The image below is the famous NASA shot of the earth at night. Or obviously a collage of different night shots. Take a look:
This photo shows what’s happening in the world very clearly, much more than a daytime satellite photo. There’s inequality in population/wealth. Most people are in the eastern USA, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, South Africa, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia. Everything else is small potatoes. Really bright lights usually mark wealthy industrialised nations.
Then there’s the enormous environmental impact humans are having. Enormous areas are totally floodlit. You have to drive more and more to get to a place where you can see more than a 40 stars with the naked eye. The lights show human cover a surprising area. This photo would be a great illustration for the Matrix’s Agent Smith’s argument that humans are a disease. The only areas of total black are extremely difficult habitats: the Amazon, Sahara, Australian desert, central African rainforest, Himalayas, Gobi desert, Siberia.
This photo’s also the best picture of people suffering from poverty, political oppression, genocide. There are some areas that an alien would think are deserts. But they have very sizeable populations: a sign something’s gone terribly wrong giving faint lights in a sea of darkness. Those little specks in west Africa are Nigerian towns where government corruption holds back much development. Move over a little to the east to flickers of the Congo, where the surrounding darkness holds multiple armies of genocidal rapists/torturers who can come into your town at any time and do things that—. A little further to the right are the reminders of the Rwanda genocide. Burma, Pakistan, Somalia also have large populations but are almost pitch black. These people live in a parallel world to ours. You can slaughter hundreds of thousands of them and us “electricity folk” won’t even notice. They’re even invisible on satellite photos.
This is probably the most rambling and pointless of my posts but I found it interesting just how much about the state of our world is encapsulated in this little photo. I await with curiosity as to what lights will appear on this map over the next say 50 years — and which will turn off. Or whether any will be left.
3 comments ↓
Very interesting posting. Thank you. Coincidentally, I also just wrote about one of the very dark areas on the map, Tibet. Take a look, if you can stomach it.
The first part with the beating of the prisoners made me think how far we’ve actually come — just a few decades ago, you could expect far far worse treatment even in the most progressive states in the world.
The second part is unwatchable — however I do object to the use of such graphic imagery in a general news release. It’s very inflamatory and can easily be misinterpreted by people like me with no medical training to suggest things that might not be true. Eg. I have no idea what factors actually combined to produce such horrendous wounds. Maybe I’m a bit cynical about footage released from Dharamsala that has obvious political purposes — but it felt like the man was exploited by the makers and distributors of the film.
That said, he was tortured and there should be a lot more noise made about each such case.
Yes, indeed, I think you are right: there are political motivations. I am sorry I linked the video–in fact I did not watch the second part. I stopped and skipped forwardl; I couldn’t stand it. But we need to condemn torture, everywhere, at all times.
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