1969 and Global Consciousness

Within 3 months, we had a change in consciousness from local to global, a change in what we were conscious of and acted on, like a thirsty hiker who sees a river in the distance and alters course to move towards it, acting on what she's now conscious of.

1969, July: Apollo 11 astronauts send back the “Earthrise”-style photos, showing our fragile blue planet against the black void. It’s often called the birth of the modern environmental and global consciousness movements.

1969, October 29: ARPANET’s first message sent between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute — the seed of the internet. The first word transmitted was “LO” (they meant to type “LOGIN,” but the system crashed).

So: same year. Within three months, humanity looked back at Earth from the Moon and began to wire Earth together with digital connections. That coincidence is almost poetic: the same season, we both saw the whole and began to connect the parts. A shift in consciousness that triggered a change in how we communicated and worked and what we thought of as valuable.
And just now you have used this worldwide web to see a picture of the earth from space, something no generation of humans could do before 1969, a picture so familiar now that you might take it for granted, might forget how perfectly it represents something we might call global consciousness. This is reality. The divisions we create on this beautiful orb are just tools we use to make something so vast seem navigable, feel like home, make this manageable. Globalization is real; the demarcations across this globe are just made up. (Well, except for coastlines.)