^B00:00:13 >> John Haskell: Welcome, everyone, to the Library of Congress. I'm John Haskell, director of the Kluge Center here at the Library. The Kluge Center brings leading thinkers in the humanities and social sciences to the Library for periods in residence, to do research in the collections, and we showcase the work of those scholars in public events like this. This afternoon, Bruce Clarke, who's sitting directly next to me here, the Baruch Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress chair in astrobiology, and the Paul Whitfield Horn professor of literature and science at Texas Tech University, will moderate a discussion on the rich cultural impact of the so-call Earthrise photo. The first photo of the Earth from the perspective of the moon, which was taken on December 24, 1968. I do want to recognize one of our alumni Blumberg chairs, David Grinspoon, is sitting over there, and raising his hand over there, and -- ^M00:01:06 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:10 -- I'm going to quickly introduce the other panelists, and we'll get right to it. Next to -- next to Bruce is media artist David McConville, who will speak broadly to the impact the photograph had on our worldview, perhaps comparable really in certain respects to the Copernican revolution. Co-director of the -- Anne Goodyear, right next to him, co-director of the Bowden -- Bowdoin College Museum of Arts explores the interconnection between art, and the tremendous advances in technology as reflected in the Apollo mission. Next to Anne is Neil Maher. He looks at how the Earthrise photo became an icon of the environmental movement. Neil is a -- an historian at Rutgers University. And at the end, Margaret Weitekamp of the National Air and Space Museum -- I should note that Margaret's quoted in obituaries for Jerrie Cobb in the -- who was in the first cohort of female astronauts in the late '50s and early '60s. She's quoted both in "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" today, but you can look -- it's a -- they're fascinating obituaries. Margaret would rather have you read the "New York Times" one, as her book is cited there [laughter]. She works at the National Air and Space Museum, as I noted, and considers how expressive artifacts from spaceflight missions have conveyed a sense of our human identity. I'm going to turn this over to Bruce, but please join me in welcoming the entire panel. ^M00:02:35 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:43 >> Bruce Clarke: Thank you so much, everyone. It's really wonderful to see you here in this glorious room, and welcome once again to the Kluge Center. Here we are at Earth Rise Day. Yesterday was Earth Day, and I have declared today Earth Rise Day [laughter], to carry on that theme. Now, let's see how we're doing here. There we go. So I am privileged to be this year's Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress chair in astrobiology, and as you see, the -- it explains the task that the Blumberg chair -- one of the important ones is to bring astrobiology to a wider public, and kind of explain what that's all about. So -- so perhaps you're asking yourself, what is astrobiology? So I thought -- well, there's -- it is the scientific study of life in the universe. So you've got your astrophysics, perhaps more familiar with astrophysics because we -- science believes, with good foundation, that the matter and energy of the universe is, in fact, universal. And so, we can study distant galaxies on the basis of what we understand for atoms, and chemical reactions, and how energies move through the world, but what about biology? I mean, that's the question. Is biology -- is there any other biology out there? That's the question astrobiology asks, and if we can find some, then we'd have something to compare to the biology that we're familiar with. So biology, as a science, has developed not giving really a thought to the cosmos, but just saying, "Life on Earth is life." Like, the -- life is life on Earth, but give that just a bit of a cosmological twist, and then you think, but isn't there more life out there in the universe somewhere? Well, let's see if we can find it, and think about how we might detect it from a distance. So astrobiology is a kind of -- it's a super-biological -- it's a cosmological twist on biology. Okay. Now, Earthrise -- here is one of many celebrations, this one from the wonderful writer Lewis Thomas, seized by James Lovelock, co-author of the Gaia hypothesis as a -- as an epigraph for his second book. "Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth catching the breath is that it is alive. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright, blue sky is the rising Earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos." If you could look long enough, you'd see the clouds swirling. If you had been looking a very long geologic time, you could've seen the continents themselves in motion. That's the astrobiological view that can open up out of Earthrise to think about that long -- the Earth in its long tenure as a planet in the solar system evolving under the clouds. So Gaia, which is actually my topic of research while I'm here as the astrobiology chair, looking into the -- NASA's connection to the origins of Gaia theory. Gaia is an astrobiological object as well, a child of NASA. Now, I want to very briefly take you through one more revolution in human perspective. So if you happen to Google Earthrise, but you look -- but you went to the Apollo 8 part of NASA's website resources, you -- you might find this page. And you look at it, and you say, "What's wrong? Did they forget to put it the right way?" But in fact, interestingly, the caption reads, "This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation." Well, what does orientation mean when you're in space? So all that means is that he was in a capsule, and you can see the animation in the next room. There's a wonderful NASA animation of the -- sort of the event of the taking of the photograph. It just meant that as he was standing on the floor of his lunar orbiter, he took the picture, and it came out looking like that. So -- but the orientation is, in space, arbitrary. But that reminds us that -- but then, when you flip it -- so there's Earthrise. This has now made the Earthrise. That 90-degree turn has given us an Earthrise, where before we had a moonrise, or a sunrise, but now we've got orientation because we are evolved to feel that down is where the Earth is, and up is toward the sky. And if it's -- so it must be going up, and so the Earth is rising. But that's already a kind of artifact of the way we see things. Yeah. That was my cool point I wanted to make [laughter], okay? So given the original orientation, a 90-degree twist -- I'm now going to read -- frames the image in terms of our habitual orientation on Earth in relation to the sun and the moon. Earthrise, then, has been invented as much as it's been discovered, and captured by a really good camera, which gives the great production values. It responds to our desire and our need for cosmic orientation. We need -- yeah, you got to orient to somewhere [laughter]. ^M00:09:55 Here on Earth, Earthrise brings us back to Earth in reminding us of our need for orientation. Now, then, these four wonderful speakers are going to take us on a journey that will loop away from Earthrise and back again, bringing in really fascinating horizons of interest in this object that has brought us here today. And so, buckle your seatbelts. We'll take a ride through space and time, and, David, the floor is yours. >> David McConville: Thank you, Bruce, and happy birthday. Earth Rise Day happens to fall on Bruno's birthday today. Yeah. ^M00:10:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:10:47 So thank you for the invitation, and I thought it would be maybe appropriate to start off with some historical reflections on the significance of this image. But it's really the story of our collective imagination, and to back into this, we really need to revisit time immemorial. For countless generations, cultures around the world have believed that the Earth was alive, that our species' survival has really depended on our ability to synchronize with the cycles of life -- way-finding, timekeeping, hunting, gathering, all kinds of things. And the key to this was the accurate observations of celestial objects, in particular this celestial sphere which seemed to rotate around a central point at the middle of the heavens, and this was widely perceived as the axis mundi, the center of the world, the portal between the heavens and Earth. But in ancient Greece, around 2500 years ago, a radical new vision emerged. In his "Timaeus," Plato described the creation of a spherical cosmos by a rational architect who brought order out of the elemental chaos, and infused the living world with its soul. And Plato insisted that the human intellect could know the mind of this creator, this architect, and in short, Plato began imagining the world from the outside, not from inside of the celestial sphere. And it was from this disembodied, Platonic perspective that planted -- that the seeds of the western paradigm were really planted, that Plato's student Aristotle later came long and described the heavens as a series of these kind of masculine spheres surrounding a feminine Earth. The spheres were eternal. The Earth was corruptible. And in the Middle Ages, this cosmological paradigm was rediscovered, and it was adopted by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. And