In December 2002, James Cameron threw a party. The film director was at the height of his fame in the wake of Titanic’s success and his event was an important occasion in the Hollywood calendar. It was a party to mark the 30th anniversary of Apollo 17, the final manned trip to the moon by NASA and a thrilling opportunity for the cosmologically-inclined director to dine with his heroes. Cameron, however, was unfamiliar with one complicating factor: the two men whom he was honouring loathed each other.

Apollo 17 was manned by three astronauts – Ronald Evans, who had died in 1990, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt – and their journey marked NASA’s final voyage to the lunar frontier. For the anniversary, Schmitt and Cernan were put up in the same hotel in Los Angeles and, on the evening of the party, a limousine came to take them and their wives to the venue.

Schmitt appeared downstairs first, and, noting that the limousine had arrived, hurried his wife into the car and urged the chauffeur to drive. Cernan and his wife were left stranded and forced to arrive in a Los Angeles taxi to a party in their honour. At the evening’s end, Cernan promptly stole the limousine that was to take them all back to the hotel and left Schmitt and his wife at the venue.

The root of the enmity between Eugene Cernan – the last man to step on the moon – and Harrison Schmitt – a former US senator – lay in the question of who took one of the most reproduced photographs of all time: the Blue Marble.

The Blue Marble captured the Earth as a whole sphere for the first time in history – a view only ever seen by a handful of people. Originally showing a pale orb hanging against a black, empty universe, and pivoted to reveal Africa and a cyclone sweeping across the Indian Ocean, the photograph was inverted, cropped and chromatically enhanced for the Earth’s residents.

NASA does not attribute photographs to individual astronauts and so the answer of who took the iconic image is lost to the expanse. Regardless, the world has never been the same since.

From the moment John F. Kennedy committed the United States to an ambitious space programme in the 1960s, the perception of the Earth as a distinct planetary entity – rather than simply humanity’s home – began to anchor American ideas about space and the environment. Aspirations to explore the cosmos emerged simultaneously with a rising environmental consciousness, intertwining dreams of space travel with an awareness of Earth’s fragility. The Blue Marble photograph epitomised this duality, symbolising both humanity’s outward ambitions and the delicate interconnectedness of the home planet.

In 1966, lying on the roof of his house while tripping on LSD, counterculture writer Stewart Brand had a transformative vision: he imagined seeing the entire Earth at once. After coming down – both literally and figuratively – he launched a campaign, asking, ‘Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’, even partnering with the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller. Some NASA employees wore the button badges bearing this slogan to work. Brand later recalled that the experience of ‘100 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide folding through me’ convinced him that an image of the Earth as a unified whole could change human consciousness. Two years later, NASA released the first picture of the Earth rising above the grey surface of the moon.

The immense power of the US government and its ambitious pursuit of space exploration found an unexpected resonance with the burgeoning environmental and countercultural movements of the late 1960s, both unified by their shared reverence for the image of Earth. When 650 million people watched Apollo 11 touch down on the moon in July 1969, they witnessed President Richard Nixon speaking to Neil Armstrong from the Oval Office, articulating such a vision of unity: ‘And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one: one in their pride in what you have done.’

The publication of the Blue Marble in 1972 captured the cultural imagination, swiftly becoming a symbol adopted by a variety of social movements and cultural icons. Astronauts themselves described a profound transformation upon seeing Earth from space, a sensation later termed the ‘Overview Effect’: the wholly overwhelming feeling of seeing your home as a small, lapidary, blue beacon alone in the vastness of the cosmos.

For many Americans across the political spectrum, the fragility of the Earth lay in its exposure to the destructive forces of modernity enforced by the US state. Environmentalism and the campaign against nuclear weapons shared an awe, fear and reverence for American power as it transcended the bounds of geography. ‘The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space’, reflected Jimmy Carter in his farewell address in 1981. ‘From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is – a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet.’

