Photos Taken from Space to Make You Realize Just How Tiny We Are

world.pulse

8 years ago

The largest aircraft storage and preservation facility in the world is located at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, USA. The boneyard—run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group—contains more than 4,400 retired American military and government aircrafts.

It all started with an educational video. Benjamin Grant grew up as one of those kids fascinated by the idea of outer space, and our place in the universe. He ended up starting a “space club” at his first post-university job in New York, where everyone “ate lunch by themselves, at their desk, every day,” as a way to get them talking. But before he turned that passion into a book of frankly stunning satellite-view photos of the Earth, taken from above, things began with a fairly unassuming film in school.

“In the US there’s a video called Powers of Ten,” he says,

“where they start with a guy in the park and they zoom out and zoom out exponentially until you’re all the way in outer space. Then they zoom back in to do a microbiology thing. But I think, in our culture, this idea of space isn’t necessarily embraced, or is kind of nerdy, or very far removed from everyday life.”

So he’s doing his best to pull that idea back into people’s minds, with a new book, Overview: A New Perspective. It picks up its name from the “overview effect,” a term coined in the 80s by astronaut Frank White to describe the way your understanding of life and its meaning shifts once you’ve been shot into space and seen the planet as a pale blue dot. It’s part of what takes people’s breath away when they look at Earthrise, astronaut William Anders’ 1968 photo of the planet. Basically: holy shit, we are really insignificant and tiny.

“I think the official statistic is that 552 people have ever been in outer space, so to bring that perspective to many more people every day is powerful,”

Grant says. As far as the book goes, he’s largely left us out of it: the photos are taken by a fleet of four satellites owned by a company called DigitalGlobe, and generally on such a huge scale that you wouldn’t be able to make out a single person anyway.

“There are no people visible in the pictures,” he says, “but the way the chapters in the book are structured tries to frame the human presence—in all but the last chapter. It’s trying to understand the world that we’ve shaped, without necessarily saying it’s good or bad.”

What you end up with is a coffee table book that could give you an existential crisis. Beautiful images, of everything from an exploding volcano on a Japanese island to the patterns created by human irrigation systems, fill its pages. It’s often hard to wrap your head around just what you’re looking at, which Grant acknowledges.

“The scale is often beyond comprehension, and even if you start to put numbers down—saying the approximate area shown in this overview is 200 square miles—that doesn’t necessarily mean something to people. So a lot of the images are composed very purposely so that there might be elements you can recognize in them, whether it’s a car or a sports track. You can see that and go, ‘OK, I know how big that is,’ then look at the larger image and keep flipping back and forth between those two things.”

Making that mental shift from your own perspective on earth to that of the satellite becomes a central part of flicking through the book—what Grant calls a sort of “duality of presence.” He continues:

“If I do a good job composing an image, for a second you go up into the satellite camera and it serves as our eyes looking straight down and imagining this vast amount of area. Then you go back down to earth and you’re like, ‘oh I don’t get it,’ and you keep looking closer to try and get a sense of scale. I think that’s a healthy exercise, feeling that confusion, because we don’t often think ‘bigger picture.'”

Sun Lakes, Arizona, USA is a planned community with a population of approximately 14,000 residents, most of whom are senior citizens. According to US census data, only 0.1 percent of the community’s 6,683 households are home to children under the age of 18.

You probably wouldn’t be able to get much done on a day-to-day if you only thought on this sort of scale, but there’s something undeniably arresting about these photos. To be clear, Grant didn’t take them himself, but has been allowed to post them daily on the Daily Overview Instagram account after coming to an agreement with that satellite photography company, DigitalGlobe.

Grant realized they’re the people behind most of the images you see when you look at Apple Maps or Google Earth, when he initially typed “earth” into his search bar while preparing a space club talk. He ended up being zoomed into a photo DigitalGlobe owned—of Earth, Texas. The company’s been at it for 15 years, Grant says, and after convincing them his project wasn’t some kind of terror plot, they signed up to this project.

