Earthrise: "Riders on the Earth Together"

The words in the image above were written by the American poet Archibald MacLeish upon seeing the imagery coming from the Apollo 8 mission (the famous Earthrise image, accompanying the quote above, was taken just the day before MacLeish's quote was published).

Seeing our world from space, seeing that there are no national boundaries, no grand positions for monarchs and rulers to claim, seeing that we are all connected by sharing our beautiful little Blue Marble in the vastness of space... comes with an existential awareness that could be gained in no other way. 

Seeing ourselves as "riders on the Earth together" brings us together in our shared experience as members of our world, participants in our biosphere. 

---

Below, you can read the entire text from MacLeish's 1968 New York Times article:

A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold
by Archibald MacLeish
New York Times, December 25, 1968

"Men's conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World -- all the world there was -- and the stars were lights in Dante's heaven, and the ground beneath men's feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God -- and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.

And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space -- when Dante's heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) -- men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason -- if we call it one -- of force.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante -- that "first imagination of Christendom" -- had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. "Is it inhabited?" they said to each other and laughed -- and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space -- "half way to the moon" they put it -- what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. "Is it inhabited?"

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere -- beyond the range of reason even -- lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers." 

New Graphics for One Flag in Space

One Flag in Space (OFiS) is one of the initiatives of Blue Marble Space, the non-profit that I work for. OFiS has a mission to inspire people to explore as citizens of Earth, using the Earth Day Flag as a symbol to represent all of humanity engaging in the act of space exploration and coming to better know our own world together. I recently put together some more graphics for sharing on our social media profiles. I thought I'd share some here as well. Enjoy!

A brief bit about my field site using only the thousand most common English words

To say a lot with a little is harder than you may think. 

Words are important, but what if you only had
a small number of known words with which to speak?

Chris Trivedi (right) and Graham Lau (left) at Borup Fiord Pass in 2014.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, created by Theo Sanderson, is a web-app that challenges you to type using only the one thousand most common words in the English language. It's intriguingly far trickier than you may think. I gave it a go, in an attempt to explain the reason that my colleagues and I went to Borup Fiord Pass to conduct our field research in 2014. What d'ya think?

On the top of the round world where we live, lies a land with ice and cold. In this land there is a piece of ice, long and thick, and covered in a color that does not seem right in such a place. This color let us know that something important was on or in or around that colored ice. We went to that place to find the colored ice and learn more about what made the color, to learn about why this place is just so cool. In the ice I found something important about fire's friend in the book of one god. This friend of fire as spoke upon before, was to be found in new forms within the ice, and of this I wrote with my friends. Now we know more about the stuff that causes the colors of the ice in that land with ice and cold that lies so far to the top of the round world where we live.

The Earth and our Moon from Voyager 1

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, 

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

On such a full sea are we now afloat. 

And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." 

-William Shakespeare

This picture of the Earth and Moon were taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 7.25 million miles (~11.66 million km). Taken on 18 September 1977 (when I was -6 years old!), this picture as the very first ever taken that showed the Earth and the Moon in one single frame.

Voyager 1 is the most distant piece of human engineering and human exploration. It's fanciful to sit and think sometimes about how far away it really is now. As of the exact time of this writing, Voyager 1 is 20,661,735,297 km from the Earth and still going. The Voyagers and their mission were a hallmark of early space exploration. Now is truly the time for us to work together to take this current of humanity's evolution as a spacefaring species, and find our ventures among the other realms in the cosmic ocean.


(Note: in the picture above, the Moon appears very close to the Earth. However, the Moon is really about as far away from us as 30 times the diameter of the Earth! The picture certainly wasn't taken from equal distances to both Earth and Moon)

The estival days have grown long and bright, but the night will win back its hours.

Happy Midsummer, my fellow Earthlings!

The "Not Planets" World

The image below was created by Kristoffer Åberg (Örebro Astronomi) and shows a map of the Earth with country borders which is overlain with the land areas of the largest worlds in our solar system that are not planets. Check it out:

Kepler-452b: One of the newest discovered kids on the block may be similar to our Earth

An artist's concept of what Kepler-452b might look like from orbit (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

We've now confirmed the existence of nearly 2,000 exoplanets in our neighborhood of the galaxy. There are still another three thousand or so possible finds that are awaiting confirmation, but there's a good chance many of them will turn out to be real planets as well. We still estimate maybe 160 billion (or more) planets exist in our galaxy alone (averaging 1.6 planets per star). These numbers are incredible, especially for those of us who remember a time when we had not yet confirmed the existence of planets around other stars. 

