I’m sitting in the keynote address at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference. Rem Jackson, is speaking, and I wasn’t intending to write anything, because I’ve seen him present many times. But Jackson just said something that I think is enormously powerful.
He showed a picture of the globe at night. So you can see the cities lit up. Then he asked, “If we had satellites 50 years ago, would the planet have looked like this, or a hundred years ago?” For the billions of years of this planet’s life, the planet was dark at night. The lighting of the planet has just happened — and it’s happened to us.”
Very powerful.
I’ve seen pictures like that, and they are truly amazing. It’s always easy to pick out cities you know that way.
ok, I’m feeling picky, so here goes:
it’s happened to us? No, we did it.
And why, or in what way is that powerful, exactly? Is it the lighted parts? Or the dark parts, that attract your attention? Which parts are the powerful parts? I can see that globe and imagine a Buckminster Fullerian world, sharing the electricity via an around-the-world grid, with all the populated areas lit up, but with blessed darkness too, coz we need both.