earthrise

Robin McKie's article in The Observer celebrates the 40 year anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the moon - the first human journey to another world - and the photograph taken by Bill Anders on Christmas Eve, 1968.

'Arguably, his picture is also the most important legacy of the Apollo space programme. Thanks to this image, humans could see, for the first time, their planet, not as continents or oceans, but as a world that was 'whole and round and beautiful and small,' as the poet Archibald MacLeish put it.

'Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,' the US astronomer, Carl Sagan, noted. 'There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.' The opinion is shared by Sir David Attenborough. 'I clearly remember my first sight [of the Earthrise photograph]. I suddenly realised how isolated and lonely we are on Earth.'

Indeed, says the UK space historian Robert Poole, the first popular expressions of ecological concern can be traced to the publication of that picture: dazzling blue ocean, the jacket of cloud and the relative invisibility of the land and human settlement. 'It is a rebuke to the vanity of humankind,' says Poole. 'Earthrise was an epiphany in space.'

'It was,' Borman later recalled, 'the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any colour to it. Everything else was either black or white. But not the Earth.' Or as Lovell put it, our home world is simply 'a grand oasis'.

However, of all the efforts to sum up the story of Earthrise, the best is made by TS Eliot in last of the Quartets:

'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.'

extracts from Robin McKie's article,
The mission that changed everything
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008
The Observer, Sunday November 30 2008

photo credit: NASA