Turns out, it is a river in Egypt
blogs.discovermagazine.com
blogs.discovermagazine.com
The experience that really brought home the importance of the Nile was taking the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. You wake up in the morning to sunrise over the Nile. If you look out of the left hand window of the train, you see desert - nothing but sand and rocks. If you look out of the right hand window, you see literally just a few hundred metres of lush green farmland followed by the expanse of the river. It makes you realise that a large chunk of Egypt's usable land is hundreds of miles long but less than half a mile wide.
From Luxor onwards the fertile band is substantially wider, more like 20km, as can be seen on Google Maps.
http://maps.google.fr/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.61167,31.330261&...
Does anyone know why the desert of North Africa is so... desert? - In Australia, even the deserts, which are supposed to be some of the driest in the world, in terms of rainfall, have far more vegetation. See here for an example:
I took the hot air ballon option in the Valley of the Kings, and from the basket you could see the Nile. Turn a little bit, and you see the farmlands, and turn some more you would see the desert.
At a wide angle, I was able to take a picture of all three in one shot. The Nile is truly the lifeblood of the region.
Nothing drives home the beauty, the fragility, and somehow the hospitality of the country like this image.
I didn't get to see Luxor or Aswan (it was out of season), and I missed Alex because I ran out of money. The time I spent in Cairo, Sharm, Giza, Ainh-Soknah, and 6th of October City changed my life.
To anyone considering it: if you have the chance to travel, do it. Nothing makes the world seem smaller and the people seem closer.
Except, some country borders are phenomenally obvious from space - those that separate totalitarian / communist countries from free market / democratic countries.
Look at the border between Israel and Syria.
Look at the border between North Korea and South Korea.
Look at older pictures of the border between East Germany and West Germany.
Capitalism lets people grow, innovate, and develop. Authoritarian governments stifle that.
Thus, in pictures from space, capitalist countries are well lit (if at night), or covered in crops (during the day), and countries with large governments are dark (at night) and barren (during the day).
You stand in the Gulf of Aqaba and just a few hundred meters in front of you is the coast of Saudi Arabia. To the Northeast, you can have a glimpse at the port cities of Eilat in Israel and Aqaba in Jordan.
I've never been in a place with so many countries right next to each other. The profound thing, like the author mentions, is that there's absolutely nothing in that nature dictating or talking about any borders.
From that perspective, all those lands look pretty much the same: gorgeous.
In Eilat, viewing Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Little known fact: Israelis can enter the Sinai with just personal id and no visa. Same goes for Egyptians in specific parts of Israel.
Not enough people cross over, due to the "borders" that we put up.
In general, the picture provides a great insight into both the affluence and population density of various parts of the world.
As for the sister comment, I believe China would be twice of bright, and the lights likely extending all the way to the edge of the deserts/mountains.
There are some borders you can see from space, such as the transition between North and South Korea:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....
I don't know why the author thought that was so profound. Did he really expect the borders to be outlined with lights?
But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.
Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that Western Europe became more advanced than China despite a head start in China because there were so many countries, so one country's government couldn't ruin things.
Nuclear weaponry is but one of a number of salient examples. Even such staunch realists as Kissinger have come to recognize that they must be eliminated, and that intense international cooperation will be necessary to do so:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/610...
Our pretty fragile species. As a ball of rock going through the solar system, the earth itself will keep going until the sun blows up, and so will life itself more than likely. But we don't live in the whole planet, the biosphere (and even more so the section of it we can in) is a fragile shell and its destruction will translate in ours.
One of my favorite shows is The Sons of Anarchy, a modern day take on Hamlet with a motorcycle club as the back drop. The club was established on the principles of anarchist writer Emma Goldman, and it's interesting how they portray the world of anarchy. As a biker gang, they reject the laws of the world at large, but they seek order at a tribal level, with a president and VP of the club. They want to maintain peace in their hometown, but their quests are geared toward survival and prosperity. It's just a TV show, though. It's not profound. But as a microscopic view of what a borderless world might look like, it's a better starting point that a night photo of the Nile.
Rich countries have street lighting, poor countries didn't - even the west-east German border used to be very obvious. 20 years later cheap fluorescent tubes are everywhere which has blurred this a little
watched "Independence Day" yesterday again. I don't think there is another way short of that to make majority of human species on Earth to feel as "citizens of planet". Things like ecology/green movement doesn't seem to be a way to do it as it is subject to tragedy of commons... at least until it will be out weighted by an order of magnitude bigger tragedy
Maybe I'm weird, but now I want to know what those lonely spots of light are.
this seems to be one of the more isolated ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahariya_Oasis
pretty fascinating.
Pharaos are big in a metaphorical sense. Enpharaoronate means embiggen.
Incidentally, I've heard that 'Pharaoh' comes from an ancient Egyptian word meaning 'big house' or 'big palace'.
Another speculation is that it's related to the Arabic word فارع, meaning 'very tall'. So it's might be nearer than expected to the intended meaning :)
If 'Enpharaoronate' were a real word it would fit very well in translating a famous Egyptian proverb from Arabic: "Said to the Pharaoh: what Enpharaoronated you? He said: I didn't find anyone to stop me."
Sure, space travel will pay for itself by engendering international love. Um, ok.
No definitions were found for enphaoronate.