More than a half century ago a fraternity, even more exclusive than the elite club of American presidents, began thinking about Earth in a way so far ahead of its time that today it would seem like the unrealistic musings of aliens from another world. But in a very real sense that’s what the 24 Apollo astronauts who went to the moon between 1968 and 1972 were.
No humans had ever seen Earth from deep space, and when they did, it turned them into instant messengers for a new enlightenment about planetary unity and Earth’s fragile place in the universe. When he was 180,000 miles away from Earth on man’s first orbital mission to the moon in December of 1968, Jim Lovell looked out the window of his Apollo 8 spacecraft and posed this guileless, rhetorical question to the television audience: “What I keep imagining is if I am some lonely traveler from another planet what I would think about the earth at this altitude, whether I’d think it would be inhabited or not.”
And there you had it. The astronauts couldn’t see people, races, countries or borders. Every reference point that man had ever organized himself around geographically, politically and culturally vanished in the eyes of the lunar explorers and their Hasselblad cameras, which captured “Earthrise” — man’s first color photo of Earth from the moon taken this Christmas Eve 50 years ago.
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Share your thoughts on the news by sending a Letter to the Editor. Email letters@seattletimes.com and please include your full name, address and telephone number for verification only. Letters are limited to 200 words.When Mike Collins returned from the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11, he would write: “I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The Earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”
Today, Collins and his 12 remaining lunar brethren are horrified by the virulent return of nationalism and planetary amnesia eclipsing a brief period when global unity seemed genuinely possible. “The biggest problem the world has today,” says Bill Anders, who shot “Earthrise,” the photo that helped launch the environmental movement, “is that we can’t get together. I mean even friendly people can’t get together, just look at the European Union as one example. If we’re ever going to explore the universe, we need to do it as a planet.”
Throughout their lives, the men of Apollo practiced their courage and patriotism with quiet humility. What troubles them now is hyperpartisanship and a growing trend toward false patriotism and braggadocio, particularly in many of today’s elected officials: Shortly before he died this year, Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk across the lunar surface, told me, “Most of the congressmen and senators serving now, they need to rip that American flag off their lapel, and put a picture of a donkey, or an elephant, or their own damn picture on their lapel because they’re not patriots to this country. They are self-serving jackasses.”
As we approach the New Year and the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, we must try to stop thinking of ourselves in an insular way; my neighborhood, my house, my state, my country. From deep space, our home planet shows no such subdivisions. It is Mother Earth, our collective home, whose common good we should all be working toward as it strains to keep us alive in this new era of rapacious tribalism.
Read Again https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/from-space-our-home-planet-shows-no-divisions/Bagikan Berita Ini
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