# The Blue Marble



## J-Sun (Dec 8, 2011)

The Blue Marble was taken 39 years ago today (yesterday in some parts of said Marble).


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## Abernovo (Dec 8, 2011)

I saw that on Wikipedia yesterday. An iconic photo. Working in the conservation field, you get to see it quite a bit, but it's never lost its power.


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## Metryq (Dec 8, 2011)

I've recommended the Blue Marble data sets (mentioned in the Wikipedia article) to other 3D animators. Before Google Earth came along, downloading the 21K images and panning around them with an image viewer was fascinating. Of course, Google Earth will now take you right down to ground level.


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## hopewrites (Dec 8, 2011)

what I find interesting is, having grown up with the image, I see it as a statement of earths durability and power, not its fragility as was referenced in the article.
For me it has always been accompanied with strong statements of responsibility and sweeping epic music. So the emotional underpinnings of it are of strength, and prosperous endurance, and mankind's ability to over come anything.

Am I alone or unique in this view? Is it seen as a statement of fragility as wiki suggests?


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## J-Sun (Dec 8, 2011)

I think both are true in their ways, really, but I was sort of struck by the dissonance of the "fragility" comment, too. I think it's more an issue of uniqueness. We have to take care of it because it's the only one we've got. And, apart from us, a single asteroid of the wrong size and speed could destroy it all forever. That said, it's a highly adaptable, changeable, yet enduring ecosystem that persists through many minor catastrophes. But, yeah, my primary reaction is probably something like "timeless beauty" and "unity" or something.

I like what Abernovo said, too - so many things like that are overused and become trite and empty but there's something so "thus" about the image that it can't really lose its power.


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## HareBrain (Dec 8, 2011)

J-Sun said:


> But, yeah, my primary reaction is probably something like "timeless beauty" and "unity" or something.


 
Funnily enough, I get the opposite feeling from "timeless". Before a few decades ago, no one, ever, had seen the world like this. And who knows how people will see our planet, or reality, in another forty years?


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## Metryq (Dec 8, 2011)

HareBrain said:


> Before a few decades ago, no one, ever, had seen the world like this.



Well, not actually seen, but some imagined it—from *Kepler* to *Bonestell*.


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## J-Sun (Dec 9, 2011)

HareBrain said:


> Funnily enough, I get the opposite feeling from "timeless". Before a few decades ago, no one, ever, had seen the world like this. And who knows how people will see our planet, or reality, in another forty years?



Yeah, that's very true and I do get that - part of the interest of it is in its almost revolutionary nature on our perspective - but I mean timeless in the sense that, while we're just seeing it, it's been there for a long time. Obviously, in and near the beginning there was and near and at the very end there will be difference and, in the meantime, the continents shuffle around over the megayears and so on, yet it's the Earth. As above, so below - on Earth we often point to the ever-changing and changeless ocean or sky as timeless things and this is a picture of them from above.

Back on the shuffling continents, that's sort of the above of the below of being at, say, the Grand Canyon. At the same time that the plate movements and river whittling away shows obvious change, it's taken place over the eons which conveys a feeling of timelessness.

Maybe that's part of its power - the Wikipedia says "fragile" and hopewrites says "durability and power"; I say "timeless" and you say "opposite". I think, depending on how you squint - what you focus on at a given time - it kind of represents everything.


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## Starbeast (Dec 9, 2011)

We live on such a beautiful planet, it's a damn shame that humans have poisoned and plundered it within a hundred years.


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