Blueturn

Experience the Whole Earth and leap into planetary consciousness.
A blue turn for Humankind.

BLUETURN PROJECT HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Blue Marble, Al Gore, L1, NASA, Triana, DSCOVR and Blueturn

Blue Marble is the first picture of the Whole Earth photographed from space. It was taken in 1972 by Apollo 17 astronauts on their way to the Moon. As Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission, it remained until recently the only full portrait of the Earth.

Blue Marble changed humanity which saw its « home » for the first time. This picture appeared magically at a moment when environmental problems became global. Blue Marble allowed the first development of planetary consciousness and facilitated the emergence of global ecology and environmental movements.

Vice President Al Gore, standing in front of Blue Marble

Inspired by the Blue Marble’s environmental impact in the Seventies, Al Gore dreamt in 1998 of a satellite that would be sent in space to broadcast live Earth images across the nascent Internet. He challenged NASA to launch this mission before the end of the Millenium. At the age of the Internet, Al Gore had the visionnary intuition that live videos of the Whole Earth would help disseminating this sense of wonder and bring the perspective that is missing to tackle today’s global issues. This satellite had the potential to bring to all Earth citizens the Overview Effect that transformed the astronauts in space.

There is only one point in the universe where the Earth is always lit and where a satellite could easily stay : Lagrange L1. Located one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from the Earth (4 times the Earth-Moon distance) on the Earth/Sun axis, where gravitational forces of both bodies are balancing each other.

NASA took the Al Gore challenge, built the so-called “Triana” satellite and was ready to launch in 2000 before the end of the Millenium. But sadly the mission was slowed down by Republicans when they took over the Congress and fully stopped by the George W. Bush administration early 2001.

During the Obama administration, the mission was confidentially restarted under the new name “DSCOVR“ (Deep Space Climate Observatory) with a primary focus to film the Sun (early warning system of the Earth in case of solar eruptions) in partnership with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization) and US Air Force. In February 2015, the mission was launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, arrived at L1 in June and transmitted in July the second Full portrait of the Whole Earth taken by the onboarded EPIC camera.

Here is a nice explanatory video about the DSCOVR mission and its purpose, from last year’s AGU (American Geophysical Union), the american community of Earth and space scientists:

However DSCOVR and its EPIC camera only provided static pictures which are of limited interest for the general public. Through its advanced algorithms, Blueturn turned these images into live videos.

With Blueturn, experience the living Earth on any screen and be inspired. The next stage of planetary consciousness is starting now.

BLUETURN FOUNDERS

Michaël Boccara

Chief Machinist

The Home Planet

Seminal Book

Jean-Pierre Goux

Chief Dreamer

We met in Engineering school in Paris back in 1993. We were neighbours in the student dorms and shared endless night discussions on the way our world could run. In 1996, Michaël showed Jean-Pierre its latest discovery, The Home Planet, a book of photographs of the Earth taken in orbit and accompanied by beautiful astronaut texts. This book mesmerized us and shaped our future.

In 1998, we had been both amazed by Al Gore’s Triana vision. At that time, we were both researchers in the US : Michaël at MIT (virtual reality and imagery applied to aerospace) and Jean-Pierre at Northwestern University & Argonne National Laboratory (distributed computing and algorithms applied to energy and environmental issues). They considered at the time applying to NASA to promote these Triana images.

After the program stopped, our paths diverged. Michaël moved to Tel-Aviv and worked as a software team leader for several large IT firms (Silicon Graphics, Intel) and startups with a focus on 3D imagery and mobile user interfaces. On his side, Jean-Pierre went back to Paris, lead the strategy and business development of diverse startups in energy and environment. Inspired by the vision of The Home Planet, he also wrote two very popular eco-thriller novels, the Siècle bleu saga (not yet translated into English but Blue turn could be the right translation for the title). In the novels, the vision of the Earth felt by the astronauts, the so-called overview effect, occupied a key role. In 28 days, this vision triggered a (pacific) revolution that changed the world. Blueturn is the natural follow up of these novels into reality.

Siecle Bleu second volume : Ombres et Lumieres (shadows and lights)

20 years after, the NASA EPIC images have given Michaël and Jean-Pierre the chance to pursue this dream and share this vision with nowadays technologies and social media.

BLUETURN TEAM

WE NEED YOUR HELP !

The Blueturn project is collective. All help is welcome to make this experience better and these images more broadly available. Please us the contact form at the bottom of this page.

We develop this project during our free (night) time and all Blueturn productions (based on NASA public domain images) are freely available under Creative Commons licences.

Yuval Drori

Server Application Developer

Hopes to live forever and migrate to Mars, also loves to help and be part of cool projects.

Georges Houy

Webmastering, Translations & Videos

Developing websites since 1995, Jean-Pierre and I met in 1996 when we created the site for the Revolution of the Ants (Bernard Werber’s novel).

We would like to already thank:

Yacine Aït-Kaci (Yak, creator of Elyx) for his help on post-production, motion design.
David Jeanne for his work on the User Experience (UX) of the Blueturn app.
Gabriel Boccara for his help on logo, communication and marketing supports.
Constanze Kühl and Gilles Tessier for the german translation (will be online in a few days)
All the teams of Institut des Futurs Souhaitables and TEDx VaugirardRoad for their tremendous support in the Blueturn project

If you have some free time as well, we are in particular interested :

IT software :
- knowledge of the Unity development framework (Android, iOS, WebGL, HD TV, Virtual Reality) in order to make our upcoming app available on all types of devices
- automation of testing with advanced tools (Google Cloud test lab…) to improve our robustness and availability
IT server : knowledge of the Server side to create automation of image retrieval (Amazon Cloud services), load balancing and scalibility, scripting for automated push of images to social networks accounts (Vimeo, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram…)
UX: knowledge on application user experience methodologies will help Blueturn design the most intuitive and esthetic user experience on our upcoming app

But also, some non-IT related tasks :

Legal : knowledge of the Creative Commons license
Communication / Marketing : expertise in logo, motion design, animations, web design (WordPress / Divi framework)
Social networks : if you are an expert in creating buzz on social networks and have ideas on how to bring Blueturn images to a larger audience, we are interested!
Translation : translating the Blueturn website, applications and tools in other languages (Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, …)
Projects : we want to promote usage of NASA and Blueturn images in education, meditation and art, in order to make the overview effect broadly accessible and initiate the next wave of planetary consciousness