The Importance of Visuals

It is received wisdom, well understood, that the astronaut, shot into space and seeing the earth whole for the first time, will be moved to speak heroic words of unity and beauty.

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
-- Neil Armstrong

"The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me -- a small disk, 240,000 miles away. . . . Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance."
-- Frank Borman

and so on.

The conceit is that seeing the earth, whole, as it were, generates this epiphany. Photographs from space are brought back, paired with these quotes, intending to elicit the same response from those of us unlucky enough, or lucky enough, not to have been shot into space.

Blue Marble, 1972, Apollo 17.

Earthrise, 1968, William Anders. Apollo 8.

Galen Rowell called Earthrise, if wikipedia is to be believed, "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken," and author Robert Poole claims it as the spiritual nascence of the environmental movement, saying “it is possible to see that Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it means for Earth.” The first claim is absurd, Silent Spring was published 4 years earlier, but hold on to the quotation.

Moving onwards, here are a couple other quotations:

"Up here, you wonder why we're so different, when the land is the same. You think: we're all children of the same mother planet, who says we're different?"

"I have seen the earth ... turning below me like a fantastic ball, the seas like blue glass in the sun or lashed into grey storm-peaks ... and the land green with life ... and the cities of the world sparkling ... and the people."
-- Reverdy McMillen

Perhaps you are wondering, slightly, who the hell Reverdy McMillen is, and you would be, it turns out, quite justified. Rev McMillen is a fictional character, the first man to orbit the earth, in a short story called "The Cave of Night." I am going to, shortly, spoil that story, so if you're interested you should go find a copy now and read it. We're well past any reasonable expectations, though, the story was published in 1955. Two years before humanity would launch anything at all in to orbit, six before a human would orbit even once.

So, for starters, we see that the idea of the heroic epiphany predates, by quite a lot, the actual heroic epiphany. Alan Shepherd, Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, William Anders, perhaps none of them read James Gunn's story, but they sure as hell knew and worked with people who had. Gunn may not have (probably didn't?) even originate the idea, these things just sort of turn up after all.

The point is, the idea had been in play since at least 1955 that seeing the earth all-at-once from space was supposed to produce these visions of unity, and the fragility of life, of the special nature of the planet. These guys being shot into space cannot possibly have escaped these ideas. We have no real way of knowing how much scripting of these quotes occurred, but certainly the answer is "more than none."

Scripted or no these guys knew beforehand what emotional response was expected to happen when they saw the planet whole.

Here comes the spoiler. It gets better, it turns out.

Even inside James Gunn's story these quotes are not spontaneous, they are scripted. A recording, in fact. There is no man in space, there wasn't enough money. The whole thing is a setup to pry loose money for a real manned mission to rescue the supposedly stranded lone astronaut. The implication is that the dramatic failure to rescue the fellow does indeed lead to unity, to all manner of good things (not least: tons of money for manned space exploration).

So, not only so we have the idea of that this visual should produce an epiphany appearing in 1955, but we have the idea that also, quoting these epiphanies is great marketing. If this did not become NASA's playbook, I cannot imagine why not. In fact, it clearly was NASA's playbook, we just don't know whether they came up with it themselves, or whether James Gunn invented it.

Ok, so what about the visuals? I promised something about the importance of visuals, after all.

Well, here we see played out one more time this theme: visuals, it turns out, follow the idea at least as often as they lead it. The notion that it was the visuals that turned the tide of public opinion leading to the end of the US involvement in Vietnam turns out to be not quite true, and we see the same sort of result here.

The visuals were no doubt emotion-producing, but the epiphany and the basic nature of the heroic quotations was worked out well in advance.

The Earthrise and Blue Marble photo certainly support the sentiments that we ascribe to them, but to suppose that they in any way are the origin of them is false. The sentiment arises first, and the visual is found to support it.

Is it propaganda? Marketing? Or simply the way people work?

I suppose it's all three, isn't it?