Al Gore got the same amount of ridicule for proposing a satellite that would live-stream the earth 24/7. The trouble is that to get a good view, you have to be so far away that the resolution isn't scientifically or commercially valuable. And to get a daylight view 24/7, you'd have to be in a Lagrange point which is crazy far away - about 4x the distance to the moon. Eventually after years of pushing and shoving, someone came up with a reason to have a probe at L1 (studying solar weather), and they stuck a camera on the back, and now we have daily 2048x2048 multispectral images of the earth, always in full daylight! <a href="https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/</a><p>Sometimes it gets photobombed by the far side of the moon, and the images of solar eclipses are the best. <a href="https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries" rel="nofollow">https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries</a>
More context to the story:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog</a><p>The story is by Steward Brand[1], who, besides bringing the Whole Earth Catalog into existence, help Douglas Engelbart present the Mother Of All Demos[2] - the demo that gave us the mouse, hypertext, and many other things that Xerox PARC (and then MacOS and Windows) emulated.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand</a><p>[2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos</a>
Here's a video by Vsauce explaining why:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww</a>
Related: the GOES “full disc” view is a partial realization of this and it’s mesmerizing: <a href="https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/FullDisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=GEOCOLOR&length=96" rel="nofollow">https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/FullDisk_band.php?sat=...</a>
Great story! Strikes me though that the image we associate with the "whole earth" is only of a specific half.<p>An expansion on the revelation at the heart of many issues today.