BBC Radio 4 2016-10-24

Good morning. On this day, seventy years ago, a group of scientists and soldiers at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico saw something that no one had seen before. They had just recovered grainy black and white photographs from a camera launched on a rocket to an altitude of 65 miles and showed the first picture of the Earth seen from space. Some viewed it as just a technological achievement but one unnamed member of the team said with amazement, 'Do you realise what is going on here?'

This technology would pave the way for images taken by satellites and then the Apollo Moon missions. Its significance was in giving a new perspective on the Earth and its effect was profound. These images gave a sense of common humanity and the special beauty of our planet. They helped greatly in the beginnings of the environmental movement and physicist Carl Sagan wrote that they 'underscore our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot'.

But there is another interesting dimension in the photographs first seen in 1946. The camera was riding on a V-2 rocket which towards the end of the war had caused the deaths of 9000 civilians in attacks, as well as 12,000 prisoners in the factories that produced them. After the war, 300 railroad cars transported these missiles to White Sands and dozens were tested by the US military. Of course, it would be na?ve to think that they were fired just for scientific discovery. They were being tested to develop ballistic missiles and then to win the space race, but the scientific instruments were allowed to go along for the ride. This had not completely, in the words of the Old Testament prophets, 'beat the swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks' but the V-2 technology did inadvertently open up a different perspective.

Now my perspective as a Christian puts alongside these pictures a God who is revealed in Jesus who not only is the source of our common humanity but also the hope that evil in the world can be healed and transformed.

It is in pictures that the question 'Do you realise what is going on here' often arises for me today. I see pictures of the desperation of Aleppo, the violence of Mosul and the fear of the Calais jungle in stark contrast to the common humanity seen in viewing Earth from space. Perhaps all of these pictures sometimes of horror, sometimes of beauty and sometimes of faith are needed if I am going to take seriously my part in transforming the world.