No longer just an expansive world of opportunity, the Earth seemed smaller, more dangerous and victim to natural and human disasters in the Cold War. The small orb of the Blue Marble provided an encapsulation of Malthusian anxieties in the 1970s. Commissioned by the Club of Rome and developed by a group of academics at MIT, The Limits to Growth (1972) offered an intense critique of the consumerist economic system, based on innovative computer modelling that predicted that humanity would exploit all of the earth’s finite resources within a few decades. The book sold over 12 million copies following its publication and was translated into over 30 languages. The front cover depicted the Earth of the Blue Marble shrinking in on itself.

The Limits to Growth was a landmark text that framed Earth as a finite resource facing inevitable depletion due to human exploitation. This perspective evolved significantly in subsequent years, particularly through James Lovelock’s 1974 ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, developed during his time as a scientist at NASA. Gaia reframed Earth not merely as a passive resource but as a dynamic, self-regulating ecosystem in which living organisms and their inorganic environment interact to sustain life.

Both narratives prominently featured the Blue Marble imagery, yet Gaia departed from the stark pessimism of The Limits to Growth, offering instead a romantic and spiritualised vision of the Earth as a fragile, interconnected organism – even maternal in its symbolism. By emphasising the Earth as an active agent rather than a static resource, Gaia resonated powerfully in the cultural imagination, reinforcing perceptions of the planet as beautiful yet vulnerable to the emerging forces of climate change.

The 1980s witnessed a sharp rise in global temperatures, triggering a gradual adjustment of modern agricultural practices. Famine in Ethiopia inspired the modern charity and development movement, while one of the dominant news stories of the late 1980s in the United States was a drought that enveloped the northern US, causing over $130 billion in damage – far more costly than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and comparable to the economic devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Fires ravaged Yellowstone National Park and there was popular uproar over the sudden rise in food prices. The North American drought of 1988-89 was the forgotten trigger point of America’s reckoning with climate change.

The most influential voice of this emerging climate awareness was an unlikely one. James Hansen, a NASA scientist raised in an Iowa farming community, had originally focused on studying cloud formations on Venus. In his work, Hansen discovered that rising CO₂ levels were heating Venus—a finding clearly applicable to Earth’s own atmosphere. In June 1988, Hansen testified plainly before the US Senate, presenting unmistakable evidence that Earth’s temperatures were rising due to human fossil-fuel use. The next day, the New York Times prominently featured Hansen’s testimony, explicitly linking the ongoing American drought to the new concept of ‘global warming’ as articulated by NASA.

NASA emerged as a leader in climate research in the 1980s, translating its Cold War-era expertise in space exploration into a new focus on Earth’s ecological transformations. The agency harnessed its infrastructure – originally developed for national security purposes – to monitor and interpret global environmental shifts. NASA’s imagery, epitomised by the Blue Marble, framed localised climate events within a unified planetary narrative. Even the term ‘global warming’ originated from within America’s national security establishment, reflecting Cold War-era anxieties about global vulnerability and a newfound sense of interconnected responsibility.

As the Cold War drew to a close, global crises increasingly demanded cooperative international responses. Echoing Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a unified, post-bipolar Europe – a ‘common European home’ – the landmark Brundtland Report, titled Our Common Future (1987), captured a similar spirit of collective responsibility for addressing nuclear weapons and climate change. Our Common Future was illustrated in some iterations with images from the famine in Ethiopia and in others with the Earth held up by hands. The report urged nations to address environmental and developmental challenges with ‘innovative, concrete, and realistic’ solutions, advocating stronger international collaboration capable of reshaping existing policies. Towards the century’s end, the Kyoto Protocol and Millennium Development Goals channelled the spirit of the report, providing an argument for a globalised consciousness to address collective climate and sustainability crises that still characterises the modern environmental discourse.

Over 50 years later, the endurance of the Blue Marble lies in its place between the ambitions of the beyond and the fragility of home. The Earth hangs there in the photograph against the expanse of black – beautiful, but alone.