![]() What shatner describes on having gone to the edge of space is exactly the emotion the space billionaires don’t want associated with their ego projects. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things-that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. Everything I had expected to see was wrong. And I was leaving her.Įverything I had thought was wrong. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later black holes absorbing energy satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared. I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. ![]()
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