Simon Yoo
Fintech Investor
Published in
5 min readNov 20, 2016

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Earthrise

Friends: I’d like to post an essay here. It’s about a photograph that helped change the way we view our world. Bear with me, and all I ask is that you keep an open mind when reading this — I promise I have a point, and perhaps one that’s even worth sharing.

“Earthrise” — as the photo became known — was taken by Bill Anders, who was part of the three man crew of Apollo 8 that in December 1968 were the first to travel to the moon. (The Apollo Program was the code name for NASA’s manned lunar landing missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.)

The commander of the Apollo 8 mission was Frank Borman, and the third member of the crew was Jim Lovell, the future commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission to the moon that had to be aborted.

As to why I think this photograph matters, it’s first important to understand the events of that time and leading up to this picture being taken.

In 1968, civil unrest in the US was reaching a crescendo due to the unpopularity of America’s involvement in the war overseas in Vietnam and the progression of the Civil Rights movement at home.

Both were focal points of then president Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. On the former, he believed, as did many others, that North Vietnam’s conquest of South Vietnam would lead to the spread of communism throughout Asia. Back then and until the end of the 1980s, nearly everyone in the Western World lived in fear of a communist takeover of the world. (Anyone else remember the safety evacuation drills in grade school in the event of a communist attack?)

Johnson’s solution to the rise of communism in South East Asia was to quickly escalate America’s involvement in the war in the hopes that a swift military surge would defeat North Vietnam once and for all.

Johnson thus increased the commitment of US troops on the ground to 500,000 in 1968, up from only 50,000 a few years before. Unfortunately, he underestimated North Vietnam’s will to win. His escalation of troops on the ground only led to more US casualties, and more protests at home.

Knowing this fact took a heavy personal toll on Johnson. So he decided not to run for reelection. Bobby Kennedy then quickly rose to become the front runner for the Democratic Party’s nomination because he built his platform for president around ending America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

He was well on his way to winning the nomination, but then a madman intervened to alter the course of history. Kennedy was assassinated after a campaign stop in California. He died on the floor of a hotel’s kitchen.

During all of this, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. Johnson pushed for racial equality, social justice and an end of poverty under his Great Society Program in 1964 — 1965. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was of course the moral leader of the Civil Rights movement.

Just a few weeks before Bobby Kennedy was murdered, Dr. King was assassinated. Dr. King was gunned down just outside his hotel room in Memphis and riots broke out throughout the country in response. (Indianapolis was only a handful of cities that did not break out in rioting because Sen. Kennedy gave what many historians would argue was one of the great speeches in modern political history there the day MLK was assassinated.)

It is no exaggeration to say that the US was a tinderbox throughout much of 1968 because of these events. I wasn’t alive in 1968. However, what I’m told by my friends and family that were is that the country is divided today in a way that is very much reminiscent of that dark period in our history.

Then something unexpected happened. In December of 1968, Apollo 8 succeeded in sending men to the moon for the very first time. NASA’s intention wasn’t to land on the lunar surface, that would come just a few months later, but to test some of the mission hardware in deep space. It was a highly risky gambit necessary to meet President John F. Kennedy’s deadline of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

The Apollo 8 team of Borman, Lovell and Anders in the process of an “all-up” test flight became the first humans to ever lay eyes on the moon up close. And while there, they were able to capture this photo of the Earth as it rose over the moon’s horizon — something that no one had anticipated.

I can’t emphasize enough how daring a mission this was, or how poignant a moment this would be.

On the former, there was no backup spacecraft or redundant systems. All they had was their tiny command module with a single engine. If the engine didn’t fire, for example, they would die. The planners estimated that their chance of mission success as only being 1 in 3.

On the latter, as to why this moment was so poignant — consider that no humans had ever seen the entire circumference of the planet before the EarthRise photo was taken. Even today, nearly fifty years later and with all of our advances in technology, only 27 men remain ever to have seen the earth in its entirety and all its glory. (Please note, only men were on the Apollo missions to the moon where the earth’s complete circumference could be seen from space.)

Amidst all the chaos at home and abroad this photo of a tiny, blue marble hovering in the vast blackness of space was presented to the world. To quote the late / great Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The Apollo 8 mission presented this image to the world at Christmas 1968. Even today, the photo is breathtaking. Look at it again. Everything we have is “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Look at how small, and fragile it looks. It’s so easy to forget this.

It’s also easy to forget how fragile democracy is. When it doesn’t work a lot of people get hurt. Is it perfect? Of course not. But a better solution to govern has yet to be invented by humankind. Let’s make our days count. Let’s take (better) care of one another. Our differences are not as great as some would have you believe.

If you’ve gotten this far — thank you.

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