Notes from the far side of the Moon

Neil Armstrong's iconic photograph of Edwin ''Buzz'' Aldrin from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.

A week after the 50th anniversary of the Space Age's Apollo 11 voyage and humankind's first Moon landing, it's still a topic of wide media coverage and much discussion.
Well, among a certain age group, I suspect. I haven't yet asked my grandchildren how significant they consider that event from half a century ago. Their age group will one day have their own stock of questions asking, ''Where were you on the day ....?''

For the record, I first saw the televised footage in the old Auckland Star building on that city's Shortland St. In July 1969, I'd worked there for only a few weeks, determined to be a cadet reporter after leaving school halfway through what would now be Year 12. I don't think I looked ahead far enough to see myself still working in a newspaper room 50 years later.

This week it's my pleasure to welcome a new columnist to our 48 Hours pages. He is Paul Serotsky who might already be familiar to many readers as an occasional contributor in the past, sharing his fascinating views and reviews of classical music under the title Classic Stuff. Paul Serotsky will use his writing skills to pick over a range of topics, including music, under the banner Classic Notes.

That old moon landing marked a huge milestone for him, coming as it did while he was studying his MSc in geophysics and planetary physics. But this week he writes about an even greater jolt he had from the days of Apollo, something he says is still a ''spine-tingling'' experience every time he sees it - the iconic photo taken from an orbit of Earth's Moon eight months before mankind stepped foot on it. - Lindy Laird, Northern Advocate features editor.

Earth's selfie from the moon

Cover photo: Earth's selfie from the far side of the moon

Earthrise, from the far side of the moon.

Earthrise is the name given to a photograph of Earth and some of the Moon's surface taken from lunar orbit by astronaut Bill (William) Anders on December 24, 1968.

Anders and fellow astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were on the Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed voyage to orbit the Moon.

The name Earthrise is a play on "moonrise". Nasa flipped the photo so Earth seemed to be rising above the moon's horizon, and cropped it to make Earth look bigger and more focal.

At the beginning of the fourth of 10 orbits, the spacecraft was emerging from the far side of the Moon when a view of the blue-white planet filled one of the hatch windows.

"Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!" Anders is heard saying on the flight recordings.

He first took a black and white photo, and believed he'd missed the to-be iconic image. Lovell scrambled to find a colour film canister for Anders and looked through windows three and four.

"Hey, I got it right here!" he exclaimed.

A weightless Anders shot over to where Lovell was floating, shoved the film in the Hasselblad camera and shot two photos.
"You got it?" Lovell asked.

"Yep," Anders answered.

In Life's100 Photographs that Changed the World (curated in 2003), wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called Earthrise "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken".

''It's never easy to identify the moment a hinge turns in history. When it comes to humanity's first true grasp of the beauty, fragility and loneliness of our world, however, we know the precise instant. It was on December 24, 1968.'' - Life That giant leap

Classic Notes, by Paul Serotsky

Paul Serotsky.

Write a column, they said. It was not a question. About what? This was a question. Anything, they said.

Really? Gingerly, I picked up the gauntlet, inspected it closely; no sign of poisoned barbs or detonator pins.

Start by introducing yourself, they suggested. So I did, then set it aside for later – because something fairly topical barged into my brain, and I felt obliged to strike while the iron's at least tepid.

As we all know, July 20 was the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. To my mind, Project Apollo's greatest gift to all mankind perhaps came, not from Apollo 11 but over six months earlier from Apollo 8, when Bill Anders took the Earthrise photograph.

Its profound implications – for all but flat-Earthers and those who believe space exploration is a gigantic hoax – have resonated down the decades. Suddenly, our understandable pride in Apollo's mind-boggling achievement was tempered by a lesson in humility. By showing it to be a mere speck of dust in the Cosmos, it made our home – our only home – infinitely precious.

Or it should have. Fast-forward 50 years and it seems that we've forgotten that salutary lesson. Considering the deplorable mess we're making of our world, Anders starts to look like St Anthony preaching to the fishes (they were impressed by the sermon, then swam off and carried on sinning).

Oh, I'll grant that we are trying to fix things. Unfortunately, it seems to me that piece-meal is not the right way.

I'm reading H. R. Frankel's massive (as in four volumes weighing around 4½ kg!) book, The Continental Drift Controversy. He observes that the early argument over continental drift dragged on for so long because most of the scientists involved adopted regionally-blinkered attitudes towards what was actually a global phenomenon.

It's all right puttering about with bits to "help the environment" but, surely, this also really is a global problem. As far as I'm aware, nobody has yet examined that beloved speck as a whole and asked one rather obvious but crucial question: How large a human population can this planet sustain?

Since it's done so for many millennia, clearly the Earth can tolerate mankind's activities – but only up to a point. I'm not saying it'd be easy, but we're entirely capable of figuring out two things: How much human "crap" (there's a nice, concise technical term) the planet can cope with; and the current rate of generation of the same.

The former is pretty well constant, while the latter is broadly proportional to the number of people. Thus it'd be "a small step for man" to work out the maximum viable population. At least that'd provide some proper "crap reduction" targets to aim at.

But, since things first started to look bad the population has almost tripled, so just "cutting the crap" isn't likely to cut the mustard – we need to reduce the global population to fit the planet. The problem, though, must be approached holistically – adopt the Apollo method: The same commitment, ingenuity, co-ordination, and funding, but applied on a global scale.

Now, wouldn't that really be a giant leap for mankind, especially when it's not just to put a man on the Moon, but to save the world?