[dragonwriter]

> > The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.

> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.

It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.

I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.

[dylan604]

Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people. Seeing the whole of the Earth like that moved a lot of people into realizing this planet is worth saving. That one image was a significant moment causing such a spike in people paying attention that it can be forgiven for being confused as the thing. It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did

[dragonwriter]

> Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people.

“Regardless of what you think about X, you must think Y about X” is a particularly tiresome rhetorical device, but its also being deployed as part of a motte-and-bailey argument here.

> It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did

Blue Marble (1990) is a completely different image than Earthrise (1968), and Earthrise was only adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement because the movement was already ascendant when it came out, not because it was the trigger for it.

[rhubarbtree]

I didn’t say it was the sole cause of the environmental movement, you’re being silly.