I have been reading Arthur C. Clarke and there is no doubt that he was ahead of his time when defending that space research and, more specifically, sattelites are tools of peace. He was writing a couple articles in the middle of the Reagan´s Star Wars, in 1980s, and had foreseen the huge impact that satellites would have on peoples way of working, travelling, producing, talking. Much more important than military use.
Besides, it is nice listening to Clarke remembering us how beautiful can be the pictures took from the outerspace. I would say here that we should also considering how powerfull these images has been on communicating Earth´s most urgent problems.
Take the example of this images bellow. It was obtaneid (for free, it must be stressed) on Nasa’s Earth Observatory.
Forest fire in Los Angeles
This is something that everybody could understand. It is huge forest fire and huge columm of smoke. Does not need translation.
But where the journalism came to forefront? Well, I think that we, journalist, are not taking advantage of having all these free imageries and immense flow of information on Earth events. The interpretation of sattelite images is, so far, seen as duty of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) experts. This is true when we talking about information that is going to lead public policies or some private investment. But we can do a great job interpretating ourselves some of the image and delivering to our public .
