When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and...
The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project by Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, one of the...
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in...
Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition. It had been well understood...
Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Moon voyages became popular in the 1630s, their underlying inspiration Galileo’s telescope and the curiosity it piqued about the planet; but the way of reaching the new world on the moon was more important than the substance of an ideal...
Source: Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank E. Manuel
Before any celestial distances or sizes could be calculated, the ancient Greeks first had to establish that the Earth is a sphere. This view gained acceptance in ancient Greece as philosophers became familiar with the notion that ships gradually disappear...
Source: Big Bang by Simon Singh
It is not so much that certain educated men had not already theorized that Earth was round, but that with the return of the first ship Victoria the expedition’s wealthy financial backers had visual evidence that ships could circumnavigate the...
Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty
The first of these schemes derives from the fact that the generally accepted "flat earth" was, all of a sudden, proved to be a sphere by the voyage of Magellan's ships around the world.
Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty
Being a sphere, it therefore had to be a finite object, with a finite—that is, limited—surface area. With this awakening the ideas of world trade and related colonial proprietary rights were born.
Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty
While almost everyone is taught that the Earth is a sphere with all of us somehow glued to it by gravity, the reality of our circumstance did not really begin to sink in until the famous frame-filling Apollo photograph of...
Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is the experience of seeing first-hand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately...
Thus, we can begin to think of the immense universe in which our green mantled earth is but a tiny speck whirling around our sun, one of the many stars that range throughout space-time.
Source: Nature and Human Nature by Lawrence K. Frank
It's a small world after all
Well, you can have your place up in outer space, 'cause my home is where my food is grown
Back to the earth, I lived - and they all follow
Back to the earth, I screamed - and no one listened to me
Crazy on a ship of fools - Crazy on a ship of fools - Turn this boat around - Back to my loving ground
My world is a flood - Slowly I become one with the mud
For all the places I have been, I'm no place without you
Back to the earth, I feel it - Back to the earth I'm fallin'
So I walk up on high, and I step to the edge - To see my world below
You're just living out life on a big blue ball
From a distance the world looks blue and green
Cause It’s the World I Know
We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.
