This still from a video shot by an astronaut from the International Space Station offers a new perspective on world history. It was taken by American astronaut Frank Culbertson on 11 September 2001. As he looks down on New York from space, a vast plume of smoke hangs over the harbour. The smoke trail is longer than Manhattan island.

Culbertson saw an unnatural event as if it were a natural one. Like a volcano spewing ash, the destruction of the World Trade Centre sent enough dust into the sky to change the map-like view of the earth in an astronaut's eye. This startling off-world perspective is a reminder more than a decade on of the scale of what happened that day.

It is also an image of impotence. While people were dying down below – and he later found out he had lost a friend in the attacks – Culbertson could only see the eerie image of a distant event. He was sitting safely in a tin can far above the earth and there was nothing he could do to help.

This is the situation everyone is in who was not there. World events are witnessed by the world as never before; history can be seen as it happens – from you and me following a live blog on events in the Crimea to an astronaut watching the spinning earth. But does it make any difference that we have so much information so fast? Knowing up-to-the-minute what is happening on the far side of the planet – or even in your next door neighbour's house – may leave you as helpless and passive a witness as the astronaut who filmed that smoke plume.

Even as Channel 4 plans to show this video in a documentary on life in space, planes and ships have been scouring the sea looking for traces of the missing Malaysian airliner MH370. So far this "vanished" airliner has confronted the modern world with something unusual: a dearth of information, an absence of images. Yet even if every fact becomes known, even if every piece of the story falls into place, will this make the experiences of the people on that plane any less isolated? The eyes of the world are just eyes – watching is not helping. It is not being there. It changes nothing.

'The uselessness of watching and waiting': A protester uses a catapult during clashes with riot police in Kiev, Ukraine. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA

The Ukraine crisis in particular confronts us hourly with the uselessness of watching and waiting. The facts are all there, with or without satellite images to give the political map of the region a spurious scientific aspect. Each new development is seen around the world on a host of media platforms. None of this helps anyone as options for action appear starkly limited. William Hague speaks sombre words into the microphone in his space suit as he floats helplessly in the void; Barack Obama sweats in the control room and tries another rhetorical gambit worked out by the backroom boys. Washington, we have a problem. In space, no one can hear you threaten sanctions. Like astronauts watching from the ISS, everyone can see the problem, but there may as well be a galaxy between us and the Crimea for all the difference that knowledge makes.

The history of political knowledge is a curve that peaked some time ago. From the age of Christopher Columbus up to 1914, improvements in communication – from the dissemination of printed maps to the rise of newspapers, telegraphs and photography – gave (western) societies increasing control over their fate. But for a century now, since August 1914, the hope that science would allow the world to govern itself rationally has been exploded. Knowing all the facts does not make political decisions any easier. Witnessing world events does not not mean knowing what to do about them.

An astronaut helplessly watches the planet below burn. We stare at our screens following the latest from Sevastopol, reaching for a snack that is floating away in the zero gravity of our times.