@setepenre-set replied to your post, “I suddenly feel how old I am”
“what was it like, seeing those first pictures? (space *is* eternally new; that’s *exactly* the feeling of it.)”
I know a lot of people have said it was a moment of awe for them, that those first pictures of the “blue marble” really transformed their point of view, but I was kind of already there? See, I was a little kid who loved maps, especially world maps. I would look at them for hours, thinking happily of all the people and countries and animals and ecosystems that exist in the world and being frustrated that the ones in my textbooks (printed during the Cold War, which was still going on) showed the Soviet Union and China as just blank spots, as if those countries weren’t part of the Earth, too, just because they had Communist governments. So the pictures of the Earth from space just confirmed the sense of the world that I already had. I think it was older people who maybe weren’t so bookish, whose mental picture of the Earth was centered on their own physical experience of it (kind of like the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cartoon that has been so often parodied that for a while those “View of the World” cartoons formed a genre of their own), who had their minds blown by the sight of this planet as a rather small thing compared to the vastness of the universe around it. Just a theory.
Oh my god, Cold War textbook maps had the Soviet Union and China as blank?? That’s…so weird and yet as soon as you said it, I was like ‘ah yes BUT OF COURSE THEY WERE’.
Not all of them and not all features. Topographic maps showed the Ural Mountains and the Yellow River. But cities, major roads and railways, internal boundaries, nope. Mad Magazine printed a parody in which people went around saying “big empty spot” instead of “China”. The culminating joke was something along the lines of “The dog tipped over the coffee table and broke six pieces of my wife’s best big empty spot.”
Published
setepenre-set 
