Planet Earth Seen From Space: A Very Brief Visual History

International audienceThe article proposes a brief visual genealogy of scientific whole Earth imagery from the beginning of the nineteenth century until today. It shows in particular that imagination played and still plays an absolutely central role in this history. Indeed, all whole Earth views from outer space – whether these are engravings from the nineteenth century, photographic recordings from the twentieth century, or digital images from the twenty-first century – invoke necessarily imaginative processes. Although data-gathering and visualisation technologies have dramatically modified the accuracy of the scientific knowledge and information that feeds into whole Earth imagery, imagination still has a very strong grasp on how we represent, visualise and finally conceptualise planet Earth