Chapter Two: The First Earthrise
All human suffering concerns each human being.
— Václav Havel
The photograph that changed how the human race understood itself was taken almost by accident, in a hurry, by a man who had been told he was not supposed to take it.
It was Christmas Eve, 1968. The three astronauts of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, the commander; James Lovell, the navigator; and William Anders, the lunar module pilot, though the lunar module was not yet built and, on this mission, he was, more honestly, the photographer — were on their fourth orbit of the Moon. They were on the far side, where no human being had ever been, and where the radio could not reach them. For forty-eight minutes at a time, they would pass through the deepest silence any human had ever inhabited, the bulk of the Moon between them and every other living thing in the universe.
The year is part of what the image meant. Nineteen sixty-eight had been a catalogue of catastrophe. Martin Luther King had been killed in April, Robert Kennedy in June. The Tet Offensive had shaken what remained of American confidence in the war in Vietnam. The Prague Spring had been ground under Soviet treads in August; the Democratic Convention in Chicago had collapsed into police riots the same week; the cities of the United States had burned through the long hot summers of a half-decade by then and shown no sign of stopping. The year had been, by almost every measure available to those who lived through it, an argument for despair. And then, in its last week, into all that wreckage, came a photograph of the Earth taken from the Moon — and the world was, briefly and almost in spite of itself, given a different vantage point from which to consider itself.
The mission itself had not been intended to deliver any such thing. Apollo 8 had been hurriedly redirected from Earth orbit to lunar orbit because the intelligence community suspected the Soviets were preparing a similar flight, and NASA, against the advice of cautious counsel, had decided to send three men to the Moon in a spacecraft whose lunar module was not yet ready, on a rocket that had flown only twice. The mission was a wager. Its purpose was geopolitical: to get there first. The photograph was not in the flight plan.
Then the spacecraft began to rotate. Borman was turning Apollo 8 to a new position for a series of photographs of the lunar surface. The Moon, until that instant, had filled their windows entirely: grey, cratered, harsh in the unfiltered light. The crew had been describing it in the language of mortuaries and battlefields. Lovell would later say it looked like plaster of Paris, or a sort of greyish beach sand. Anders, just hours earlier, had described the long view of the lunar surface from orbit as a stark, lonely, foreboding place. Not somewhere one would wish to linger.
And then the windows rotated past the horizon.
What happened next was preserved by the open microphone. Anders saw it first.
“Oh my God!” he said. “Look at that picture over there. Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
Borman, the commander, with the dry humour of a man whose mission profile did not include this item: “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.”
Anders, already reaching for the Hasselblad: “You got a colour film, Jim? Hand me that roll of colour, quick, would you —”
He took the picture. Frame fourteen of magazine E, Apollo 8, taken by William Anders on December 24, 1968, at a distance of approximately 240,000 miles from the subject. It was the first photograph of the Earth ever taken by a human being from the vicinity of another world.
The image is so familiar by now that it requires an act of imagination to see it again with the eyes of someone who had never seen anything like it. The Earth hangs, suspended, partial — half-lit, half in shadow — against the absolute black of space. In the foreground, the lifeless grey of the lunar surface curves away. The Earth itself is small. Smaller, somehow, than one would expect: a blue and white marble against an infinite dark. The eye searches it for the familiar shapes of continents and finds them, faintly, under the swirling cloud — the curve of Africa, the long horn of South America — but the continents are not what one looks at. What one looks at is the wholeness. The fact that it is one thing.
The photograph would be released to the world a few days later, in the last week of 1968, and reproduced more often, in more languages, in more places, than perhaps any other photograph in the history of photography. The nature photographer Galen Rowell would later call it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. Time put it on the cover. So did Life. So did newspapers in cities that had spent the year burning. The American poet Archibald MacLeish, writing in the New York Times on Christmas Day, found the language before almost anyone else: to see the earth as it truly is, he wrote, 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.
A photograph taken almost as an afterthought, against the orders of the mission commander, by a man who had three seconds to ask his crewmate for a colour roll, became — within a week — the visual symbol of a new way of conceiving the human species.
