When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a patchwork of plots and kingdoms but as a vast living organism veined with valleys and furred with forests. They had to leave the Earth to see it whole, torchbearers of that rude paradox of the human condition: often, we have to lose our footing to find perspective; often, it is only from a distance that we come to feel the pull of the precious most intimately and most urgently.
Two centuries later, Apollo astronauts would capture the magnificent and humbling view of Earth rising over the Moon. The photograph, now known as Earthrise, would awaken the modern environmental conscience with that same sudden sense of indivisibility felt where the spirit meets the bone...
https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/orbital-words-humanity
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