things that were going to happen once the Internet was ubiquitous. It was quite an ambitious and visionary view of things given that they only had one node at that point! What’s different now is that we have the quasi-ubiquitous Internet networks suddenly getting fast enough that we can connect our computers and people and information sources in ways that were not possible before. Also, the software has evolved to the point where we can start thinking about linking distributed computing systems into something really interesting.

When did our computer processing capacity and data storage capacity reach the point where we could even consider implementing distributed computing utilities or grids?
One important part of the evolution towards grid computing is, in addition to the deployment of the Internet, the fact that our home computers are now as powerful as yesterday’s supercomputers. As we all know, the power of our computers continues to double every eighteen months or so. The laptop that I use for most of my work nowadays, for example, is faster than the supercomputers that were deployed at the U.S. national centers just ten years ago. This process is an ongoing one and the same observation will probably be true ten years from now. But the transition to a system that enables participation in a grid as a true peer is something that’s just happened in the last five years or so. (more…)

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How are coders themselves increasingly becoming lawmakers?
In implementing and choosing the architectures that will define cyberspace, you’re implementing and choosing certain architectures to enable or disable values. So you’re making political choices. What’s troubling is when these political choices are made by entities that aren’t responsible publicly; we then begin to worry about the extent to which this kind of private law making defeats public values.

How is commerce changing the character of the Internet?
The intended consequence of “cookies’ is to deposit little markers on your hard drive so that the website “remembers’ you and what you want to buy, which makes it easy to shop online. The unintended consequences include the fact that it’s now much easier to track people as they move around the Internet, and to target advertising or gather information from people. What are typically considered invisible markers are actually indelible markers. And as a result, it’s now very easy to monitor and chase all online transactions. Those in business are not paid to think about privacy and personal liberty. Businesses do what they’re paid to do: find ways to make it so they can sell stuff on the Internet. We need to think about the consequences of their techniques, and if those consequences corrode values that are important to us. If so, then we have to find ways to resist this.

What are the roots of intellectual copyright law?
People have an understandable view that the idea of copyright has been around for 200 years and that it has never changed. And so, when you see this explosion of peer-to-peer file sharing - which is said to violate copyright laws - most people’s natural response is to say, “Let’s stop the “theft.’” But in fact, there’s a long tradition to consider. There was once a powerful group in England called the Congor. They were a monopolist group that restricted the spread of knowledge by keeping prices of books high. Then along came the Statute of Anne, which was designed to promote education and learning by limiting copyright to 14 years. Its effect was to basically tell the Congor that their government-granted monopolies would be over, and they would have to compete in the marketplace if they wanted to continue to prosper. As a result of its implementation, for the first time in English history, the works of Shakespeare, for example, were no longer under the control of monopoly publishers. Works became free and the tradition of free culture was really born. (more…)