Most of the worlds we have confirmed were first detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler was launched and entered service in 2009, immediately getting to the work of hunting for alien worlds. The mission had a highly successful lifetime of 3.5 years and was even granted a mission extension, but then, in 2013, a second of four of the reaction wheels within the spacecraft had broken (the reaction wheels are what allow such spacecraft to orient themselves in space without the need for fuel). Since that time, an ingenious repurposing of the spacecraft for a new planet-hunting mission called "Second Light" (a.k.a. K2) has been undertaken. Second Light has been operating since early 2014 and has been slowly building upon the list of potential exoplanets out there.

From all of the worlds discovered through Kepler's original mission and the Second Light mission, none has been as exciting for the general public as one that was just announced this past week. On July 23rd, researchers announced 521 more planet candidates, including 11 worlds that are close in their size and orbital distances from their stars as is our own Earth. One of those eleven is a world currently known as Kepler-452b. This exoplanet orbits a G2 star (one that is in the same spectral class as our Sun), it has an orbit that is similar in size to the Earth's (Kepler-452b's year is only 20 days longer), and this alien world is only about 1.6 times larger than the Earth. The following infographic from Space.com gives some fantastic details on what we've recently discovered about this exoworld:

The discovery of another world very similar to our own Earth is very suggestive that we are on the right path to discovering extraterrestrial life. Since my birth, we've now determined that there are billions of planets in our galaxy and we now know that some of them, like Kepler-452b, are very similar to our homeworld in their size and orbit (and some even orbit similar stars!). With current improvements in telescope technology and the development of exoplanet atmosphere research, it seems more and more like it really is only a matter of time before we start seeing abundant evidence for worlds that are habitable. Following that, how long might it be before the first detections of biosignature gases on exoplanets? If life is abundant in our universe, then it seems like we are only around the corner from finally determining whether we are alone in the vast cosmos.

Kepler-452b excites many people because of how similar it is to our world. Might there be a geophysical processes occurring on that world that are similar to ours? Might there be plate tectonics, continents, oceans...

We have a tendency to think that we need to find worlds like our own to find life (though this may not truly be the case), and that's why Kepler-452b is so exciting. I'm glad to know that so many people in the general public have been excited by this new finding. It might be that Kepler-452b is another Venus (a hothouse world devastated by a runaway greenhouse), or maybe the surface of Kepler-452b is simply a barren wasteland. Yet it's fun to imagine some of the more intriguing possibilities. 

Maybe Kepler-452b has a surface covered in microbial mats that generate large amounts of gases that are far from equilibrium with the atmosphere. Maybe that world has gigantic creatures like walking trees, dinosaurs, or giant floating blobs. Maybe there are intelligent beings on that world that have also discovered math and science and who have orbiting space telescopes that are peering out into their galactic neighborhood. Maybe, if that's the case, then just maybe they're also holding exciting press conferences to share their findings of new exoplanets around other stars. Maybe they've even had a meeting to discuss this new planet that is just like theirs in it's orbit around a similar star. Maybe that planet is just a bit smaller. Does it also have life?

An artist's illustration of a possible surface of newfound planet Kepler-452b (SETI Institute/Danielle Futselaar)

Earth From Nearly 1 Million Miles Away!

I recently wrote a blog post about The Blue Marble, the famous 1972 image of our planet from space taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts, and about the importance of seeing our home planet from space. When we view the entirety of our globe, without our perceived national and ethnic borders, we give ourselves a chance to reflect on our role within the global biosphere, within the global community. 

On the 20th of July of this year, NASA released a new image of our world taken from space. This image was collected by a spacecraft called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), and it was taken from almost 1 million miles away from the surface of the planet. 

Here is that image, in all of its glory:

Our Earth from a distance of ~930,000 miles (1.5 million km), taken on 6 July 2015 by the DSCOVR spacecraft

The DSCOVR spacecraft took the above image not long after it reached its final orbit at roughly 930,000 miles away (~1.5 million km). The distance is important, as the spacecraft will operate at this distance for the rest of its mission, orbiting at a point in space known as the Lagrange Point 1, or L1. This point in space will provide the spacecraft with a stable orbit (no need for extra fuel to keep it in its orbit) and will allow the spacecraft to monitor the entirety of our planet.

