This is Home, our only Home
“Home” has a special meaning to us who speak the English language. Every language must have a similar word, e.g. maybe, for example, “chez nous” (French), “nuestra casa” (Spanish), and for certain, many others.
“Home is where the heart is”. Pliny the Elder.
This photo captures a time and place where I have lived. It is one of many places that I have called “home”.
It’s not every day that we think of our wider neighbourhood, a grander “home” that we share with ~8 billion other humans on this planet Earth. Below, we are able to see the nighttime concentration of humanity in the northern hemisphere that includes North America, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
One of the more famous photographs of the same hemisphere is this one named the “Blue Marble”, below.
Unlike the photo above looking into my past, and wherever yours might be, we are unable to reach out and touch or experience in real-time the image of the Blue Marble. We rely upon the science and technology controlled by other humans here on Earth. We savour the belief that we ride on such a beautiful sphere, within a solar system, which is part of the “Milky Way” galaxy, that is a unique “home” within this Universe of estimates approaching 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe: there remains uncertainty in that estimate, but it is a huge number, regardless.
Humans have observed the Milky Way for millennia (below). It has been an infinite source of mystery. It has been a “carrot” dangling before us which has caused terrible frustration but yielded heaps of insight into where we live and continues revealing so many messages about from where we may have come. I reflect back and remind myself that we arrived from star dust: https://zack-florence.medium.com/yes-it-is-true-we-are-star-dust-e5120e5b4755
There is neither human time nor space to capture all of the theology, philosophy and science ascribed to how life, much less humans, came to cover our globe called Earth. I often remind myself that other societies likely hidden in the Universe have very different names for what they might call “home”.
In the late summer 1977 Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched from Cape Canaveral (Florida). “Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space…”. There is now another volume about what we can detect (see or measure) and what we can’t. The following paragraphs with the “pale dot” image have had a very strong impact upon my sense of “home”.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” in which he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
“Voyager 1 was speeding out of the solar system — beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun — when mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system”.
December 18, 2023: updated news about Voyager 1.
“After traversing billions of miles and spending almost five decades in space, NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe has started sending nonsensical data back to Earth. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft was originally on a five-year mission to fly past Jupiter and Saturn but somehow it has continued to venture further into space for the past 46 years. It has become the first human-made object to leave the solar system, BBC reported”.
Personally, this news leaves me with a feeling of sadness knowing that a small, tenacious inanimate bit of technology that emerged from the collective brains of many humans is in the throes of death.
I recommend this read (link below) that describes a unique scientific experiment designed by Carl Sagan 30 years ago. Given the changes in knowledge and technology available to astronomers and cosmologists since then, let’s go back and have another look: Can we still detect life on Earth?
Thank you for using your time to read my work. If you are in the mood, give me a “clap”.
