The Limited Impact of Current Conventional Earth Images
Lovelock’s comment about the image “we are now so familiar with” is the problem. We (especially those of us born after the pictures first appeared) now take them for granted, as if we have always had that perspective. And yet, as I have explained previously, the pictures do not actually give us the experience that alternately turned the astronauts mute or waxing poetic. And, unless you saw those pictures for the first time, in that magical extended moment of the Apollo program, or the brief following period when they first began to saturate our minds and image-world, that hyper-real, “magical” effect is now dulled through familiarity.
The Overview Effect is now nearly hidden in these limited and over-exposed representations. I’m not suggesting that Earth images now lack power, but because of their familiarity and lack of detail and new information, plus the fact that they are usually the same hand-full of iconic shots, they lack the rush of new sensory experience that accompanied those first sightings, let alone the depth of multi-sensory overload that the astronauts experience directly.
