Numerical Simulation, An Art of Prediction, Volume 2

4The Atmosphere and the Oceans

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, astronauts on American missions to the Moon had the privilege of viewing the Earth from space. On December 24, 1968, Bill Anders participated in the Apollo 8 mission and witnessed a rising of our planet from the Moon. Earth Rise depicts a blue dot timidly drawing itself on the horizon of an arid and dusty space. Four years later, Eugene Cernan (1934–2017) photographed the Earth from the Apollo 17 mission ship. His image, Blue Marble, is dated 1972 and is the first where our planet appears on its sunny side and in its entirety. The American astronaut is said to report on his experience in these terms:

“When you are 250,000 miles (about 400,000 km) from the Earth and you look at it, it is very beautiful. You can see the circularity. You can see from the North Pole to the South Pole. You can see across continents. You are looking for the strings that hold it, some kind of support, and they don’t exist. You look at the Earth and around you, the darkest darkness that man can conceive…” [www.wikipedia.fr].

His words illustrate the awareness of the finiteness and fragility of our lives and evoke that of the planet that hosts us. Reported by many astronauts and referred to as the Overview Effect, it accompanied the development of environmental movements in the late 1970s.

Images from space, together with other observations, contribute to raising awareness of the environmental and energy challenges facing humanity at ...