they retained the idea that Earth was at the center, and it was a corruptible center of the cosmos. It was the realm of sin, of death, and decay. It was actually the furthest place from heaven, and existence was believed to be a continuum defined by a kind of hierarchical scale. This came to be known as the great chain of being, with, of course, God naturally at the top, outside of the cosmos, like the creator, and here, in this 17th-century image, you can see the name of God in the clouds, literally holding a chain around the wrist of Mother Nature. So it was quite literally assumed to be a chain of being. Another image from 1579 -- this continuum of existence was defined by a kind of hierarchical scale, and here we see God at the top. Let's see -- going down through the layers, we see the humans, the angels -- the angels at the top, then the humans, then the animals, then the plants, then the minerals, and at the very bottom, you see Hell, which was, if you remember in Dante's "Inferno," believed to be the center of the Earth, and in this case, with a female devil. Along comes Copernicus, and in his famous text -- excuse me one second -- "On the Evolution of the Heavenly Spheres," cracks in this cosmology began to appear. He challenged, through his mathematical calculations and observations, the idea that Earth was at the center. He instead wanted to place the sun at the center in this new vision of the world, and he also believed that the human intellect could know the mind of God. He proposed that the Earth was actually moving around the sun, not the other way around, and this is a book here at the Library of Congress. And this new cosmic model really challenged the long-held intuitive belief that the cosmos was circling and rotating around the Earth. This event's been widely discussed and analyzed, often mythologized even under the rubric of the Copernican revolution. Thomas Kuhn famously coined the term "paradigm shift," which we hear all the time now, but he was using that to describe the effects of this sun-centered cosmos on the medieval imagination. And yet, as his book title, "Evolution of the Heavenly Spheres," and his image demonstrates, he didn't actually challenge the notion of the spheres. This was something that was still kept very much within the collective imagination, and it's often claimed that he dethroned humanity from the center of the Earth. We kind of confuse anthropocentrism with geocentrism, and for many people, it actually had quite the opposite effect. Galileo famously said, and I quote, "Earth is not the dump heap of the filth and dregs of the universe." That was implied by geocentrism, because even more significant disruptions were to come, because of Galileo's telescope, because of Keppler's calculations. These new observational instruments and mathematical calculations eventually shattered these spheres in the European imagination, and the celestial orbs -- the heavenly spheres -- were gradually transformed into orbits. And the consequences of this were quite paradoxical. On the one hand, it challenged the notion of heaven as a physical place high above the Earth, and when you hear the kind of famous Nietzsche quote about "God is dead," he was actually referring to this, saying, "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon, to get rid of the heavens?" And at the same time, the abolishing of this distinction between the celestial and terrestrial realm implied that everywhere was just like here. As Bruce mentioned, we now believe the laws of physics govern the universe equally. So something very deeply was embedded into modern -- the modern -- modern version of science, is that Earth is mediocre, actually. It's just like everywhere else, and this became known as the mediocrity principle. And this quest really continued throughout science. The desire to understand the laws of nature were predicated on the idea that the human intellect could know the mind of God, and we could have an objective God's-eye view. And so, science unfolded through this quest, and the idea was that we could really separate objective facts from subjective values. And increasingly, because of Newton and many others, the universe seemed like a predictable machine. These equations were extraordinarily powerful. They were describing celestial mechanics, and it seemed like the universe was a giant clock. And what we might call the mechanistic worldview took hold. And as the scientists developed, they enabled new technologies, with which we're deeply familiar, and these advancements accelerated the process of us mapping the world, and globalizing the world in many ways over the past few centuries. And the world that was once perceived as living increasingly became mapped and quantified, and a lot of the living relationships became resources. And so, as colonization expanded, these resources were to be controlled and exploited, and as a consequence of this, we began to explore -- oh, excuse me -- technical glitches, as always. [Laughter] Oh, Lord. Okay. This is the beautiful recreation of Earthrise, done by our friends at NASA. That was actually built on data from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, and what I wanted to point out in the slides that were just skipped were that the desire to escape the planet was really emerging out of a lot of the disenchantment that started to occur. That because, in many ways, we expanded to the point where there were no more frontiers, that we wanted to start to understand how it is we could get to other realms, to colonize other places. And as the Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to orbit another world, they found themselves enchanted by the sight of our cosmic home emerging over the moon's horizon, as we see here. And in doing so, they seemingly actually achieved this long, you know, desired quest for this God's-eye view of our place in the universe. The mission commander, Frank Borman, acknowledged as much. Later on, he was saying that -- at the time, he was saying, "This must be what God sees," when they saw the Earth come over that sideways horizon. And the mythological role of Apollo 8 was also fortified very soon thereafter, actually on Christmas Eve, when the U.S. Information Agency suggested that they -- the crew take turns reading from the Biblical creation story. And they live-streamed this to the largest television audience in history on Christmas Eve, and here's a quick clip of that. >> In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth, and the Earth were without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, "Let there be light." >> David McConville: How many people saw that? I'm curious. Wow. ^M00:19:58 I bet you remember where you were, obviously. This was a major moment in a lot of people's lives, and it also had paradoxical consequences, because William Anders, who actually snapped the phot of Earthrise, later claimed that the experience undercut his religious beliefs. So even the astronauts had radically different responses to this, and Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, ended up commenting that he felt like this was the moment at which the old gods died, and the new ones hadn't been born yet. And he basically was saying the hero's journey as individuals was no longer adequate, because we were collectively engaging in a process together. In other words, these images of our planetary oasis suspended in a cosmic void can simultaneously induce a sense of sublime beauty and existential dread, and the ambivalent responses to them are a testament to the paradox that they really represent. These whole-Earth photos both reveal and reinforce the fallacy of this sort of totalizing God's-eye view of our place in the universe. They're always incomplete -- that when we think of Earth, we often think of these images, but there's so much that we don't see. Though they frequently induce a sense of wonder, they catalyze planetary self-reflection. Quite famously, they're always partial views, and they fail particularly to show the extent of the influence that we humans have had on our planetary home. This is starting to change, thanks in large part to our new sensory prosthetics, our satellite observation networks, that we can illuminate dynamic processes now, much like the quote that Bruce read. We can see things over time. We can see things beyond the visible spectrum that we normally have access to, and we can see invisible relationships. Like in this case, we can see the dust coming off of the Zehel [assumed spelling] that's seeding the rainforest of the Amazon, which is then creating the water that's being pumped through the atmospheric rivers. So this very much is like a dynamic, living organism that we can begin to perceive, thanks to our new technological extensions. Because in many ways, the most significant revelation of the Space Age is actually that Earth is alive, that this Gaian planet is quite technically the ecological center of our universe. We have not found life anywhere else, which was not the expectation at the beginning of the Space Age. And while it's tempting to suggest that the Copernican revolution has come full circle, I think the implications are actually far more significant. Our continued existence as a species depends on our ability to understand, and stabilize, and synchronize with these cycles of life at a planetary scale now. So I think it's, once again, time for us to ask ourselves how should we be living on a living planet? Thank you. ^M00:22:55 [ Applause ] ^M00:23:02 >> Bruce Clarke: Next, we've got Anne Collins Goodyear. ^M00:23:05 ^M00:23:21 Yeah. