The Independent has an article celebrating the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first photos of the earth from space, including the iconic ‘Earthrise’, perhaps the most influential image in the history of photography.

Earthrise

The article contains this pertinent quote from Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

The impact forty years ago on people seeing our ‘pale blue dot’ for the first time would have been humbling enough under any circumstances, but this incredible image, framing our planet between the grey lifelessness of the moon in the foreground and the infinite blackness of space as a backdrop, understandably caused a paradigm shift in the thinking of millions of observers. This is the photo that launched environmental consciousness across the globe, as humanity in sudden, visual epiphany awoke to the earth’s fragility and isolation in the dark depths of space.

An article about the Apollo 8 mission in the Observer last November recalled the the following famous stanza from the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which could hardly have been more prescient.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

(extract from Little Gidding, 1942)