The primary goals of DSCOVR, which is run primarily through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are to monitor solar wind conditions and to provide nearly continuous climate data for our world. The spacecraft will measure the intensity of energetic particles making their way from the Sun to the Earth, such as those released in coronal mass ejections (DSCOVR will be able to offer 15-60 minute warnings of incoming changes to the solar wind that may pose dangers to our technology). DSCOVR will use UV, visible, and infrared light reflected from the Earth to measure ozone, ash and dust, cloud composition and structure, and vegetation cover. The spacecraft will also take full images of the Earth every two hours. 

Full, high-resolution pictures of the Earth at a rate of one every two hours! That's incredible. This means that it's only a matter of time until we get to see some awesome timelapse videos put together showing the dynamic Earth from nearly 1 million miles away. I can only imagine what these new data sets are going to mean for Science on a Sphere and other tools for public engagement, let alone all of the awesome science that's going to come from the DSCOVR mission.

This first image from the Deep Space Climate Observatory is so fantastic and so inspiring that even President Obama posted a Tweet about it:

Just got this new blue marble photo from @NASA. A beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have. pic.twitter.com/JQ3174P0LF

— President Obama (@POTUS) July 20, 2015

For a bit more info about the Deep Space Climate Observatory, check out the video below:

#TDB20, Viking Poetry, and Marooned on Earth as Viewed from Space

Artwork from Storm Thorgerson from Pink Floyd's The Division Bell

Pink Floyd's album The Division Bell was released over two decades ago! 

One of my favorite memories from the mid-1990s was when I spent an entire day listening to this album over-and-over while sitting in an old rocking chair and reading poems from  The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World. The skylight windows were open in the attic room where I was reading and a soft summer breeze brought warm drafts of air to where I was sitting. I can still close my eyes and feel the warmth as I rocked back-and-forth and lost myself in a world of poetry and music.

I honestly can't recall anymore how many hundreds of pages of classic poetry I read that day, but the sounds of Floyd and the poetry seemed to flow together into a collage of various thoughts and emotions that hit me in various ways as the hours passed. Ah, youth.

The Division Bell was reissued last year, the 20th year since its original release. For #TBD20, they've also cut a new video for the song Marooned. The song is a chilling instrumental piece that was cut from a few improvised takes onboard David Gilmour's houseboat/recording-studio, the Astoria. The original setting was said to be their feeling of being marooned on an island, but this new video shows something a bit different. 

Starting with views from orbit of our planet, our island in the cosmos, the video then takes us to the now-abandoned Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was abandoned due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On our little island in the cosmos, on our only home, we've built empires and industries, art and science, and yet we've also built disaster and destruction. Your interpretation of the video may be different from mine, especially with regard to the individual performing calculations at the end, but I see it as a story of marooned humanity; this is, to me, a vision of what it would be like if we were to lose our ambitions for a future. Our species is now at a point where we can foresee leaving our little island to explore the greater cosmos, yet, if we don't take care of our island, we could end up feeling less like inhabitants of a beautiful world and more like prisoners marooned in a prison of our own making. 

What do you think?

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, which then carried me from the Sahara to the Amazon

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Scientific Visualization Studio

There's a lot we can learn from Earth observing satellites.  For instance, the dust from the Sahara desert, the world's largest desert, has been found to travel through the atmosphere, making its way across the ocean and settling down to fertilize the Amazon rainforest.  That's quite a journey, and it probably seems a bit baffling to think that the material from a desert can then help to sustain all the diverse organisms that live in the world's largest rainforest.

A team of researchers have recently provided estimates of the amount of dust that makes the journey to the Amazon.  Of the 182 million tons of dust that gets lofted out of Africa, some 27.7 million tons of that same dust then finds its way to the Amazon rainforest.  The same team of researchers that made this discovery have also announced that the phosphorous within the Saharan dust fertilizes the rainforest.  Some 22,000 tons of phosphorous are estimated to rain down to the Amazon, far from their Saharan origin.  The researchers estimate that this influx of phosphorous makes up for the all the phosphorous lost to erosion.  Our world is truly dynamic.  Our fleet of Earth observing satellites have so much to teach us about our home.

Here is a fantastic video from NASA explaining these new discoveries:

For more information about this research, check out the NASA Press Release.