Observing Ourselves

This is a map of the Earth. Maps have come a long way from their earliest incarnations of paintings in caves and etchings on bones. Today, satellite maps can show us not just where things are but also how we relate to the world and our impact.

Scroll down on the left take a look around.

Arecibo Observatory

Made famous by the Jodi Foster film Contact. The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. In 1999, it began to collect data for the SETI@home project. SETI@home is a project based out of UC Berkeley to analyze radio signals in the search of extraterrestrial intelligence.

When we think about going into space we often think about exploring the unknown. Space exploration has also given us the opportunity to back towards ourselves.

Vegetation border between Namibia and Angola.

Political borders made visibile. While country borders are man made and largely don't show up in satellite imagery. The visible contrast North and South of the border reflects land-use policies on either side. Namibia's farming and livestock grazing makes the differences in ecology visible from space. Straight borders between nations like this one are a remnant of colonial occupation in southwest Africa.

Noor 3

Noor 3 is the third part of the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station located in Morocco. Commissioned in March 2018, it has a capacity of 150 Megawatts. The solar field has 7400 of such mirrors.

Meteor Crater

Meteor Crater is a crater located in northern Arizona. It is privately owned by the Barringer family through the Barringer Crater Company. This is one of 190 confirmed craters on Earth.

Brukkaros Mountain

The mountain is a large extinct volcano, in the form of a ring mountain with a diameter of about 4 km. The Nama called the mountain Geitsi Gubib after the long, flowing loincloth worn by Khoikhoi women, known in Afrikaans as broek-en-karos, Germanicized to Brukkaros.

Han River Delta

Here we see the mouth of the Han River. Fertilizer and industrial runoff has created the striking green as the river flows into the Pacific.
Eutrophication is excessive richness of nutrients in a lake or other body of water, frequently due to runoff from the land, which causes a dense growth of plant life and death of animal life from lack of oxygen.
Satellites give us perspective on the scale of our impact on the world.

Elwha Dam

Elwha Dam was a dam located in the Pacific Northwest. Originally build in 1910, removal of the dam completed in 2013 allowing the Elwha river to flow freely. While fish returned to the river within 1 year, it takes up to 20 years to return to levels before the dam was built.

Zooming in (with your middle mouse scroll) you can uncover older satellite imagery that shows what the dam looked like. Try zooming in and out to compare.

This project is a case study in effectiveness of dam removal in restoring ecology on this scale. If successful, it could encourage restoration through further dam removals.

California

Below is a time lapse of the 2020 California wildfires captured by GOES-West satellite. GOES-West is operated by the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which supports supports weather forecasting, severe storm tracking, and meteorology research. NOAA is one of the many government organizations that has been neglected in leadership and funding under the current Administration.

Meanwhile, with the future of the Earth's habitability feeling precarious, two of the wealthiest men on Earth are desperately trying to get off the planet and begin colonizing Mars. With the first commercial trips to space costing 10s of millions of dollars, one wonders who space colonization will ultimately be accessible to.

Colonization isn't the only path space exploration offers. By turning the satellites towards ourselves, we can see there is so much more to know about it, and how we can be better stewards of it.

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