“Whole Earth” origin (1976) | Hacker News Reader

“Whole Earth” origin (1976)

sb.longnow.org

85 pointsjosephpmay17 comments

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/

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

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

Would love to read more about this.

I suppose it depends on what we call high resolution, but I know for a fact I don't want a camera on me 24/7 when I'm outdoors. There are also whole cultures where personal photography is bad, and while it's not practical today to complete fufill their wishes, a livestream of the earth in high resolution would be pretty horrific I'm sure.

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.

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

Sure, I mean the low-rez version is pretty cool but no one would ever fund it. Related: The ISS usually has live video streaming from some external cameras. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream (If it goes all blue, just give it a minute.)

This might be the first time I’ve seen the dark side of the moon.

“Dark side of the moon” is a misnomer. Both sides of the moon receive equal amounts of light. A better term is “far side of the moon” since from earth we simply never see it.

More context to the story:

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

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

Here's a video by Vsauce explaining why:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww

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=...

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.

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.

Use the great American resource of paranoia…

He got that right.

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

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

Progress!

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