Dear World ... looking at you from the Shuttle Atlantis ...

“The Blue Marble” photo of 

earth taken from Apollo 17 (1972)

Around the world in 60 minutes ... this BBC2 documentary of the Shuttle Atlantis on its last journey 50 years after man blasted into space ....lift off ... the sky goes blue, blue, blue.... black – leaving earth as this jewelled sparkle below.

Gull had done her post – then hey presto in the evening .. BBC2 had this programme following one 90 minute orbit of the earth – the astronauts will see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets as they travel 220 miles above us.  This film shows us a world that usually is only seen through their eyes.

Presented by Kevin Fong, a doctor who has trained with NASA for the past 15 years, with insights from British astronaut Piers Sellers (specialising in climate and environmental science), who describes what it’s like to live, work and walk in space.

Atlantis hurtles towards the International Space Station (ISS) with its next contingent of scientifically trained astronauts – the ISS members have not seen anyone else from earth for a month.  Atlantis also brings replenishment food and water ...

Laser projected from the

Royal Observatory in Greenwich

marking the Prime Meridian

There are 16 nations involved with the ISS – a truly cosmopolitan mix of peoples – who are collaborating together ... whose basic purpose is to understand the earth below, see what nature and humans are doing to it, while conducting short and long term experiments ...

... micro-gravity means that fairly complex protein structures can be created more quickly, which helps with the testing of drugs and speeds up the process of research into various diseases.

Their starting point for this documentary is the same as those navigators of yore – the Greenwich Prime Meridian 0° – the Greenwich Observatory long acknowledged to hold the most accurate measurements available for the suns, stars and moon – so vital to navigators.

Rock outcrop in Iceland, a visible

surface feature of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,

the Easternmost edge of the North 

American plate. It is a popular destination

for tourists in Iceland.

The first port of call for our crew was Iceland which sits atop the Mid Atlantic Ridge – the tectonic plates that are pushing the Atlantic Ocean apart by 0.003mm per year (about the growth of a fingernail) – now monitored by the passing satellites.

Fifteen minutes later the next ‘stop’ is South America and the Amazon Rainforest – 1.5 billion acres of land teeming with species of plants and animals, as well as operating as one of the lungs of the earth – absorbing the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen: helping to keep the planet and climate in balance.

Limb view, of the Earth's atmosphere.

Colours roughly denote the layers

of the atmosphere.

(Sunset from the Space Station)

It’s only from space that you get to see just how delicate that balance really is ... the very thin onion skin of atmosphere surrounding this great ball of rock protecting life on earth as we know it.

We now, through the satellites circling the earth, have the ability to see the man-made scars and record those changes ...  the deforestation has slowed significantly, but still too much is being cut down – 447 acres every orbit.

Next port of call is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela – the worst storm spot on the planet  ... the satellites now track the birth of storms so warnings can be given  ... there are 1,800 storms every 90 minute orbit of the space station ... this monitoring of the weather systems has saved countless lives – whereas in our living memory the storms could be devastating.

Our orbit takes us next to Texas where more land is farmed than anywhere else on earth – there are 16m cattle and the enormous herds can only be managed by helicopter ... 49,657 cattle are slaughtered for food in every 90 minutes orbit.

The Las Vegas Valley; From top left to

bottom right: Las Vegas Strip (Paradise,

Nevada and Winchester, Nevada),

Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Henderson

A few minutes to the west lies Las Vegas – which breaks all the rules of where to build a city ... slap bang in the middle of a desert on a road to nowhere.  Las Vegas is akin to a space station .. everything has to be shipped in ...

... every ounce of flour, every biscuit, each slice of bacon ... and 69,437,500 litres of water is used every 90 minute orbit, which is the equivalent of 2,778 articulated water trucks – at vast expense.

Las Vegas is also the fattest place in America – two thirds of the populace is over weight .. and the population has almost doubled in the last twenty years ... this trend we’re seeing all around the world – by 2050 there will be nine billion people (now we have +/- six billion).

Our resources are going to be stretched to the limit ... producing, distributing and ensuring everyone has enough.  If we’re going to address that challenge ... we need to find a balance ... to look at our personal freedoms and choices we value around our food and lifestyles, with our responsibilities to live within our environmental and evolutionary limits ...

... we simply cannot continue eating the way we eat now, as we do in the UK and the USA (let alone elsewhere) ... unhappily this change in our thinking is not apparent yet.  I also thought that we should think about not condoning this type of lifestyle ... by not visiting resorts (places), where resources are used willy-nilly.

Postage stamp, New Zealand,

1933. Public health has been

promoted - and depicted -

in a wide variety of ways.

It’s a big change that humans need to address.  I have to say this part of the film revolted me ... humans looked selfish ... overeating: which leads to huge medical bills, over-stretched resources being utilised for ‘just pleasure’ ...

... the space station astronauts realise how precious our bodies are – they exercise for 2 hours every day to maintain optimum fitness and health – their food is surprisingly cosmopolitan ... but there are no hamburgers adding to the two million consumed across the world in just one orbit

They need to work together as a team ... or as a tiny community – they need to get along and appreciate each other’s personal differences, as well as the cultural and social aspects of other nations.

