I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
One of the most reproduced photos ever taken is a picture of the earth. The entire globe is illuminated, swirling brightly with clouds. Africa dominates the upper half, and Antarctica is illuminated at the bottom, shrouded in white wisps like a hunk of dry ice. No national borders are visible, no human activity of any kind.
This photo, now known as The Blue Marble, was taken in 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17. That was the last time any human has had this view firsthand.
But thanks to the photograph, we’ve all seen it, after a fashion. An image may not be quite as powerful as the real thing, but this is one of the most powerful images we have.
I wasn’t alive in 1972, but it’s said that for many people, the first time they saw The Blue Marble, it changed their lives.
Some people, such as sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, thought that seeing the earth from the outside would spark interest in space travel. Perhaps it did for a few people, like today’s richest men.
But for the vast majority, The Blue Marble energized a fondness for our own world. Seeing the earth all at once, so small amidst an infinite cosmos, made it look fragile. It let us realized that it’s our job as its stewards to protect it.
The Blue Marble catalyzed the environmental movement, along with similar photos taken around the same time. Another famous one from a few years before, Earthrise, has been called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” and today we can see it as the perfect prologue to The Blue Marble.
Picturing the Abstract
The Blue Marble is so powerful because it provides a concrete image of something abstract: the biosphere.
The word biosphere dates back to 1875, defined as “the place on the earth’s surface where life dwells.” Its coinage was a proposal for a new kind of science, one accounting more holistically for the interlocking systems that make up our world, from astrology and meteorology to geology, hydrology and geophysics.
The biosphere is an abstract notion, a way of conceptually construing the world, what computer scientists would call a level of abstraction. We can construe things in any number of ways, to make it easier to talk about them and focus on what’s important at a given time. Looking at a painting, for instance, we could construe it in terms of technique (color, line, etc.), or we could construe it in terms of art history (style, genre), or we could construe it in tems of chemistry (materials, pigmentation), or we could construe it in terms of mythology (story representation). There’s no single or ultimate way to construe a thing; what matters is our purpose. If you’re an art restorer, the chemistry construal will probably be the most useful; but if you’re an art student, a different level of abstraction would be most useful.
So the biosphere is like this: a way of talking about the parts of the universe that support life, to help us understand how they do so. The notion is fairly abstract. And perhaps that’s why nothing much happened with the idea of biosphere for many decades.
When The Blue Marble came along, the biosphere came into clear focus, not just for scientists, but for all of humanity. As the ecologist Donald Worster writes in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas:
The planet had come to seem far more singular and yet more fragile than at any other time in human experience. Its thin film of life—humanity’s sole means of survival—was far thinner and far more vulnerable than anyone had ever imagined.
What’s interesting to me here is how having a picture of something helps us rally around it. It makes sense. You can’t see the abstract, but you can see a picture. Out of sight, out of mind.
A hundred years from now, we may be able to look back and see that The Blue Marble was what saved us. Today, many of us are tense or even nihilistic about climate change. But we should take note that we have come a long way in the past 50 years. We can’t prove the counterfactual, but I have to think The Blue Marble played an inciting role in that.
Beyond the Biosphere
The notion of the biosphere came out of the study of geology, and it connotes a sense of expansion in evolutionary time: from the geosphere to the biosphere. In the beginning, there were only rocks. Then, 3.5 billion years ago, life emerged.
Just as the earth moved from the age of lifeless rock (geosphere) to the age of lively rocks (biosphere), it seems now that we are continuing to move from the biosphere to something else.
The Jesuit philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this “something else” the noosphere, after the Greek nous, or mind. His thesis was that evolution does not stop at humankind. We as humanity have the capacity to move beyond.
That’s somewhat mystical, and indeed the noosphere is a metaphysical construal as much as anything, a hypothesis about the very purpose of the universe.
The noosphere is fascinating, but we needn’t go that far.
The philosopher Luciano Floridi has proposed the term infosphere to capture the parts of the world that involve information in a way that is more prosaically descriptive and analytic. The infosphere construes our world in terms of all the ways that we store and transmit information, from clay to cables and blinking lights.
Picturing the Infosphere
Today we live much of our time in the infosphere, but we don’t yet have an image of it. It’s hard to grasp. Consider the fact that we don’t “go online” anymore like we did twenty years ago. Rather, we’re always online. We carry “online” with us. We live in it.
And looking at the state of our infosphere, it seems to be in as much precarious chaos as our natural environment was fifty years ago. The erosion of data privacy, endless distraction, FOMO and overwhelm, doomscrolling, informational warfare… We are not doing much to shepherd this environment in which we spend so much of our time.
If The Blue Marble inspired environmental progress, I wonder if a picture of the infosphere could do the same with our digital environment.
What could constitute an image of the infosphere? What sort of image could jolt us into caring and understanding the way The Blue Marble did? The Blue Marble showed us our world from the outside. Could we see our informational world from the outside?
Recall that the term biosphere emerged in 1875, but it wasn’t until 1972 that we got The Blue Marble. So maybe we have to wait 100 years for a picture of the infosphere as well.
Ports of Call
Not much to share this week… it’s been hectic with eclipse travel and scrambling to catch up!
Creatures in Heaven: One of my favorite bands, Glass Animals, have a new song out and a new album on the way. The music video is apropos for this week’s post.