THE ENVIRONMENT
How to Change Your Perspective on Climate Change
A journey through the ripple effects of a global crisis
Between October 6 and October 31, 1957, the Western world faced such a massive crisis that the New York Times wrote about it in more than 11 articles per day. The cause of all fear was tiny; Sputnik was a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses.
I remember my father describing his memories of hearing the beeps that amateur radio operators worldwide could easily detect. He told me this decades later when considerably larger structures orbited Earth, manned by astronauts who lived there for months, and Sputnik was considered ancient technology.
But in ’57, the cosmic beeping still captivated the world like a doctor listening to a heartbeat. The West feared losing its technological advances to the Soviet Union, and the ‘Sputnik Crisis’ became a significant event in the Cold War. It catalyzed the creation of NASA and kicked off the Space Race between the two superpowers.
The Soviets’ development of the world’s first artificial satellite didn’t come as a complete surprise for the Americans, but their estimates were off by a factor of ten. Instead of expecting a massive satellite over…
