Picture Post #48: Philosophic Reflections on a Lunar View of Earth

Image Credit: NASA/JSC  This view taken  July 20, 1969,  from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the moon's horizon. 

Posted by Keith Tidman

Half a century after the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the heavily pockmarked moon, a quarter of a million miles away, much of the world has recently been savoring again the grandeur of the achievement. 

The feat symbolized humankind’s intrepid instincts. To venture into space as explorers once riskily did across Earth’s threatening oceans and landmasses. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity, placing footprints, as those astronauts did, onto unknown and little-known shores.

From this comparatively short distance, Earth still looks startlingly small and lonely — even humble, given its cloaking by the atmosphere. How might the image of our planet change, then, as cameras peel back even farther: from elsewhere in the Milky Way and well beyond? After all, distances in space eventually become light-years.

As Earth shrinks with distance, does the meaningfulness of our planet and its inhabitants shrink in parallel, in the vast cosmic backdrop? Or do, say, the ‘volume and mass’ of what fundamentally matters about us rebelliously remain the same, no matter Earth’s size in the surrounding expanse? 

A rebelliousness that, one might submit, emerges from a web of human ‘consciousness’ that stretches around the planet — the collective synapses of seven billion people ceaselessly firing: the churn of dreams, imaginings, creations.

The seeming peacefulness here is just that: ‘seeming’. The pacific panorama masks the authentic nature of Earth: roiling with both natural and human activity. The phantom tranquility conceals one particular instinctual human behaviour: successive wars filling millennia of history. One has to wonder what in the human genome leads mankind to war to remedy differences and quench hegemonic cravings.

As we gaze, from moon’s vantage point, upon the orb of Earth, with its thin coating of air and water, we are starkly reminded of how vulnerably brittle the Earth’s environment is. And the responsibility humanity has as active guardians, to nurture the planet as the planet symbiotically nurtures us. Critical to the survival of our species.

What happens if we poison or exhaust the planet? Or will nature itself, being perhaps indifferent to humanity and coolly subjecting us to its whim, thereby render the planet uninhabitable, leading to another major extinction event? Are we only renters, not owners? Has the lunar walk deceived us into thinking we can leave Earth behind and inhabit somewhere else? Is that humanity’s imperative?

Is there a solemnity about the rearward-looking scene of a distanced Earth — an evocation of awe, prompting reflection? Is there ‘an aloneness’, too? The silence of space contrasts with the known cacophony of Earth, the latter a buzzing hive of devices that magnify our voices and boisterously shout our presence. Will that cacophony continue or ultimately end?

Anyone whose culture might have included the pre-digital-age children’s game of marbles might nostalgically recognise, from this lunar distance, the surface appearance of Earth, with the gauzy, seemingly chaotic swirling patterns on Earth’s surface. Our mind’s eye might give recognisable form to those patterns.

Future generations will grasp, better than us, how this one step on another cosmic body, however craggy and nearby it is, served to spur far more ambitious tours through space, whether by human beings or sophisticated thinking apparatuses — to face down the harsh environment of space as we  scratch our exploratory itch.