Almost five decades ago, two photographs of planet Earth, taken by Apollo missions 8 and 17 respectively, marked both the end and the be-ginning of an era: Earthrise (by William Anders, 1968, Nasa-ID AS8-14-2383HR) and Blue Marble (by Harrison Schmitt, 1972, AS17-148-22727) seemed but an »afterthought«1 – at first sight a hardly noteworthy side product of the dramatic ›space race‹ between the United States and the Soviet Union that further deepened the divide between the different worlds the hot and cold wars of the 20th century had created – west and east, ›first‹ and ›third‹ etc. At a time when these divisions seemed insur-mountable and nothing appeared more remote than the idea of uniting ›the‹ world as a whole, the photographic constructions of this unity and wholeness were not only perceived as a scientific success of empirical representation.