First: Two perspectives from a trip to the moon, shared by Victor Glover and Christina Koch.
“I don’t have anything prepared. I think these observances are important, and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation, I think for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing.
You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe.
Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you — just trust me — you are special.
In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.
This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve got to get through this together.”
And;
“So when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it.
Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.
I may have not learned — I know I haven’t learned — everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is:
Planet Earth, you are a crew.”
~ Christina Koch (See the full speech where she is talking about what it means to be a crew.)
Next: This insightful perspective from physicist Brian Cox.
“There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?
So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.
There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.”
We don’t often think of the significance of this tiny blue marble we live on. We don’t often ponder the idea that we are a single species cohabiting with other living organisms on an oasis in a sea of emptiness beyond our atmosphere. We don’t recognize that we are all connected, all crew, on a spaceship that is bigger than our political and cultural differences, bigger than the borders of our countries.
We are all crew on spaceship earth, our mother ship that supports us, and in turn we need to nurture and support her.
