Quotes from astronauts on seeing the Blue Marble

These quotes were given in the EOS issue of Dec. 4, 2012, published by the American Geophysical Union:

Astronaut Russell Scheickhart, in describing his experience from space on the Apollo 9 mission said, “When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing. And that makes a change. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the Earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?’”

Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan has reflected about his experience on that flight: “You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you’re looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens—the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and we know, it’s home, it’s people, family, love, life—and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up, and it’s moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.”

See this post on my own impression of the "Blue Marble" picture shown above.

Walls of misunderstanding

Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in Travels with Herodotus about the Great Wall of China

"That is how the world's energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall -and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometers through uninhabited mountains and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world- is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people [...] to communicate, to confer and jointly determine how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect. [..]
The worst aspect of the wall is to turn so many people into its defenders and produce a mental attitude that sees a wall running through everything, imagines the world as being divided into an evil and inferior part, on the outside, and a good and superior part, on the inside"

Not just the Great Wall, but any wall would be the signature of a failure, the failure of human understanding. Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish, was writing this piece in the 50's, about 10 years before the Berlin Wall started to be built. Think this is Past? Walls are still being built or reinforced at the time of writing. Examples are the Israeli West Bank Barrier, The United States-Mexico barrier or the European fences in Ceuta and Melilla among many others.