The View From Orbit; The Perspective of Eternity

International Space Station

NASA

Copyright © 2020

by Ralph F. Couey

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside in Diamond Head Crater, taking a few moments for a breath of fresh air.  I was using a new app I had downloaded which when pointed upwards, allows the user to identify stars and planets in the night sky.  As I was scanning, a new object entered the screen, moving rapidly.  The app identified the object as the International Space Station, or ISS.  I lowered the phone, and sure enough, I found a point of light streaking across the sky.  It was an interesting moment, finding something man-made in a vista where I had only seen the stellar and planetary residents of the universe.

I watched the tiny speck until it dipped below the walls of the crater.  Up there, about 260 miles up, a group of humans were busily working on scientific experiments, folks who had forsaken earth and family for months working in that most inaccessible of labs.  There were people there, not so different from me.  For a moment, I felt a small connection.

Last summer, I found another app called "ISS Live Now."  There, anyone can access an HD camera that is always trained on the planet below.  As most of earth is covered in ocean, it can be kind of boring.  But when the station does pass over land, the vistas are tremendous.  I accessed that app tonight, perhaps looking for an off-planet escape from the mess here on earth.  I had read once that astronauts described the most profound moment of their lives as that first time they saw their home planet from space.  That perspective, they said, was life-changing.  When I opened the app, the station was passing over the Pacific southeast of Australia.  A little while later, it crossed the terminator into night and passed over southern Europe.  I was hoping to see the glow of great cities, but all I saw were small bits of light. Occasionally, I saw other lights streaking through the camera's field going in the opposite direction.  I puzzled over that, until I realized that they must be aircraft.  Their apparent speed was the effect of the ISS's orbital speed of 17,100 mph while they were zipping along at 600 or so mph.  That meant they were passing each other at a combined speed of almost 18,000 mph.  Nights and days in orbit pass quickly, so it wasn't too long before the terminator was crossed again, just prior to the station passing southeastward over the Arabian Peninsula.  The app allows you to grab images from the display and I got these:

This is near a small town, Shalateen in Egypt.

The head of the Gulf of Aqaba

On the far left is Bardawil Lake, Egypt, about 100 miles east of Port Said.

Somalia, the Horn of Africa on the south side of the Gulf of Aden.

On the upper right of each image is the international docking adapter, by the way.  

These are fascinating images.  As I watched, I discovered a sense of disconnection with earth, and with that a kind of peace.  Up there, away from all the noise, I could vicariously put some distance between myself and all the current uproar.  From up there, all the arguments that divide us seem really small, indeed.  

Regular visitors to this blog (and thank you ever so much!) know of my fascination with space.  I guess a part of me always wanted to go up there.  Knowing that such a thing was light years removed from possibility has done nothing to curb that yearning.  I think about that moment of seeing earth from space, and remember what the reaction of the Apollo 8 crew, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders when they witnessed and photographed that unforgettable image of earth rising above the moon's horizon.  For really the first time, we saw our planet as small, lonely, isolated.  And vulnerable. 

A couple of decades later, Voyager I, it's planetary mission completed, turned it's cameras sunward for what was called a family portrait of the solar system from the vantage point of 3.7 billion miles from home.  What was amazing was that even the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn were mere specks in the void.  Then there was this image:

JPL

The best description belongs to the late Carl Sagan:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand."

As far as we know, we are alone in the universe.  Despite all the statistical analysis that says otherwise, we have never detected any evidence of intelligent technological civilizations anywhere but here.  Life is indeed fragile.  And rare.  Life here could be snuffed out by astronomical hazards such as comets or asteroids, rogue black holes, gamma ray bursts from nearby supernovae, or earth's own catalog of hazards to life.  But human nature being what it is, it is likely that we will do ourselves in.  We just can't seem to get along at all.  

But even if (or when) that happens, Voyagers I and II, and Pioneers 10 and 11 will carry evidence of us.  On the Pioneers are plaques, and the Voyagers carry phonograph discs which describe what we were, where we lived, and some appreciation for the heights of curiosity and exploration we reached before we presumably self-destructed.  It's a sad kind of tombstone that will soar through space for millennia.  If another intelligence encounters the craft, it will likely be so far into the future that the sun will have expanded into it's red giant stage, destroying all the planets out to earth.  Maybe past the point when the sun will have thrown off its outer layers.  Or even when the sun's remaining core will have cooled into a dark cinder.  Irregardless, there will survive evidence that we existed.

Perhaps there will be someone out there to mourn for us.