Ed. note: This is cross-posted on Medium.
No one on this planet had ever seen a whole picture of the Earth until 1972.
We knew we lived on it, and had a vast amount of useful information about its makeup, its processes, and its place in the solar system. At the time, some of the most insightful individuals had begun to understand that we, the people who live on Earth, actually had the ability to influence the processes taking place on our planet.
But it was hard for many people to grasp this concept. It seemed abstract, distant, hard to visualize.
Enter “Blue Marble”:
It was the first full photo of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the American crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The original Blue Marble is thought by many to be the most-reproduced image of all time.
What made the Blue Marble so special? Sure, it might have been the first full photo of the Earth that we took, but we’ve taken a bunch more since then.