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: Wonderful. Well, I want to start by thanking each of my fellow panelists, the Kluge Center, and particularly Bruce Clarke for the invitation to be here today, and happy birthday, Bruno. Wonderful. >> Bruce Clarke: Thank you. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: On December 24th, 1968, William Anders snapped a photograph, the most celebrated of a series of like pictures that has now become among the most influential of the Space Age. Although born of an astronaut, Anders's impulse to give expression to something larger than the self through an image might easily be characterized as an artistic act. And indeed, in describing the impact of Earthrise, I would like to suggest that it both reflected and inspired a visual idiom of emotional response to the moon shot that has forever colored how we, as products of the Space Age, understand our relationship to the Earth. While Robert Poole has debunked the claim that the opportunity on the part of the crew of Apollo 8 to capture pictures of the Earth was unanticipated, he acknowledges the awe and sense of surprise reflected in the astronauts' comments, as the Earth rose at the beginning of their first -- of their fourth orbit of the moon. But if Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were stunned by what they saw, I would like to suggest that it was not because the view defied the imagination, but rather because it fit so well with existing paradigms. The same may have been true for the audience that enthusiastically embraced the image. Indeed, Anders' photograph has striking similarity with Chesley Bonestell's 1952 illustration for "Colliers" of a rotating space station, positioned high above the terrestrial surface. The photograph similarly echoes Robert McCall's -- is this changing? Oh, sorry. Right. Ghost in the machine -- oops, sorry. >> Bruce Clarke: There you go. You had just -- you got it, then went past it. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: This will work. This will work. You can see it well enough. This is fine. The photograph similarly echoes Robert McCall's 1967 poster for Stanley Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey," picturing a space shuttle rocketing away from a strikingly-similar space station above Planet Earth. Anders' photograph, then, grew out of a long tradition of imagery that prepared the human imagination to contemplate and execute the extraordinary achievement of extraterrestrial travel. While the role of popular literature and illustration in shaping the Space Age has been previously described by scholars, I would like to address how NASA's development of an art program in the early 1960s provided a forum to stimulate and disseminate responses to the moon shot that would have lasting significance. Created in 1963, at the urging of James Webb, NASA's second administrator, the NASA Art Program had among its aims both to capture and share information about a powerful Cold War initiative, the American space program, designed to put man on the moon in advance of the Soviet Union. But unlike other forms of publicity, the art program transformed the political initiative into a human quest, endowing pragmatic considerations with historic -- one might even say cosmic -- significance. As the administrator noted in 1962, responding to his receipt of a portrait of Alan Shepard donated by the artist Bruce Stevenson [assumed spelling] to the space agency. And I quote, "The interpretation of artists can give unique insight into aspects of our history-making foray into space, and may make a substantial contribution to the history of American art." Webb's insight was as prescient as his program, a forerunner of the NEA, NEH, and present-day artist residencies, was innovative. ^M00:28:10 ^M00:28:19 >> Bruce Clarke: Here, let me. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: Okay, thanks. >> Bruce Clarke: Okay. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: "I like what you're doing with space," ran the punch line of a cartoon published in "Art in America" in the first issue of 1967. If the pun at the heart of Eldon Dedini's cartoon prompts laughter, particularly given the disparate appearance of the two central characters in the drawing. The quip also has poignancy because of the commonality between the aspiration of -- aspirations of avant-garde artists and those of the scientist, engineers, and technologists epitomized in the figure of the astronaut. As Hereward Lester Cooke, curator of paintings at the National Gallery, and one of the co-directors of NASA's art program, observed in the letter of invitation to artists participating in the space program -- and I quote. "Space travel started in the imagination of the artist, and it is reasonable that artists should continue to be the witnesses and recorders of our efforts in this field. NASA is commissioning your imagination." Perhaps not surprisingly, in order to convey the monumentality of the moon shot, which aimed to make real ancient visions of celestial travel, many artists turned to the example of religious imagery. And I might ask to advance the slide here. Norman Rockwell's "The Longest Step, Astronauts Grissom and Young Suiting Up" of 1965 depicting Gemini astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom -- we can advance it again, thank you -- ^M00:30:05 -- deliberately emulates the form of a Renaissance altar piece, positioning the computerized equipment behind the astronauts in a strikingly-cruciform configuration. The painting appeared as a double-paged spread in "Look Magazine" on April 20th, 1965, likely appearing on newsstands in time to coincide with Easter Sunday, which fell on April 18th that year. Eight months later -- and we can advance again -- in the midst of the Christmas season, "Life Magazine" published a pictorial response to Dante's "Inferno" by Robert Rauschenberg, featuring in its midst a reoccurring pair of astronauts. The accompanying article explained, "Like Dante and Vergil, they are voyagers into unearthly realms." Works such as Mitchell Jamieson's "First Steps" -- and we can advance the slide again -- and Peter Hurd's "Pre-Dawn" similarly reflected the astronaut's privileged relationship, physically and spiritually, with the cosmos. And were among works included in a 1965 exhibition, "Eyewitness to Space," originated here in Washington, D.C. at the National Gallery of Art, which, aside from a showing of the "Mona Lisa," attracted the largest audience in the museum's history. The use of images, then, to frame the spiritual import of the space program could not have been lost upon the well-educated astronauts of the Apollo 8 program -- of the Apollo 8 mission, rather, even if it was not explicitly acknowledged. Given the use of religious tropes to convey the significance of American space exploration, a metaphor not readily available to the country's Soviet adversary. It is perhaps not surprising that a space mission timed for the Christmas season -- we can advance it again -- should have brought about a particularly spiritual response on the part of the crew of Apollo 8, and indeed, that it should have been Christmas Eve during which the astronauts first saw the Earth with new eyes. The crew's public reading of Genesis -- and thanks for sharing that with us -- that evening further testifies to their state of mind. But if the astronauts had brilliantly, if perhaps unwittingly, created an image that fit within a well-established trope, the delivery of this image back to a terrestrial audience similarly changed the terms through which the technological achievement of space exploration could itself be understood. Transforming it into something beautiful, not simply thanks to the images it made possible, but because of the creative process it manifested. Not insignificantly, numerous artists responding to the moon launch in the wake of Apollo 8 would turn to photographs made by NASA for their inspiration. We can advance it. "Nothing will already be the same," observed Robert Rauschenberg in his 1969 collage, "Stoned Moon Drawing," published in the December 1969 issue of "Studio International." Combining images of Cape Canaveral and the Apollo 11 moonwalk with those of the print shop, the artist described parallels between the intensely-collaborative process required for the success of the moon shot, and that required for print-making. In a pithy assessment of Cape Canaveral, the artist described it as "a theater where performance is all." Red Grooms, who attended the Apollo 15 launch, turned to official NASA photographs to create an almost-overwhelmingly large tableau of astronauts David Scott and James Irwin exploring the lunar surface with camera and lunar rover. And I should mention that the standing astronaut is around 12 feet tall. The piece was so big that it was almost impossible for the Guggenheim to cram it into its exhibition space, which was, of course, part of the point. As the artist put it, "I wanted to do the sort of thing the NASA people were doing -- build something incomprehensible, and then try to get it off the ground [laughter]." If Rauschenberg and Grooms could celebrate the achievement of the lunar landing by drawing parallels with contemporary art practices -- we can advance again -- Michelle Stuart's 2018 installation, "These Fragments Against Time," offers a cautionary coda. Invoking implicitly, if not explicitly, Anders' famous photograph, Stuart's