On The Media

On this week’s episode of On the Media, we’re engaging in some chillingly informed speculation: what would happen if we, as a species, lost access to our electronic records? What if, either by the slow creep of  technological obsolescence or sudden cosmic disaster, we no longer could draw from the well of of knowledge accrued through the ages? What if we fell into...a digital dark age? One scenario we explore isn’t speculative: it’s real. In the 1990’s, NASA experienced its own version of a digital dark age, when more than a million reels of data -- including the 1969 Apollo Moonwalk video and Earthrise, the iconic picture of our planet floating above the surface of the moon -- were either destroyed or rendered unreadable. We hear from Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and co-founder of an initiative to rescue images and readings from the Lunar Orbiter missions, including that 1966 Earthrise photo: the first view of Earth from the moon. Earth taken from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966. This is the poor-quality i