This Is Home | We Are From Earth

Six photographs, in one direction only, from the greatest distance to the smallest subject. There is no argument in the words. The argument is the order.

The whole Earth seen from space, cloud systems over ocean and continents. — Photo by NASA Earth Observatory

Everything that has ever happened to anyone happened here.

The whole of it fits in a single frame, taken from close enough that you can still make out weather. This is the largest that home has ever been able to look from outside, and it is already small.

Sunrise across the curve of Earth, a thin blue band of atmosphere against black space. — Photo by NASA / STS-52

Closer, and the edge becomes visible.

That band is the atmosphere, seen sideways at sunrise. Every living thing we know of sits inside it. It is not a metaphor for fragility and it does not need to be: it is a physically thin layer, and the black above it starts immediately.

Aerial view of farmland divided into fields by hedgerows and tracks. — Photo by Altaf Shah

Down through it, and the surface turns out to be drawn on.

Hedges, tracks, ditches, the accumulated edges of a thousand separate decisions about who holds what. From orbit none of this was visible. From here it is the only thing that is. Both views are accurate.

A single person walking across a wide plain of volcanic ash beneath a blue sky. — Photo by Iqx Azmi

And this is the scale at which the planet is actually experienced.

Not as a system or a photograph. As ground, weather, distance, and the particular tiredness of crossing it. Nobody has ever lived at the scale of the first image in this sequence.

Dense shoals of fish moving above a coral reef. — Photo by USFWS Pacific / Public domain

Meanwhile, and entirely without reference to any of the above.

This has been running for a very long time, it involves an enormous number of participants, and not one of them is aware of us. Most of what happens on Earth is like this.

A macaque moving through dense forest canopy carrying an infant on its body. — Photo by Krishna k. sahh / CC0

One animal, carrying another, in a particular tree, on a particular morning.

Held inside the ecosystem, inside the weather, inside the drawn-on surface, inside the thin blue band, inside the small bright object in the first photograph. All six pictures are of the same place.

Both scales are the same story

There is a habit of treating the planetary scale as the serious one and the individual scale as the sentimental one. The sequence is meant to make that distinction hard to keep hold of. The macaque is not an illustration of the biosphere. The macaque is what the biosphere consists of.

Zoom out far enough and the living detail disappears. Zoom in far enough and the system does. Neither view is the true one, and the only honest position is to keep moving between them.

This is home. All of it, at once, at every scale.