artwork features images of the 2017 solar eclipse, made aboard a sailboat named Jupiter 30 miles offshore. Here, Earth appears not as a blue marble, but as a dark spot, a shadow perhaps of its former self. Pictured not in the Age of Aquarius, 50 years past, but instead in that of the present-day -- fossilized shells and animal bones evoke the dangerous implications of plastics polluting our waterways, and the industrial emissions transforming our climate. As Stuart has observed -- we can advance it again -- photographs not being singular in meaning, they assume the identity that we give them, and the context that we place them in. With its echo of Earthrise, then, Stuart's work reframes the picture's significance, even as she honors its original, ecological implications, transforming its expression of wonder and it's prompt towards responsible stewardship into a mournful lament of regret for an opportunity that we may already have lost. Thank you. ^M00:36:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:36:36 >> Bruce Clarke: Want me to -- >> Neil M. Maher: I'm losing faith that, as we move down the line, the clicker will work, so maybe I could switch seats with -- >> Bruce Clarke: -- you want it -- sure. >> Neil M. Maher: -- is that okay? And I'll move back. >> Bruce Clarke: Okay. Okay. >> Neil M. Maher: Great. Thank you. I want to thank the Kluge Center for putting on this event, and also for welcoming me back. I was here seven years ago, I think, when I was doing a lot of the research for the book that I'm going to be presenting material from today. So it's just wonderful to be back in a whole different capacity. I'm going to begin with a story about this man right here, Stewart Brand, and the story takes place in February of 1966, when Stewart Brand is a young man, put 100 micrograms of LSD on his tongue, went up to his rooftop in North Beach in San Francisco, and took in the view. And what he felt when he was up there looking over the San Francisco skyline was that he could actually -- he believed he could see the curvature of the Earth, and he believed that it was an indication that the Earth was finite, not infinite, and that it was something we needed to take care of. And he thought, how can I get people out there -- how can I convey this message to ordinary people who aren't on a rooftop in San Francisco tripping [laughter]? And he thought a color photograph of the Earth would do the trick. If people could see that, then they would think similarly about the Earth. He said that if they had that image, the Earth would look complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way. The next day, he came off the rooftop. He went to a local print shop, and printed up a couple hundred buttons with a very simple question, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" Stewart Brand claims he sent these buttons to congressmen. He also sent them to administrators at NASA, and he makes the claims that those buttons helped to spur a realization that they needed such a picture, and that Apollo -- the Apollo mission began to take those pictures. So we have Earthrise in 1968, one year after Brand printed up those buttons, and then, four years later, we have the famous Whole Earth image. And it turns out that NASA officials consciously altered the trajectory of Apollo 17 to capture that Whole Earth image. And what Stewart Brand claimed was that these images like this helped to spawn the environmental movement. Now, when I was doing research for my book, which is really about how the space race in the 1960s influenced many of the grassroots political movements of the '60s, from civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement, to feminism and the counterculture, what I realized was that Stewart Brand's story just doesn't add up, for two reasons. First of all, NASA had been taking similar pictures of the Earth from space prior to his 1967 event on the rooftop, and secondly, that the visual culture of the environmental movement very early on did not include images of Earth from space. ^M00:39:57 So what I want to do is, I want to ask a very simple question, and then try to go on in the rest of my talk to answer it. And that question is, how did Earthrise and other images like it become environmental icons? How did they become green? And I want to return to Stewart Brand. Stewart Brand should've known better, because he knew that there were images of the Earth from space before Earthrise, and also especially before Whole Earth. This is an ATS satellite image from 1967. We saw this in the earlier presentation. Stewart Brand knew about this image, and actually used it for the cover of his Whole Earth catalog in 1968. NASA was aware of these images as well, and actually went out of its way to promote them to the American public. They sent them out to newspapers throughout the country for reprinting. Here's an image from "The Washington Post" of that same ATS satellite image on the front cover, and then "The Spokesman Review," which is from Spokane, Washington, uses the same image, along with photographs of a debutante ball cotillion. NASA sold these images for a dollar apiece. They were also available in children's toys. The Viewmaster 3D viewer -- I have one at home that has some of these images in it, you know, prior to Earthrise. So the result is that during the 1960s, it was almost impossible for Americans or people throughout the whole world to avoid images of Earth from space. So now, I want to talk about Brand's second flawed aspect to his story, and that involves the meaning of these images. The original meaning of Earthrise was not -- from my research, not as being seen as an environmental symbol for stewardship. Rather, it had an alternative meaning that was forged during that Christmas Eve reading of Genesis that was just talked about. Again, it was Apollo 8. They were orbiting the Earth -- the moon in preparation for the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and they read from the Book of Genesis while beaming images from space back to Earth. And they had also taken this image as well that had become -- that was published in "The New York Times," of all places. And the following day, after that biblical reading, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Archibald MacLeish, published "Riders on the Earth," an essay in "The New York Times" that described the image this way. "To see the Earth as it truly is, small, and blue, and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold, brothers who know they are truly brothers." So the original meaning -- original meaning was global unity. It was not environmental stewardship, and when I went to look for further evidence of this, I went to the Earth Day Celebration in 1970, which occurred just less than two years later. If this was an environmental image, surely it would be appearing in the Earth Day Celebration photos, in the Earth Day Celebration posters, t-shirts, that sort of thing. But it wasn't there. What I found instead, after looking at dozens of Earth Day archives, were mostly images of pollution -- dying trees, smog-filled skies, garbage-strewn landscapes. I did the same research in 1980 for Earth Day, and again, very, very few images of the Earth from space. And it wasn't until 1990 when those images start to show up. Here's the Earth Day Celebration in Washington, D.C. in 1990. So the question is, how did Earthrise become green? And what I argue is that part of the answer to that has to do with NASA technology, and specifically, with NASA satellites, and the capture of global data. In 1971, NASA held its first conference on the possibilities of satellite assessment, remote sensing from space. We see here the report from that conference in 1971, remote measurement of pollution, and in it, NASA concluded that satellites in space, if developed properly, could provide essential data regarding pollution that cannot be obtained by any other means. NASA did not just hold conferences. It also responded by creating technologies that could capture this global data. In 1978, it launched its Nimbus 7 satellite, which NASA called its "pollution patrol satellite," and it was able to measure atmospheric pollution globally every six days. And this was the first truly global data set, and I argue that this global data is what helped to make Earthrise and images like it green. And I'll just provide one example, and perhaps in the Q&A, we can discuss other examples as well. From the 1950s through the 1980s, a British scientific team located in the Antarctic measured ozone continuously from the early 1950s through the 1980s, and they published their findings in 1985 in "Nature Magazine." And they published what they called ozone -- an ozone depletion that was occurring during this time, and this is the graph that was the centerpiece of their report. When it was published, few beyond the scientific community took note of this issue. It really went under the radar. NASA scientists, though, were quite alarmed, because their satellites had missed this event, this data. So what NASA did is, first, it recalibrated its satellites to capture this sort of data, and then it took that data, and instead of depicting it in an image like this, they instead modeled the data and overlaid it onto an image like this, which is an image that is quite reminiscent of the Earthrise and the Whole Earth image. Here, we see the contour lines where the data has been smoothed, also the color being added for specific amounts of ozone, and what we really have is what had been