We as a species have taken the most meta-selfie to end all selfies, with a little help from NASA. The agency released an image of the globe made entirely of selfies regular citizens took on Earth Day.To celebrate Earth Day this year, NASA asked people around the world a very simple question: “Where are you on Earth Right Now?” The question came with a request for people to tweet their selfie with the hashtag #globalselfie.Turns out, the goal behind the #globalselfie was to create an actual global selfie. It was more than a week’s effort, but NASA took 36,422 of the more than 50,000 selfies people tweeted from around the world and assembled them into an image of the Earth.The mosaic is based on two views of the Earth, one of each hemisphere, taken on Earth Day by the joint NOAA-NASA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite.The result is pretty interesting as an image, but more interesting for its constituent parts. The 36,422 images come from 113 countries and regions including Antarctica, Yemen, Greenland, Guatemala, Micronesia, the Maldives, Pakistan, Poland, and Peru. The 3.2-gigapixel image is also zoomable, meaning you can get look at the image in enough detail to explode the individual pictures that make up the planet.Essentially, you can look at this picture closely enough to see a handful of the people that make up our planet. And who knows. Maybe seeing the Earth made up of our own faces will give us a stronger sense of our place in the Solar System and a sense of ownership of our planet, because it’s the only one we’ve got. Or not. Either way, it’s a fantastic image and well worth exploring.
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