The next hop, skip and jump takes this ‘zig-zagging orbital tour’ to the Hawaii islands .. not to look at the tourist beaches thronged by the most isolated population on earth ... but for the enormous rubbish dumps floating in the Pacific Ocean.

Plastic does not break down ... everything we have created is constantly reduced into smaller and smaller pieces ... until the microscopic plastic pellets get into the food chain – where ultimately they mimic hormones.

Phytoplankton

40,000 tonnes of plastic is made every day – the majority of which will be thrown away.  Some natural species’ lives will be disrupted for ever ... however the greatest irony is that perhaps nature could be just as capable of dealing with our waste problems ...

The salps – shoals of bizarre gelatinous like creatures – live off phytoplanktons, which like to eat CO2 and could be our protection against global warming ... the carbon is locked away by the salps, and on decomposition sinks to the bottom of the sea.  Whereas a tree locks up carbon for 100 – 200 years ...

Our next stop is South Korea – the technical capital of the world (in the 1960s the national wealth was on a par with Afghanistan – now it is the 13^th richest country in the world); the key to this growth has been the silicon chip.

Teheranno – “Silicon Valley

Boulevard”, Seoul,

South Korea.

We in the west watch baseball games, tennis or football matches sitting in a stadium – here the Koreans have computer games ...  and after often having spent hours in the arcades, that line the streets of towns, they stream into their local stadia to watch a computer game – it is their spectator sport!  $12 m worldwide will have been spent on computer games during just one orbit.

However South Korea is a minnow compared to its vast neighbour – China.  Fifty years ago it had a rural economy based on farming life with an average $20 wage and a life expectancy of about 40 years.

Now China leads the way as the manufacturing nation – one quarter of everything produced on earth is made in China.  The wealth of the nation has increased 100 fold .... but it needs limitless energy to satisfy the world’s demands for its goods and services.

Topography of China

China is the world’s largest polluter, with many areas covered in a constant haze of air pollution ... every which way we know how to harness the world’s resources is being applied here on an epic scale ...

... the UK and America’s 40 year old clean air policy is plain to see from our orbiting ISS ... China understands the environmental pressures and is trying everything to find a balance.

Despite this - renewable energies (sunlight, wind, rain, tides and thermal heat) cannot supply sufficient power to keep up with demand – China have invested $48 billion in renewable energy, becoming the world’s leading investor ... but still needed to burn 600,000 tonnes of coal in the 90 minute orbit.

Cherrapunji high in the Himalayan foothills, records the most rainfall in a year (12 metres) – in fact it can rain all year round - while 81.6 trillion litres of water will fall as rain onto our planet in one ninety minute orbit ...

Aral Sea – 1999 and 2008

... then travelling west to Kazakhstan – the Aral Sea ... shows the huge scar of toxic waters of what was once the largest fresh water lake on the earth – before it was drained for cotton and rice fields along its two major tributaries ... there’s a project in place to turn back the clock so it can fill again.

Over time toxic waters and plants can be renewed – as has happened at Chernobyl .. and as I previously mentioned here in my Eden Project and Iron Curtain posts.

During every orbit though 34 sq kilometres of land will become desert ... the landscape is changing in our quest for fresh water.

The last stop is Ethiopia where it is thought that 160,000 years ago the origin of modern man began to emerge ...another place of great change ... which through the dynamic landscape of faulting, earthquakes and volcanic activity a natural world was allowed to flourish into which humans first settled and began to evolve.

Anatomical comparison of the skulls

of a modern human (left) and

Homo neanderthalenss (right).

It is mooted that we are truly a creation from our geologically unstable planet and we need to be prepared for greater change and instability ... are we really nomads at root – have most of our problems arisen by settling down into major population centres ....

... many of which due to climate change will be drowned or will definitely be very less attractive ... one lesson we need to relearn from our ancestors – is the ability to move in order to continue to prosper.

To counter these massive changes we as humans are inflicting on this world we somehow need to adjust our community living – be more compassionate to others ... understand their needs ... we will need to adjust our lives in order to sustain an ever growing population – during our orbit 23,019 children will be born.

Scarlet Macaw, which is indigenous
to the American tropics 

The International Space Station has brought nations together and suddenly our perspective on the world has changed forever. We thought we were going to explore the universe, yet the most extraordinary thing we discovered was our own home planet, the Earth.

This unique journey around the weird and wonderful planet of ours that we call home – was put together by the BBC and its collaborative scientists ... and to them I give total credit ...

PS Gull says it’s too long – but bloggeress .. says it needs to be said and  read – as we humans use every part of this earth ... the rest of the flora and fauna has boundaries ...

BBC2 Film and preamble ... I hope when it becomes available you’ll take some time to watch it.

Eden Project – Plants as Metal Gatherers 

Iron Curtain or Rich Green Wilderness


Some new information that's come to light (2014) from Bish Denham's blog " Random Thoughts" on plastic in the ocean - here's the link .. and the TED talk by Boyan Slat, a Dutch youngster, is amazing - he's pursued his dream through sheer determination, giving up his studies and his social life, crowd sourced ... and is engineering to clean the oceans of plastic ... very well worth watching the 17 minute video. 

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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