“I don’t think, surprisingly, they’d ever thought to do this before. They’re primarily of the engineering mindset, which is: ‘We’re creating these images and people can buy them if they want to.’ I’m sure their number one customer is the US government, so at first when I approached them they were very unsure, saying ‘Who are you? We’re going to do a background check on you,'” he says, laughing.

Grant speaks about Overview with a disarming earnestness. While he isn’t setting out to change the world, by any means, he tells me that he’s been in contact with two teachers in the US who use specific Overview photos to teach their secondary school students mathematical concepts. In his own way, he’s gone full-circle with his love for space—right back to the classroom.

Every year, tulip fields in Lisse, in the Netherlands, begin to bloom in March and are in peak bloom by late April. The Dutch produce a total of 4.3 billion tulip bulbs each year, of which 2.3 billion are grown into cut flowers. Of these, 1.3 billion are sold in the Netherlands and the remainder is exported: 630 million bulbs to Europe and 370 million elsewhere.

This Overview captures the Gemasolar Thermosolar plant in Seville, Spain. The solar concentrator contains 2,650 heliostat mirrors that focus the sun’s thermal energy to heat molten salt flowing through a 140-metre (460-foot) central tower. The molten salt then circulates from the tower to a storage tank, where it is used to produce steam and generate electricity. In total, the facility displaces approximately 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

The Arlit uranium mine is located in Arlit, Niger. French nuclear power generation, as well as the French nuclear weapons programme, are both dependent on the uranium that is extracted from this mine in the former French colony – more than 3,400 tonnes per year.

Angkor Wat, a temple complex in Cambodia, is the largest religious monument in the world (first it was Hindu, then Buddhist). Constructed in the twelfth century, the 820,000 square metre (8.8 million square foot) site features a moat and forest that surround a massive temple at its centre.

The villas of Marabe Al Dhafra in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates are home to approximately 2,000 people. Located in one of the hottest regions of the world, the record high temperature here is 49.2°C.

Ipanema Beach is located in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recognised as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, the sand is divided into segments by lifeguard towers known as ‘postos’.

The coal terminal at the Port of Qinhuangdao in China is the largest coal shipping facility in the country. From here, approximately 210 million tonnes of coal are transported to coal-burning power plants throughout southern China every year. In 2015, new data from the Chinese government revealed that the country has been burning up to 17 percent more coal each year than previously disclosed. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China has released almost a billion more tonnes per year of carbon dioxide than previously estimated.

Hagadera, seen here on the right, is the largest section of the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya and is home to 100,000 refugees. To cope with the growing number of displaced Somalis arriving at Dadaab, the UN has begun moving people into a new area called the LFO extension, seen on the left. Dadaab is the largest refugee camp in the world with an estimated total population of 400,000.

Burning Man is a week-long, annual event held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, USA. Drawing more than 65,000 participants each year, the event is described as an experiment in community, art, self-expression, and radical self-reliance. This image was taken during the event, in August 2014 …

… And this was taken at the same spot in the desert once Burning Man had ended, in October 2014.

A turbine interchange connects two highways in Jacksonville, Florida. This structure consists of left-turning ramps sweeping around a centre interchange, thereby creating a spiral pattern of right-hand traffic.

Tailings are the waste and by-products generated by mining operations. The tailings seen here were pumped into the Gribbens Basin, next to the Empire and Tilden iron ore mines in Michigan, USA. Once the materials are pumped into the pond, they’re mixed with water to create a sloppy form of mud known as slurry. For a sense of scale, this Overview shows approximately 2.5 square kilometres (1 square mile) of the basin.

Dendritic drainage systems are seen around the Shadegan Lagoon by Musa Bay in Iran. The word ‘dendritic’ refers to the pools’ resemblance to the branches of a tree, and this pattern develops when streams move across relatively flat and uniform rocks, or over a surface that resists erosion.

Nishinoshima is a volcanic island located 940 kilometres south of Tokyo, Japan. Starting in November 2013, the volcano began to erupt and continued to do so until August 2015. Over the course of the eruption, the area of the island grew in size from 0.06 square kilometres to 2.3 square kilometres.

Photos by Benjamin Grant;

Words: Tshepo Mokoena;

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