ozone depletion becoming an ozone hole, and also a global environmental crisis. And there are other examples, but what I'm really trying to say here is that -- to answer the question "how did Earthrise become green?" Well, it was layered with global data that made those images into representations of environmental crisis, and this occurred in the '80s, long after the Earthrise photo was taken. Thank you very much. ^M00:47:37 [ Applause ] ^M00:47:46 ^M00:47:53 >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: I think I will piggyback on Neil's very good solution. So thank you, again, for the opportunity to come here, and it's always fun going last, because you get to just sit here and listen for the -- most of the event. So in December, I attended the kickoff event for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo missions, which we're celebrating mostly this year, and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is taking a leading role in the national celebrations of this. And this 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 event called "The Spirit of Apollo" was held at Washington's National Cathedral, and it celebrated Apollo 8, and also, especially, the Christmas Eve broadcast from 1968. And you see here the lunar window that actually holds a piece of lunar rock in the center of that upper circle. When Mission Commander Jim Lovell spoke, he talked about the Earthrise image, and he said, "That one photo provided convincing evidence that many nations are but one world." So it's been said that, by sending men to the moon, we actually discovered Earth. So given Dr. Clarke's charge today to consider the rich cultural impact of the Earthrise photo, I started thinking about the ways that, after Earthrise, people started thinking in different ways about Earth as a planet. So for today's talk, I thought that what I would do was explore three different expressive artifacts that convey our human identity, and were sent on subsequent space missions. So first, this is a duplicate that's in the National Air and Space Museum's collection of a silicon disk that the Apollo 11 astronauts actually left on the surface of the moon in July 1969. It's about the size of a 50-cent piece. ^M00:49:54 It contains goodwill messages from 73 different heads of state that were reproduced by a technique they called ultra-microfiche. It's etched, then, in a disk of almost pure silicon, and it's in an aluminum case. When you look into the history of this object, the planners for Apollo 11 only really started thinking about commemorative actions on that mission in February of 1969. Remember that the landing is in July of 1969. So -- but they set first a set of goals and parameters for what those kinds of actions would be, and there were many. And there's a rich history there. I'm just going to look at this one object, but the -- two of the first three of those goals and parameters for what these commemorative actions could be really emphasized representing the whole planet. So after the first, of course, which was no activity should jeopardize crew safety, then they said these should be actions that are in good taste from a world perspective, and have an historic, forward-step for all mankind theme. The decision actually to add these messages from heads of state only came in June. So working in consultation with the U.S. State Department, NASA sent out 116 requests to embassies around the world. They got 81 replies, and those included 73 different messages. The company that actually produced the disks -- and I'll give their name -- Sprig Electric Company of North Adams, Massachusetts -- because they did yeomen's work, they were only approached on June 23rd. So ultimately, at the end of the historic first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin had a beta cloth bag, which contained this disk, a small gold olive branch, an Apollo 1 patch in commemoration of the three astronauts who had lost their lives in 1967, two medals commemorating Soviet cosmonauts who had died. And he then basically tossed that onto the lunar surface as they were on their way back into the lunar module. For today's purposes, in addition to that history, I want to draw your attention to the header that is physically on the artifact, "From Planet Earth." The second artifact I wanted to draw your attention to is the plaque that was attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in 1972. On your left here, you see an image of the full-scale engineering model of that spacecraft, which is in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, just down the street. The plaque was designed by noted science popularizer, Carl Sagan, whose papers are here at the Library courtesy of Seth MacFarland. And he worked with astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake, and you will remember Drake from the Drake Equation that can be used to calculate the probability of radio communicative intelligent life in the universe. The artwork was actually done by Linda Salzman Sagan, who was Sagan's wife at the time. And as they were developing the Pioneer spacecraft to fly past Jupiter and Saturn, many of the folks working on this realized that this would be the first human-built objects that were set on trajectories that could go out of our solar system, and then, in fact, would have enough speed to do just that. In a seminar about astrobiology, it's especially fitting to point out that they were really imbued with an optimism that intelligent life existed, and that this would be humanity's first message sent out of the solar system by ours. But they recognized that they faced a basic communications problem. On this Earth, we don't all speak the same language. We don't all even use the same alphabet. How do you communicate without written language? So Sagan, and Drake, and others had actually started a series of thought experiments were they would send each other messages in the mails without a key to see could they come up with a meaningful message that somebody else who was in on the project could then decode and come up with what they had meant. And largely, as I understand it, most of those failed [laughter]. But this simple message about humanity then simply tried to give an illustration of who are we. So a man and a woman, not holding hands -- they feared it would look like it might be one organism [laughter] -- set against a kind of profile there. You can see the curve of the shape of the spacecraft behind them, that gives you some sense of scale, and there's a binary number to the woman's -- on the right of the image that gives you some sense of that. And then, next to them there is actually -- that multi-pointed star is a 14-point map to nearby pulsars that locates, in space and in time, our solar system. And you can see along the bottom, then, a very -- a rudimentary map that shows with this, our little solar system has, at the time, nine planets, and that this vehicle had originated from the third one. The set of two circles in the top is a hydrogen atom that provides some basic benchmarking according to the most abundant element in the universe. So fairly simply message. This is what we look like. This is where we are. Hello. So this is actually something that then they were really able to build on when they were putting this together, and to think about how they would be able to send a more complex message. And this, then, is what we get with the Voyager spacecraft, and the artifact that -- on the right, my third example, is the gold cover for the sounds of Earth phonograph record that were included on the two Voyager 1 and 2 planetary exploration probes in 1977. So these were, as many of you may know, planetary exploration probes that took advantage of an alignment of the outer planets, and that were then going to be on even faster trajectories going out of the solar system. So the piece that you're looking at is actually the cover for the phonograph records, and so there's essentially two parts now to this more-sophisticated message. So this, as you see, echoes some of the same symbols. You'll recognize the hydrogen symbol on the bottom right, next to the pulsar map, and this then comes with an imagery set of instructions on how to build a phonograph record. They did include a stylus, so they were not counting on the aliens to necessarily have a Radio Shack where they could get the equipment. But the phonograph records that were inside, protected by these covers, were a compilation of images, sounds, music that had been selected by a committee at Cornell headed by Sagan. And it begins with spoken greetings in 55 different languages, which, at the time, represented the languages of 65% of the planet. Now, Annie Druyan, who later became Sagan's wife, led the music selection, and I bring it to your attention in this context as one of the ways that Earthrise then begins to get people thinking about us as a planet. Because in many ways, this record is really one of the early examples of world music, of trying to represent -- and she worked actively with musicologists to select not only western classical music -- Bach's Brandenburg Concerto is included, but also Navajo, Chinese music, folk music from Benin in West Africa, an Indian Raga. Famously, they included "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry as an example of modern music, and she thought really the sounds of the modern world. But they even included whale song, which had only recently been recorded. So start thinking about our planet perhaps as not only human-centered. Sagan