The astronauts themselves felt it before any of us did. In the hours after they returned to radio contact with Earth, Borman read from the Book of Genesis. It was Christmas Eve; he was on the far side of the Moon; he had just seen his planet entire. He chose the first ten verses. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. He read it to a global audience of perhaps a billion people — the largest audience in the history of broadcasting at that moment — and he read it slowly. The three men reading and listening were Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish; their audience contained every religion and none.
Borman would later say that he had chosen those verses because they were the foundational words of all three of the great Western religions. He felt, in that moment, looking at what they had all been looking at, no smaller language would do.
When the astronauts came home — when they were debriefed and decorated and asked, again and again, in the years that followed, what it had been like — they began to say something that no one had quite said before, and that they had not quite expected to say themselves.
They had gone to the Moon. But what they had seen, what had changed them, was their view of Earth.
This is the observation that the writer Frank White, almost twenty years later, would name. In a 1987 book of the same title, White called it the overview effect. He had interviewed astronaut after astronaut — Americans, Soviets, men and women of different temperaments, different politics, different faiths or none. What he heard in their answers was something so consistent that he came to believe it was not a psychological coincidence but the report of a real phenomenon. They had all, in different words, described the same thing.
Borders, they said, disappear when you look at the Earth from above. There are no lines on the planet. The countries one has been taught to take as primary realities — the things over which most of the wars of human history have been fought — are not visible. What is visible is the weather. Currents. The bright thin shell of the atmosphere, so terrifyingly thin, protectively holding everything that has ever happened inside it. The astronauts spoke, again and again, of the fragility of that shell. Some wept. Some found themselves praying, even those who had not previously thought of themselves as praying people. Some came home and gave their lives to environmental work. Some changed nothing in their outward conduct but described an inward change so deep it could not be undone.
The Saudi astronaut Sultan bin Salman al-Saud, who flew on the Space Shuttle in 1985, gave perhaps the cleanest one-sentence account of what it does.
The first day or so, he said, we all pointed to our countries. On the third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.
Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the Moon, came back with a phrase he would spend the rest of his life trying to defend in scientific terms: an instant global consciousness. He never quite found language his colleagues could accept — his later work would take him toward positions most scientists regarded as fringe — but he was clear about what the experience had been. He had seen the planet whole, and the seeing had changed what kind of mind he had returned home with.
What the astronauts were describing, across all this testimony, was not merely a strong emotion at a beautiful sight. They were describing a reorganization of perception. A shift in what they took to be the foundational facts about the world. The facts they had gone up knowing, in the way one knows things one has not seen, that the Earth was one planet and that humanity was one species. They had come back knowing in a different way. A way they could no longer not know. The view had not informed them; it had reformed them.
It is fair to ask what to do in evaluating testimony like this, with the obvious selection effect. The astronauts were not a random sample of the species. They had been chosen, in the first instance, for psychological steadiness and emotional containment — qualities that probably overlap, more than coincidentally, with the kind of person who comes home from the orbital window and reaches for a language of unity rather than a language of indifference. One cannot fully separate what the experience produced from what the cohort brought to it. What can be said is that the testimony has been too consistent, across too many temperaments and too many languages, to be reduced to the demographics of the program. Pilots and scientists and engineers, drawn from competitive militaries and rival superpowers, have come back saying versions of the same thing for almost sixty years. They are not the same kind of people. The view is what they have in common. The consistency itself is one of the more striking findings in the descriptive psychology of the twentieth century.
What one sees depends on where one is standing when one looks. Standing on the Earth, on any patch of it, one sees the local. The whole is not visible from inside the whole. It becomes visible only when one is at a sufficient distance from it — and the distance is not merely physical. The astronauts had been physically transported a quarter of a million miles, but what changed them was not the miles. It was that the miles had forced their attention into a frame from which the whole could be apprehended at once.
That is what an overview is. It is not just a vantage point. It is the kind of vantage point from which the relationships among parts become visible as parts of a whole, and the whole becomes available as an object of thought and care.
It is among the rarest things that can happen to a perceiving creature.
