ESA satellites capture incredible image of 'Burning Man' from space, revealing its massive scale

Time and again, space agencies, with the help of satellites, capture images of important events occurring on Earth. Their unique vantage point offers a sense of wonder as we see our planet so breathtakingly beautiful. Boundaries fade away and humanity's fragility makes sense. It reminds us to cherish the beauty of our planet. Recently, the European Space Agency (ESA) released one such stunning image of the Burning Man festival from space. The annual event is a celebratory desert event held by the non-profit Burning Man Project, headquartered in San Francisco, California.

It all started in 1986 when a small group gathered on Baker Beach for the first burn, which later became a yearly celebration at Black Rock City, Nevada, USA. The festival attracts tens of thousands of global artists, creators, community organizers and local initiatives to the temporary metropolis in the middle of the Nevada desert every year, per the Burning Man Project. With flamboyant costumes and creative minds, the arid landscape transforms into a kaleidoscope of color and whimsy. This incredible event is based on 10 principles - Radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy, per the website.

The Burning Man 2024 (@burningman) was full of vibrance and energy, spreading miles across the desert region. The data from ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission showcases a souvenir of the grand event from space and it's a sight to sore eyes. The image was captured on August 26, 2024, the second day of the week-long festival that occurred between August 25 to September 2 at Black Rock. It turns out that this year, more than 70,000 people gathered in the desert, setting up their tents and campers in the temporary city. The semi-circular area in the image shows the lodgings set up in the metropolis surrounded by mountainous terrain. 

The ESA explained that the Black Rock Desert is a part of the Great Basin Desert spanning over 492,000 sq km. It holds a recurrent terrain, including valleys and rugged gorges, which are depicted by the brown area in the image. The sandy area where the festival occurs and the surrounding mountainous terrains were the result of the "stretching and uplifting" of the Earth's crust for over 17 million years. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission's two identical satellites cover all of Earth's land and coastal waters every five days from an altitude of 786 km. The massive gathering of people and their artwork looks like a tiny semi-circle of rocks from space and we can barely see the differences in culture, race, nationality or gender from up above. 

While speaking of the vantage point of space, an astronaut who observed Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) for 178 days says he realized humanity is "living a lie." NASA astronaut Ronald Garan feels that we as humans don't see ourselves as "planetary," as per his statement during an interview with Big Think. "Since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly-owned subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vantage point of space that we're living a lie," he explained. Rather than prioritizing "economy and society over planet," Garan suggests that we rearrange our priorities to "planet, society, economy."