famously called the record on the Voyager spacecraft "a bottle thrown in the cosmic ocean," and I think it's a fascinating conception. And if you go online, you can really dig into this record as a conception of Earth as a planet of motion, of images, and of sound. So as I was looking at these three artifacts, I was thinking it would be really nice to kind of carry this forward to the present. Apollo 8's Earthrise starts a trend that continues unabated, and actually, the more I looked into it, the more I realized that these artifacts, in some ways, represent a real moment in time, and a somewhat rare effort. There are many things that are included on spacecraft, and they're often done to attract public attention or support, but not necessarily past the three I've talked about as thoughtful or meaningful messages about who we are. For instance, on the left here, the Mars Phoenix lander from 2008 pictured on our left -- and you can see that it has a CD that has been added to the front -- is more of a time capsule of sorts for future us, for future Martian explorers. So it includes the name of -- the names of 250,000 people who sent their names in to be sent to Mars, and it also includes, then, a library that they called "Visions of Mars," science fiction stories and art inspired by the red planet. So the Planetary Society has encouraged public interest in space exploration with a number of these kinds of projects. So the gentlemen here on the right of the image are holding a disk of names, again, provided by the Planetary Society, that was going to be -- whoops -- attached -- giving my next piece away -- to the Cassini-Huygens probe. So since 1996, according to the Planetary Society's website, the full list of active Planetary Society members -- and this then becomes a bit of a membership incentive -- has been flown on 19 different spacecraft. ^M01:00:25 So they've been to Earth orbit, the moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Pluto, three asteroids, two comets, and out of the solar system. So in some ways, as I was looking for artifacts that went a little bit more toward the present, what I find is a deeply human desire to attach our names to things, but not necessarily those kinds of well-thought-out global visions of who we are. And I'm going to suggest that one of the places where people have done that is in science fiction. So for instance, to offer just one example, "Star Trek, The Next Generation" had an episode, one of its best, in 1992 called "The Inner Light." This Hugo Award-winning episode, in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard, here on our left, played by Patrick Stewart, gets knocked out by the alien probe that we see on the view screen. And while he's unconscious, he lives a life of 40 years in his mind as Kamin on the Planet Kataan. So the story then revolves around the idea of this planetary probe, created by a civilization that's preserving the memory of its culture by imbuing some recipient with the lived experience of being on their planet. I'd be interested in the question and answer if people had other examples of science fiction really thinking about ways to preserve a culture in and above their kind of compilation of a library. But to bring us up to the present, I'll end with two examples which are of actually different parts of the same thing, and variations on today's theme. So when Elon Musk's Space-X tested their Falcon Heavy Rocket, in a wonderful display of showmanship, he decided if they needed to launch a payload, they might as well launch a cherry-red Tesla Roadster with a spaceman in the seat into -- to Mars, and then into eventually solar orbit. And what most people don't know is, included in the glove compartment was a digital library that included a silicon disk, in some ways an echo of what was on the moon with Apollo 11, and this one featured Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Series." So this is a creation of a nonprofit that is called The Arch Mission Foundation, headed by a gentleman named Nova Spivack, and they are interested in creating multiple redundant repositories of human knowledge around the solar system and on the Earth. Now, this is less of an optimistic vision of a gesture to E.T. about who we are, and more of a hedge against the next extinction-level event, and the idea that whoever -- you know, as we have come after the dinosaurs, whoever comes after us will find this repository of our knowledge. But he's working on the idea of sending those around the solar system and into the Earth. And so, they also provided one with a lunar library, a very different library, for the Beresheet, which was an Israeli company's lunar lander that went to the moon, and unfortunately, crashed on the lunar surface just less than two weeks ago, on April 11th. I had been hoping to end with a nice celebratory moment, as I'm sure, had they. But the Beresheet, which means Genesis, or in the beginning, carried a different kind of these libraries that was not only about universal humanity, but also particularly then fronting Israeli identity. So their time capsule, which was 30 million pages, included a full copy of the English language Wikipedia, as well as of the Torah, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, the Israeli national anthem, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And I had been particularly looking forward to including this, because I think that this Earth selfie that the Beresheet took of itself en route to the moon in many ways deliberately evoked that Earthrise image, where we began, and where I will end. So I would argue that the Earthrise image is not solely responsible for the Space Age change in mindset that allowed us to think of ourselves as a world, but as a part of the rich, cultural impact of Earthrise. That striking image of our blue and white planet hanging in space has been an ability to think about ourselves as a planet, and to begin to craft a message about who we are, and to send that out into the void. Thank you. ^M01:05:17 [ Applause ] ^M01:05:28 >> Bruce Clarke: I think we -- >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: You want us to reset, or we good? >> Bruce Clarke: -- we're -- no, we're good. >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: Okay. >> Bruce Clarke: I think we're good where we are. I want to thank my brilliant and erudite panel for these wonderful presentations. I think that, given the -- where we are in the flow of the program, we should just open it up to audience comment and question. So -- >> One of the -- I guess it was Voyager -- did that famous photo of the Earth with, like, four planets aligned in the image. I'm getting blank expressions from everybody, so that's -- >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: There's a pale blue dot image -- >> -- yeah. >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: -- which is from the great distance, and then there have been compilation images where they've tried to line things up -- >> Is that becoming -- do you think that will become the focus of future, you know, seminars and stuff? Is that an important photo, or is that just kind of a fluke? >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: -- I think it's a very important photo. It's one that Sagan in particular talked about and captured in "Cosmos," the television series that he did in the early 1980s. And there's a similar image from the New Horizon spacecraft that really -- the Earth is almost just a pixel when you try to recapture and redirect back towards Earth from that great distance, going all the way out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. So I think it is important. It's a little more dwarfing of our sense of ourselves as the center of the universe to see ourselves even tinier than appears in the Earthrise image. >> Bruce Clarke: Yes, please. >> So those of us who remember this probably may have assumed that we'd be at the moon much more often than we are now, and the Chinese have recently sought out to land on the dark side, and got some publicity for that. So are any of you disappointed that we haven't spent more time on the moon, or do you think that we did it just the way we had written the script? >> Neil M. Maher: I could respond to that, I think. I think it's less about me being disappointed or not, and as a historian, thinking more about how people in the past might've been either pleased or disappointed. And I think what's interesting is, we think back on the space race as something that really unified our country. We think of it as an extremely positive moment, and it was, on one level -- a million people flocking down to Cape Canaveral to witness the Apollo 11 launch. But what we forget is that, three weeks later, half a million young people hitchhiked, and ended up walking in traffic to Woodstock, New York to listen to a music festival that was -- had music that was quite critical of the country, especially when it came to Vietnam. So the country was extremely divided during that period, and I think that we have to remember that when we think about the space race. There were civil rights activists who were very upset with what was going on. Feminists were upset with the all-male astronaut corps. Environmentalists were worried that all this money being spent on space was taking our eye off, you know, pollution back home. But I think it's important that these two sides of this cultural divide were, in a sense, reliant on each other. It's sort of what made that moment so important in our history, and it was also really about a debate over what our country was going to be. Was it going to be about one or the other, or was it going to be a dialogue where we come together and try to formulate a compromise over spending money to explore outer space? Which I think many people felt was really important, but also dealing with problems back at home, which was very important. It's that debate, I think, that is important to remember. