
“Whole Earth” origin (1976) - josephpmay
http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/WholeEarth_buton.html
======
sp332
Al Gore got the same amount of ridicule for proposing a satellite that would
live-stream the earth 24/7\. The trouble is that to get a good view, you have
to be so far away that the resolution isn't scientifically or commercially
valuable. And to get a daylight view 24/7, you'd have to be in a Lagrange
point which is crazy far away - about 4x the distance to the moon. Eventually
after years of pushing and shoving, someone came up with a reason to have a
probe at L1 (studying solar weather), and they stuck a camera on the back, and
now we have daily 2048x2048 multispectral images of the earth, always in full
daylight! [https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/](https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/)

Sometimes it gets photobombed by the far side of the moon, and the images of
solar eclipses are the best.
[https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries](https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries)

~~~
nixpulvis
Well not to mention that there's pretty sound arguments for not allowing the
public access to high resolution live images of the earth.

~~~
GuiA
Would love to read more about this.

~~~
pjc50
I'm not sure if tracking and identifying individual humans from orbit is even
optically feasible, but it can certainly be done for cars. And tanks.

Such a thing would be used by both sides in urban conflicts to "see round
corners" and track targets.

~~~
badosu
If 40+ years ago NRO had meters resolution imagine what they could have
today...

> A perfect 2.4-meter mirror observing in the visual (500 nm) would have a
> diffraction limited resolution of around 0.05 arcsec, which from an orbital
> altitude of 250 km would correspond to a ground sample distance of 0.06 m (6
> cm, 2.4 inches). Operational resolution should be worse due to effects of
> the atmospheric turbulence.[24] Astronomer Clifford Stoll estimates that
> such a telescope could resolve up to "a couple inches. Not quite good enough
> to recognize a face".[25]

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen)

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romwell
More context to the story:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog)

The story is by Steward Brand[1], who, besides bringing the Whole Earth
Catalog into existence, help Douglas Engelbart present the Mother Of All
Demos[2] - the demo that gave us the mouse, hypertext, and many other things
that Xerox PARC (and then MacOS and Windows) emulated.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

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jedimastert
Here's a video by Vsauce explaining why:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww)

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matthewmcg
Related: the GOES “full disc” view is a partial realization of this and it’s
mesmerizing:
[https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/FullDisk_band.php?sat=...](https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/FullDisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=GEOCOLOR&length=96)

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nixpulvis
Great story! Strikes me though that the image we associate with the "whole
earth" is only of a specific half.

An expansion on the revelation at the heart of many issues today.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
I presume that's because the other half is mostly the Pacific Ocean (along one
plane), or the empty southern oceans (along the other plane). I assume they
went for utilitarianism, as opposed to actively discriminating against people
living in Alaska and Japan.

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andrewl
_Use the great American resource of paranoia…_

He got that right.

~~~
Terr_
Honestly I think "insecurity" or "dissatisfaction" might be stronger.

But in either case, isn't labeling it "great American" still a kind of
exceptionalism, however negative? :P

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smacktoward
The sad thing is, you could reprint that exact same button today and make a
mint selling them to the flat-Earth crowd.

Progress!

