The magic of an earthrise, 380,000 km from our blue planet. For nearly 55 years, and since the famous Earthrise captured by astronaut William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission a few months before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon in July 1969, it has been impossible to tire of images from space that show us how infinitesimally small and fragile we are in the midst of the universe.
On the edge of the void
This Sunday, July 23, 2023, Finisterian Éric Lagadec, astrophysicist at the Côte d’Azur Observatory, shared an intriguing short video with his 150,000 Twitter followers. It was taken by a probe from the Japanese space agency and shows the flight over the moon, our globe. Small blue sphere surrounded by cosmic emptiness, which is probably experiencing its hottest month of July at the moment.
“To send a message”
On the social network abused by Elon Musk, a billionaire who also sends rockets across the stratosphere, the video caused a stir, prompting mostly admiring comments, not to mention a handful of “conspiracy skeptics” with banal arguments that to this day have made no distinction between NASA and Hollywood.
“It is important to send a message”, Éric Lagadec confided late last year while hosting the show Towards infinity… (but not beyond), which he co-produced with comedian Guillaume Meurice. That is crystal clear today. And as climatologist Michael E. Mann told our colleagues at Le Monde: “We still have time to prevent the worst impacts if we act now. »