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: I might offer some thoughts, too. I think that's -- these are such important points, to sort of think about what was the larger political context in which the moon landing happened. And of course, in addition to so much social unrest at home, we had the Vietnam War. That was unfolding, and as far as the art world is concerned, a big thing that began to happen is this celebration of technology that was very much on the minds of a lot of influential avant-garde artists at the end of the '60s. ^M01:10:07 Really fell apart when the equation became made between technology and warfare, and the observation that a lot of aerospace companies, who were active in the space race, were also manufacturing napalm, in addition to bombers, and so forth. So at least where the art world is concerned, technology sort of became a poisoned apple of sorts in the early 1970s, and I think there was certainly a falloff of optimism on the part of artists responding to the Space Age. But it is extremely interesting to me that there are a number of exhibitions happening now, and that will happen in the immediate future, including, I just learned today, one at the National Gallery of Art, I believe this coming summer, of photographs that are reflecting on the Space Age, and on the lunar landing. And it's really interesting that about a year or so ago, a Japanese tycoon was able to make -- sort of purchase a bunch of tickets, if you will, for artists to be part of, I think, one of the first civilian space shots ever. And I think it's incredibly interesting that an art collector had his imagination stimulated to such a degree that he is going to send artists into outer space. And I have to admit I was really wondering as I was working on the remarks today -- what types of photographs or other artworks might result from that? And I mention this because, while I think the imaginative, symbolic environment in which Apollo played out in the early 1970s led -- I think that was one of the factors that led to the dissolution of the program to do further moon landings. Of course, we did have the Space Station, which was important. I think that there is a reigniting of the imagination around space travel, and I think it will be really interesting to see whether that does not come to be a precursor for new developments to come. >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: I would add that I think that there was an expectation of pace of change that was set in the 20th century, perhaps, that may not have been entirely realistic. When you think about the very first powered flight ever by the Wright Brothers was in 1903, and by 1969, you have human beings standing on the moon. The idea by the year 2000, which sounded impossibly futuristic, was that clearly, you know, we will have moon bases. We're going to be going out to Mars. Hop, skip, jump, boom. And I think that, in reality, things have been both longer to develop, but also have developed in different ways. You know, so we think about -- the International Space Station has six human beings on it right now who -- and that station has been continually occupied since the year 2000. So you have a steady presence of humanity living and working in space -- not the same humans for the whole time, but -- and increasingly longer duration. They've just announced that Christina Koch, who's up there now, is going to do another long-term flight, going to extend her mission as a way of gathering more information, so that we can start to think about longer flights going into the future. So I think that the pace of change that was set in the 20th century may not have been achievable, and it may have gone in slightly different directions than what was pictured in, say, "Life Magazine" or other places at the time. Can you use the mike so that we can have it recorded? >>Bruce Clarke: We'll come back. >> I wanted to comment on the initial comment about Earthrise being an invention, and all of you have expressed different ways, very eloquently, in which it is an invention. But there's something unacknowledged here, or sort of implicit, and that is that the Earthrise image is, in some ways, accidental, serendipitous, or contingent. Had the spacecraft been oriented slightly differently, had the crew been asleep at that moment, we would not have this image, and we would not be talking about all these layers of meaning. And I think that's important to acknowledge, too -- the contingent nature of it, and the elaborate invention of it thereafter. >> Bruce Clarke: Oh, I agree completely. The -- my point was, it was invented as much as it was discovered, but the entire story is so wonderful in that they hadn't planned to take pictures of the Earth. The actual sort of preparations had all been focused on the moon, and the program of photography of the moon while they were orbiting it. And so, it very much was this serendipitous moment that, as you say, just depended on the capsule, the lunar orbiter that they were in tilting the right way, so that all of a sudden, Earth appeared. But -- so what I like to think about this image, which is -- I mean, we still call it Earthrise, but the Earth is not rising here so much -- so much as it's just appearing. And if you dwell on this image, what you kind of -- at least I can, in my mind -- recapture a sense of hovering. In other words, the freedom from gravity that the orbit, that -- the guys were in free space, and they're just kind of hovering over a planetary surface, and encountering that aspect of the extraterrestrial experience. So it's a -- but I'd finally say it's -- the image was happily discovered serendipitously, beautifully taken with -- they had practiced using really high-quality cameras, so this wasn't actually beamed at the time as a transmission. It was brought back to Earth and developed, and we had this beautiful, high-resolution image. But -- please. >> Hear they're surprised -- you hear their surprise, and it's, oh, my God, look at this. Give me the camera. Quick, give me the color camera. >> Bruce Clarke: Right. >> You know, they are scrambling to get the image before it fades from view, and so it truly was a surprise to them. >> Bruce Clarke: So in the room with the exhibit, there's -- on the screen, there is a NASA animation of the Earthrise event that plays that tape, and shows just from second to second how everything had to kind of tilt just in the right direction for the photograph to even become possible. And so, then, you know, that -- we then give it a 90-degree spin to put it in terms of our gravitational orientation is perfectly, you know, justified, and yet, if we understand that, we can kind of hold both ideas. So it's that we understand what orientation means by allowing our self to hover for a second without it, and experience the vertigo that might come from that, and how we -- so we need to turn it, to frame it for our own desire for orientation. I would just -- if I could -- on this comment -- to me -- and this kind of echoes the point I took David to be making, that -- but Margaret A.s well. We discovered ourselves, but we discovered the Earth. This photograph resonates. It continues to have this powerful -- at least for me, this magnetic intensity of inspirational charge, because it really -- it's what we still need to see, having invested all those resources in making the Apollo missions happen. We need to see our existence as a planetary phenomenon. >> Neil M. Maher: Can I -- >> Bruce Clarke: Yeah, jump in. >> Neil M. Maher: -- can I just jump in, and then -- >> Anne Collins Goodyear: Oh, yeah, please. >> Neil M. Maher: -- we've been talking about Earthrise, and we keep mentioning the Earth, the Earth, the Earth, but what we're forgetting is that the moon is in it also. And I think that we have to think about that as both a looking back at the Earth, but also as, in a sense, an advertisement, right? We got there. ^M01:19:53 We got to the moon first. We're orbiting the moon, when no one else has done that. Part of the reason they didn't crop the moon out was because they wanted the world to know that we were right there. So I think there's a lot of ways to read these images that are really, really interesting. