PP #48: Philosophic Reflections on a Lunar View of Earth

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

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. Reaffirmation of the ‘giant leap for mankind’ legendarily beamed back to Earth, and the ambitious revisualisation of our space-based destiny and vistas.

The feat symbolised humankind’s intrepid instincts. To venture into space, as Earth-bound explorers once riskily did across threatening oceans and landmasses. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity, placing footprints, as these resilient astronauts did, onto unknown and little-known shores. And in the doing, be in awe of the oneness and most-fundamental architecture of humanity — the very nature of our being.

From this comparatively short distance, Earth still looks startlingly small and lonely — even humble, given its cloaking by the atmosphere. Yet, humankind might discover it isn’t alone; the cosmos brims with habitable planets. In that endeavour, how might the image of our planet change, then, as cameras peel back even farther: from elsewhere in the Milky Way and well beyond? As distances in space turn into light-years.

As Earth shrinks with distance, does the meaningfulness of our planet and its inhabitants shrink in parallel, in the vast cosmic backdrop, contesting humankind’s immodestly self-styled honorific of ‘exceptional’? Does our reality change? Or do, say, the ‘volume and mass’ of what fundamentally matters about us — our purpose — rebelliously remain unaffected, defining our place in the larger scheme, no matter Earth’s size in the surrounding cold expanse? 

A rebelliousness that, one might submit, emerges from a web of human ‘consciousness’ that stretches around the planet — the neurons and synapses (connectomes) of seven-and-a-half billion people ceaselessly firing: the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations. Integral, perhaps, to a larger cosmic consciousness: and again, the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations.

The seeming peacefulness in the image at top is just that: ‘seeming’. The pacific panorama masks the true nature of Earth: roiling with both natural and human activity. The phantom tranquility conceals one of our instinctual human behaviours: successive wars filling millennia of history. One wonders what idiosyncratically in the human genome leads mankind to war to remedy differences and trifling grievances, as well as quench hegemonic cravings. All the while paradoxically juxtaposed with the astounding complexities of humankind’s diverse civilisations and cultures.

As we gaze, from moon’s vantage point, upon the orb of Earth, with its thin coating of air and water, we are reminded of how vulnerably brittle the Earth’s environment is. Especially at the environment’s intersections with not-uncommonly remorseless technology. Existential risks abound. We’re reminded of the responsibility humanity has as active (proactive) guardians, to nurture the planet as the planet symbiotically nurtures us. Critical, we might agree, to the survival and continued evolution of our species.

What happens if we misguidedly, even disinterestedly, poison or exhaust the planet, as it hangs precariously in space? Or might nature, perhaps indifferent to humanity and coolly subjecting us to its whim, itself render the planet uninhabitable — leading to another major extinction event? Are we only renters, not owners? Did the lunar visit introduce a new imperative: to leave Earth behind and inhabit somewhere else?

Is there a solemnity about the rearward-looking scene of a distanced Earth — an awe that prompts reflection? A scene made all the more evocative by our believing that Earth is immersed in a sort of cosmic sea — of dark matter, dark energy, quantum fluctuations, and more. Is there the perception of ‘aloneness’, too, our seemingly distanced from everyone and everything else in that cosmic sea? The silence of the gaping, inky space contrasts with the cacophony of Earth, the latter a hive of devices that magnify our voices and echo our presence. Will that cacophony continue, or ultimately go silent?

In that presence, we marvel that humankind, dwelling on the comparatively tiny planet seen from the lunar perspective, nevertheless has the cognitive wherewithal to ponder and increasingly understand the cosmology of the whole universe: its beginning, its evolution, its current circumstances, its future. A study in the making, propelled by an irresistible impulse to know.

Anyone whose culture might have included the pre-digital-age children’s game of marbles may nostalgically recognise, from this lunar distance, the surface appearance of Earth, with its gauzy, chaotically swirling patterns. We admire its familiarly abstract beauty. All the while suspecting that there’s order interweaving the deception of chaos. Surrounding this marble-like Earth is a bewildering stillness and blackness — a blackness majestically interrupted, however, by galaxies and stunning phenomena like the Pillars of Creation.

Future generations will grasp, better than us, how this one step on another cosmic body, however craggy and nearby the moon 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 inexorably scratch our exploratory itch.