Today in 1966, the first pictures of the Earth from a geostationary orbit were taken.
I was twenty-eight [in February 1966]. In those days, the standard response to boredom and uncertainty was LSD followed by grandiose scheming. So there I sat, wrapped in a blanket in the chill afternoon sun, trembling with cold and inchoate emotion, gazing at the San Francisco Skyline, waiting for my vision. The buildings were not parallel—because the earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture—that people perceived the earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred mikes, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. But how to broadcast it? It had to be broadcast, this fundamental point of leverage on the world’s ills. I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. A photograph would do it—a color photograph from space of the earth. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way. But how to accomplish this? How could I induce NASA or the Russians to finally turn the cameras backwards? We could make a button! A button with the demand “Take a photograph of the entire earth.” No, it had to be made a question. Use the great American resource of paranoia… “Why haven’t they made a photograph of the entire earth?” There was something wrong with “entire.” Something wrong with “they.” “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Ah. That was it. The next day I ordered the printing of several hundred buttons and posters. While they were being made I spent a couple hours in the San Francisco library looking up the names and addresses of all the relevant NASA officials, the members of Congress and their secretaries, Soviet scientists and diplomats, UN officials, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller…