Earth in Culture - Modern Perspective

Modern Perspective

The technological developments of the latter half of the 20th century are widely considered to have altered the public's perception of the Earth. Before space flight, the popular image of Earth was of a green world. Science fiction artist Frank R. Paul provided perhaps the first image of a cloudless blue planet (with sharply defined land masses) on the back cover of the July 1940 issue of Amazing Stories, a common depiction for several decades thereafter.

Earth was first photographed from space by Explorer 6 in 1959. Yuri Gagarin became the first human to view Earth from space in 1961. The crew of the Apollo 8 was the first to view an Earth-rise from lunar orbit in 1968. In 1972 the crew of the Apollo 17 produced the famous "Blue Marble" photograph of the planet Earth from cislunar space. This became an iconic image of the planet as a marble of cloud-swirled blue ocean broken by green-brown continents. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that "The Blue Marble" is the most widely distributed image in human history. A photo taken of a distant Earth by Voyager 1 in 1990 inspired Carl Sagan to describe the planet as a "Pale Blue Dot."

Since the 1960s, Earth has also been described as a massive "Spaceship Earth," with a life support system that requires maintenance, or, in the Gaia hypothesis, as having a biosphere that forms one large organism.

Over the past two centuries a growing environmental movement has emerged that is concerned about humankind's effects on the Earth. The key issues of this socio-political movement are the conservation of natural resources, elimination of pollution, and the usage of land. Although diverse in interests and goals, environmentalists as a group tend to advocate sustainable management of resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy and individual behavior. Of particular concern is the large-scale exploitation of non-renewable resources. Changes sought by the environmental movements are sometimes in conflict with commercial interests due to the additional costs associated with managing the environmental impact of those interests.