We're out of this world

(Somewhere above the Earth)

The world is gazing in awe at Noguchi Soichi’s twitpics from space, beautiful portraits of our lives from a vertical perspective. The first one I clicked on was a close-up of the underbelly of Noguchi’s ship and it filled me with many feelings at once. Vertigo, fear. Excitement, desire. I continued to scroll through the images of Earth as fascinated as when reading National Geographic but with an extra thrill because these photographs come from space, a place I will never see.

How amazing that you can now take a photograph and transmit it instantly to the internet on Earth and straight onto a social networking site without any need for somebody on the ground to facilitate the process. How wonderful that we can all feel so close together as inhabitants of this tiny, vast domain.

Yes, but no. What is amazing is that with all our capabilities all we choose to do is gild the technological lily while people the world over still die through starvation, war and the effects of the environmental damage we have inflicted on our own habitat. We marvel at all these places because we are seeing them from the only view which excludes the scars of all the evil we have done.

It has been said many times that the only reason we concentrate on space is because we need another place to destroy. These pictures, although beautiful and well-intentioned, show the start of that process. We can no longer photograph the world without revealing the unquestionable evidence of our arrogance, so now we take them from space to spare ourselves the guilt.

Tongue in cheek

I often read Time magazine, more for the excellent writing and international range of stories than for the opinions of the journalists. In this week’s edition, dated February 22nd, there was an article on how the U.S. military and U.S. government respond to violent incidents involving American soldiers.

The first part of the sub-heading of the article was “Some soldiers become murderers.” Did the journalist really write that with a straight face? The second part was “The military needs to figure out how to stop them”. Did anybody read that with a straight face?