Empty? Maybe not.

Blue mountains in the distance
Laval, QC
August 2013
Thematic. Emptiness. Here.

The Mars Curiosity rover got some global headlines last week when it snapped a picture of Earth from its perch on the surface of the Red Planet.

Like Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot picture before it, I spent more time than I should have staring at it and wondering about its meaning. At first glance, both pictures may look fairly simple. There's no detail to speak of, little more than a single pixel of light. No sign of activity, humanity, or life.

But if we could look more closely, we'd see every human alive on that day. We've see the sum total of life on our very isolated, very fragile planet. We'd see it all. Only the limitations of technology keep us from having that visibility.

And so it goes with this shot of Laval's western tip. That's Deux-Montagnes (aka Two Mountains) in the distance, and as much as this scene seems empty of life or activity, a deeper dive into the limited-pixel perspective here would bear out countless lives playing out in real-time. It's a reminder that not everything is ever as it initially seems, and an inspiration to keep shooting stuff like this.

Your turn: Who lives here?