Seeing the Earth from space will change you so much that there is a word for it: summary effect. The extreme few who have had the opportunity describe it similarly. You see something you were not meant to see, that is, the Earth just sitting there, and the whole world around it. To look at the blue marble, surrounded by its very thin green atmosphere, the auroras fluttering on the edge, is not only awe-inspiring but something to reset the factory for one’s sense of self. Almost everyone tears at the sight.
“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political borders. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission. he told it NASA soon. Jim Lovell, describing the view of Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, he told it Chicago that he could put his thumb on the window, and at that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind him. Billions of people. Seas. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”
Where some see infinite beauty, others see weakness. Marina Koren previously reported in this magazine that, when he saw the Earth from space, one astronaut “was absolutely convinced that we would kill ourselves between 500 and 1,000 years from now.” Famously, actor William Shatner has written that his brief experience watching Earth brought great sadness. “All I was feeling was sadness, and sadness was for Earth,” he told Koren in 2022.
I’ve never been in space, but for the past few days, I’ve been torn between these feelings – surprise and disappointment – NASA has continued to publish images of the Earth and the moon from Artemis II. Yesterday, the Integrity spacecraft came within 4,067 miles of the moon during its lunar flyby. For 40 minutes, it lost all contact with humanity. At one point they were 252,756 miles from Earth—the farthest from any planet anyone has ever traveled. For seven hours, the astronauts—Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen—were able to observe a part of the moon’s surface that was previously invisible to the human eye. According to NASA, astronauts took approx 10,000 imageswhich feels perfectly appropriate for such an occasion.
A few of these photos—some taken before the moon passed—have me confused. A picture of the world appear put behind the moon. The photo, taken through the window of the Orion spacecraft, shows Earth’s smallest crescent moon getting smaller as the capsule moves toward the moon. Like one brief description in the image caption, “Earth is illuminated by the blackness of the sky.” I’ve scrolled through these images the way I consume most media: through the tiny screen of my phone, with beautiful, life-affirming images sandwiched between updates on golf tournaments, oil prices, MLB’s new automatic pitching system, and reports of the US president threatening the civilizational destruction of Iran.
On a good, calm day it’s hard to know what to make of the pictures that show, without a doubt, that everything you’ll ever know and can know is simultaneously irrelevant and beautiful and of indescribable value. Today, the world breathed a sigh of relief as they waited for the 8pm deadline set by Trump for Iran to accept an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. If his conditions were not met, he posted this morning, “all civilization will die tonight, never to return.”
Trump’s threats drew condemnation from Democratic lawmakers as well as broadcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, and raised fears from people who interpreted Trump’s post as a proposal for nuclear war. Then, this evening, an hour before the deadline, Trump he announced a two-week ceasefire, which Pakistan helped broker.
Trump’s bluster, no matter how bad, has been impossible to categorize. (He’s famous for shuffling, trolling, or pretending he never said what he said.) However, one way to view our current era is as a series of existential reminders, whether it’s nuclear proliferation, climate change, or pandemics. In Silicon Valley over the past half-decade, the extinction of civilization at the hands of hypothetical technological advances has moved from the realm of science fiction to a marketing ploy to an urgent concern of a group of true believers. Humans may not want to die, but as species we seem eager to invent and advertise new ways to threaten our existence.
And yet at the same time, four flesh and blood human beings are hundreds of thousands of miles away taking pictures of our beautiful little world. Their mission and their images remind us of something else entirely—of a passion to learn, explore, and join together to become something greater than the sum of our parts. If Trump’s claims of apocalypse represent humanity at its smallest, weakest, and most fearful, then those watching our planet right now from afar represent the best of what we have to offer. Another way to hear this words from Coach:
We will investigate. We will build. We will build a ship. We will visit again. We will create outdoor science centers. We will drive the rovers. We will do radio astrology. We will find companies. We will strengthen industries. We will inspire. But in the end, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.
As Lovell looked down at Earth in 1968, an old saying popped into his head: I hope to go to heaven when I die. Then he to identify“I really went to heaven when I was born.”
There is something depressing, terrifying, and somehow appropriate in the timing of all this. That one person with the power to do it could threaten the destruction of a part of our planet while at the same time its beauty and weakness is on full display. We live, in this difficult time, with our summary effect. The four look into the distance. But the rest of us are watching too—left to ponder our own place in the deep blue dot, reminded of all the ways we could die, and all the reasons to live.
*Sources: NASA; Space Limits / Getty; Chip Somodevilla/Getty.
