These Photographs From Space Show What Humans Have Done to the Earth
In new book, vivid satellite images of the planet evoke what astronauts call "the overview effect"
More than 550 people have shucked the bonds of Earth and visited space. They unanimously describe the experience as profound. But it isn’t the empty blackness between stars or the power of the harnessed explosion they ride that so affects these space travelers. It’s the feeling they get when they look back at Earth.
“When we look down at the Earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet,” says astronaut Ron Garan. “It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile.”
Neil Armstrong did call his first step on the moon’s surface a giant leap, but when he looked at Earth he says, “I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
This moving experience is called “the overview effect.” Space travelers have struggled to explain exactly what it is about seeing the planet as a pale blue dot that evokes this feeling. Yet artists, filmmakers and other Earth-bound creatives have been inspired by what the astronauts can share. Author Benjamin Grant, who just released a book, Overview: A New Perspective of Earth, that draws on the rich photographic resources collected by satellites, is the latest person striving to convey the feeling.
“When I learned about the overview effect, it completely changed the way I thought about the world,” Grant says.
Grant got his own taste of the overview effect after he typed the query “Earth” into Google Earth. Instead of zooming out and showing him the globe, he says the program zoomed in to Earth, Texas. Green circles, irrigated fields that pop out from the brown landscape, surround the small community in the western part of the state. “I was amazed and astounded and had no idea what I was seeing,” says Grant. “From there I became completely obsessed with finding patterns in the Earth.”
Grant’s curiosity led him to search for other striking ways that humans have altered the landscape of the planet. From the orderly grid of city streets to the patchwork quilts of agricultural areas, from the vivid hues of mining waste ponds to the sinuous curves of highway interchanges, Grant kept finding intriguing marks of civilization etched on the surface of Earth. In December 2013, he started to collect the images and explain what they were in a blog he calls “Daily Overview.”
