%0 Journal Article
%T The blue marble
%A Gregory A Petsko
%J Genome Biology
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/gb-2011-12-4-112
%X The timing of the picture was auspicious, to say the least. The early 1970s marked the beginning of an era of environmental activism in the US, and the blue marble Earth photo, being the first ever taken of an illuminated face of the entire planet, rapidly became a symbol of the movement. It's easy to see why. Our whole planet suddenly, in this image, seemed tiny, vulnerable, and incredibly lonely against the vast blackness of the cosmos. It also seemed whole in a way that no map could illustrate. Regional conflict and petty differences could be dismissed as trivial compared with environmental dangers that threatened all of humanity, traveling together through the void on this fragile-looking marble.I had occasion to use this picture in a talk I gave recently, and it got me thinking about the power of images.The word 'iconic' is often used for pictures like this one, and it fits. The word means, of course, to be like an icon, which is a symbol that perfectly represents something other than just itself. The blue marble was an iconic image because it perfectly represented the human condition of living on an island in the universe, with all the frailty an island ecosystem is prey to. People are particularly moved by images, in part because we have evolved to have our visual system as our primary sensory input, but also because an image can be retained easily in the mind's eye, and so forms the stuff of memory. The right image, offered at the right time, can have effects far greater than those imagined by the one creating it.Consider another picture that changed the world: the famous photograph of the German dirigible Hindenburg bursting into flames on 6 May 1937, in the skies over the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. It was that photo, more than the scale of the disaster - 36 people were killed, mostly from jumping to escape the fire, but 62 survived by staying on board as the burning blimp floated to the ground - that spelled doom for the graceful zeppelins
%U http://genomebiology.com/2011/12/4/112