Stewart Brand: evaluation

Transcript context

…In 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog — you had the view that what the world needs is a photo of the Earth appearing to be one thing. What is the photo we need today? What’s interesting is the various photos of Earth. One of the things I learned early on is people fixed on basically two photographs, the earthrise photograph of the moon in the foreground, which was powerful because you saw in one frame and in one frame of reference, a dead planet and a living planet, and boy, the difference is striking, and you’re glad that you’re on the living planet, and it incites you to want to make sure that it stays living. Then there’s the so-called Blue Marble, where the photograph is taken with the sun behind the spaceship, behind the camera. You see there’s no crescent; there’s no gibbous Earth. It’s just a big round Earth like people expect, which of course is the rarest photograph you can take. You have to be right in line with the sun to get that image. There were thousands of other photographs of Earth. Soviets took some; we took countless ones. Eventually I found their drawer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, where they all are. I just paged through and picked out these amazing images and started using them in later Whole Earth Catalogs. I think one of the best things that’s happened in this last century is that outside-the-planet perspective, and every astronaut comes back with stories of how amazing it was, even though they’re trained for and prepared for being amazed. They are then really amazed by getting out there. The photograph is just a glimpse of how powerful it is to be off-planet and see the planet as a whole. That, I think, will continue as we explore the rest of the solar system, mostly with robots, sometimes with humans. Lately, I don’t think we’re going to the stars, Tyler. No.…

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