the upside-down Blue Marble and imagining other worlds

One of the most famous photographs in the world is the Blue Marble, a picture of Earth taken from Apollo 17 as it made its way to the Moon.

I learned something interesting about the photo today, though: Apparently (see here, among other sources, though I wish I could find a NASA comment on this), the photo was originally taken with the South Pole facing the top of the photo—and with the Earth not exactly centered. Frequently, though, it’s displayed with a vertical flip and some cropping so that it matches our expectations of what the Earth looks like.

As one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing teaches us, though, there’s no reason other than convention (and, likely, self-serving convention) for us to imagine the North Pole “at the top” and the South Pole “at the bottom.” There’s nothing impossible about a photo of the Earth that has Africa pointing toward the top of the image, but we are so uncomfortable with the idea of things being different than how we’re used to them that we refuse to imagine them that way.

Of course, there’s a metaphor in here somewhere. One of the things I appreciate about reading David Graeber and other anarchism-influenced authors is their insistence that better worlds are possible. Just because we’re used to the world as we currently know it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t be living in a different one—one that would feel “upside down” to how things are now. For Graeber, it’s a lack of imagination and will that prevents us from achieving that upside down world, just like our lack of imagination has us flip the Blue Marble over (or even center ourselves more than ) so that we can keep things the way that we’re comfortable with them rather than explore what could be a better world.

My favorite part of the Christian calendar is Advent, which also expresses the anarchist’s hope that a better world is possible—and that it is on its way. One of my favorite Advent hymns is The Canticle of the Turning, which repeats over and over the phrase “the world is about to turn.” I’m going to start thinking about that line in terms of the Blue Marble photo. Am I willing to see things upside down in the service of imagining a better world? Or am I too uncomfortable with seeing things in other ways to help bring that better world around?

• The Blue Marble
• space
• NASA
• anarchism
• David Graeber
• The West Wing
• Advent
• Canticle of the Turning