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: You know, it's interesting -- I am currently co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, so I am on the campus of a liberal arts institution, wonderful college. And I would have to say, as I'm listening to this conversation unfold, I can't help but observe that I really take this to be a great humanities moment. It's very interesting to me that, in some ways, the space program, we might say, represents the culmination of what's possible with a sort of, quote unquote, "STEM mentality," science, technology, engineering, math. But what I find really interesting as an art historian is that I think it's really the symbolic envelope that we put around this photograph that has made it so meaningful. And that, I find extremely interesting. There actually were some similar photographs that had been taken by a Soviet spaceship before this photograph was released, but I think it's really this overlay of the reading of Genesis, this connection to a cultural concept that this is a spiritual moment. I think, Valerie [assumed spelling], your point about -- and Bruce's point about the rotation of this image is really powerful. The name Earthrise comes to be given to it after it is published, but I can't help but think about Peter Hurd's image from 1963, which I showed, called "Predawn." I mean, Hurd, through his painting, is already putting out the idea that it's -- I mean, predawn literally in the sense that he's there before the sun comes up at Cape Canaveral, but symbolically, predawn in that we haven't yet completed this mission from President Kennedy. And in a sense, this is the moment where dawn is happening. The Earth is rising. So I do think it's really interesting to think about NASA's success in -- through the art program, and through other techniques, of putting a symbolic structure which comes out of literature and art. Really quintessentially humanities disciplines that enable us to attach a meaning to this, even though we might debate the different meanings that accrue, and I think that's a very, very important point. But it really is this interconnection between art, literature, and science that makes this moment possible. >> Bruce Clarke: Hear, hear. Time for one more. Oh, my gosh, yes. Yes. You got [laughter]. >> Fabulous. Thank you so much. I -- so all my friends, when they talk about outer space, they talk about the space program, but they also talk about Space-X and Virgin Galactic, and sort of these celebrity, commercial spaceflight entities. And I'm wondering if you guys have thoughts on -- if Earthrise, as a photograph, was taken by a private company, like, say, Virgin Galactic, do you think that it would read the same way? Because after the Falcon Heavy launch, and Tesla's sort of infamous roadster photo, I think that that was couched in a few layers of commercialism that sort of the people who kind of swim in my circles didn't really sort of celebrate, I think, in the same language that Earthrise typically does. As sort of being kind of emblematic of sort of humanity, and sort of seeing the Earth from this kind of objective sort of third vantage point. And so I was wondering if you guys had general thoughts on that. >> David McConville: I would love to speak to that. Particularly from a historical perspective, because a lot of the vision and the will to engage in the space program in the 1950s was because of Walt Disney, that he created a series with Wernher Von Braun, who had been brought over from the Third Reich to oversee the American space program. And they created this show on ABC called "Man in Space," and so it was inherently a commercial endeavor from the very beginning, in terms of thinking about how to catalyze the imagination. So it's always been kind of intertwined, and I know it's not exactly what you're kind of pointing to with regards to the privatization of space right now. But there's always been a very close relationship, and I think particularly in terms of thinking about how those images are absorbed, people in the '50s weren't quite as, you know, sensitive to thinking about how those images were being used to promote a particular commercial agenda. But I really encourage you, if you haven't seen them, to go on YouTube and watch these clips, or they have the entire shows online. Because it's really remarkable to give us an indication of where we thought things would be by a certain time, because it was almost unthinkable that we would go to Mars, and we wouldn't find life, and rivers, and kind of -- I think Walt Disney calls them lowly forms of plant life was, like, the worst that was going to happen. And so, our understanding and our expectations have been so radically reset in terms of why we're even doing any of this that it's interesting now to think about the role that entertainment is still playing, and that, you know, commercial entertainment in particular is still playing in shaping our collective imaginary. And I'm not sure -- I mean, because it was a private endeavor that -- from Israel that shot that same image, right? And I don't hear many critiques of that -- I mean, I -- it's more about because it crashed, and I think -- >> Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp: And it was quasi-government private, which gets into some of the conversations about, you know, Space-X, or Blue Origin, or these companies that are then doing this work for NASA. But I think there's also something very interesting in the connection to those Disney visions to remember -- they could picture going back and forth into space, and doing all of these things. They couldn't picture a computer smaller than a room. They couldn't picture a way to bring photographs back, other than physically carrying the film. And so, I would -- we might end out with a little shout-out to the planetary science community that's doing amazing work at great remoteness with wonderful fidelity, in terms of the images that are coming back, and that we have actually explored through our entire solar system at this point without necessarily having to send the people. So some of the "why haven't the people been back on the moon" is because so much work has been done in other places, and we have the privilege at the museum of having a department -- the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies -- who are talking about those places -- Mars, Mercury -- as places. They know them. They know their geography. They talk about them as if they're standing there, because they've got these wonderful mapping images that they're looking at coming back in great -- you know, and really then having arguments about exactly what kind of alluvial flow might have created that formation. So the exploratory work that's been done has these wonderful roots, and then has gone in these surprising new directions. >> Bruce Clarke: Neil? >> Neil M. Maher: Yeah, I think there's no doubt that Disney was involved early. You know, private, free-market contractors were involved early in the Apollo mission, all the NASA missions, but I do think there's a difference in this free-market moment. In the 1960s, if NASA was doing something in the program that people didn't agree with, they could take to the streets, go on their soapbox, and protest or demonstrate. Civil rights activists did it. Feminists did it. Anti-war students did it, who were concerned with NASA's technology being used in the Vietnam War. And because NASA was funded publicly, NASA had to adjust, and was very nimble at adjusting in ways that encouraged public support of the program. I think in the moment we're in now, this free-market moment, it's a bit different, that we can't take the streets and protest against these corporations. We can, but they can ignore us, I guess is what I'm saying. And I think that if they took an image, like the Whole Earth image, I think we would see that as a corporate brand, whereas in the 1960s, we saw that as sort of coming from the grassroots perhaps, coming from the federal government, coming from us as a culture. So I think there is a shift. I think that there's no doubt that efficiencies, and financial efficiencies, and even technological efficiencies have been improved by the free market. But I think we do lose a bit of that connection into civic culture in a way that might be a bit of a concern. >> Anne Collins Goodyear: And just sort of riffing off of Neil's point about the market, and culture -- I think another really important practical dimension of these photographs is they're not copyrighted. And, you know, I think as we think about our digital culture, and the fact that so many people -- the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, et cetera -- seek to put so many limitations on our ability to share information. It's maybe nice to be reminded of the power of sharing information, and maybe also to acknowledge the fact that the U.S. government does not copyright anything that it does. So these images were free and open to be used by anyone, and I'm sure that is one of the reasons that they have had such significant cultural power over time, among many others. >> Bruce Clarke: We own the copyright, right, as -- our tax dollars brought this photograph back [laughter]. Could I leave us with -- assert my prerogative as the organizer of this session? So you remember the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster? Now, we learned that, in the end, it's actually this corporate guy who's actually allowing this mission to go forward, but nonetheless, Jodie Foster gets in the contraption, and seems to have this experience when she goes through the wormhole to -- you know, whether it's real or not, who knows? ^M01:30:09 But as she's dropping through the wormhole, there's these -- just these couple of seconds where there's a pause, and she kind of somehow or another gets to view beyond the capsule she's in, and she sees these alien civilizations, just for a moment. And -- but -- and then, at a certain -- I think at a certain point, she sees their star system, or their galaxy, and tears start falling from her eyes, and she says, "They should've sent a poet. They should've sent a poet [laughter]." And it just zips by, but somehow or another, we had some photo poetic astronauts that just were in the right place at the right time, and we got -- I think we got a good return on our investment. Thank you, everybody. ^M01:31:04 [ Applause ]