An artist’s collection of photos demonstrating how humans have changed Earth’s history has been launched into outer space.
EchoStar XVI took off from a rocket base in Russia last week, carrying 100 images from Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures.”
“It was kind of overwhelming,” Paglen told the Daily News.
The New York-based visual artist traveled to Baikonur in Kazakhstan last week to watch the Nov. 21 takeoff.
“It was the middle of the desert, nothing around for a hundred of miles,” he said. “You fly out to the middle of nowhere, then get on the bus for a couple hours.”
His photographs were in a disc affixed to the outside of the spacecraft.
They included shots of old churches, mountains, other rockets and an early 20th century typhoon in Japan — various images Paglen hopes “document the ways humans have sculpted the world around us.”
“These images are not really meant to represent human history,” he said.
“They’re not meant to explain what human life was all about. It’s much more about the ways that humans have changed the surface of the Earth.”
Paglen worked with physicists, astronomers and philosophers to select the photos.
“I spent years talking to the smartest people I could find,” he said.
All 100 photos are featured in a new book Paglen wrote about the project, “The Last Pictures.”
