So yesterday, I went to go see the totality of an eclipse in a tiny little town called Albion. Eclipses are weird things. They happen a couple times a year and one with a totality once every eighteen months or so. Personally, I had never seen one before.
Part of this of course is laziness, there was a totality that passed close to me in 2017 that I didn’t go see. The other part is that bit of you that goes ‘how cool can it actually be? I can see pics anywhere.’ Perhaps the problem is our hyper-saturated society. To find something under-saturated nowadays, you need to look into things like love and forgiveness. If you want to know what an eclipse looks like, you can look up a zillion pictures that are better than what you can see yourself. Here is one of them.
It is a very pretty picture, and is what I saw with my own eyes. If you wanted more context, you could probably look up a video taken during the eclipse. It’s pretty surreal for it to be dusk all around you and hearing the crickets doing their thing then for the birds to do their morning music.
On Facebook, a friend of mine said something interesting. I won’t quote them directly here, but they said that if they had a spaceship they could just maneuver their ship and see an eclipse whenever they wanted. It’s a reminder that their stuck here on Earth instead. I can feel that, I want to experience real micro-gravity. I want to to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.
On the other hand, I think he’s not looking at it like a space explorer. Far as I’ve been able to tell, the arrangement we have with the sun and the moon being about the same size so you can see the corona isn’t common. Arrive a few billions years earlier or later, and even earth doesn’t have eclipses like this. It may be that we are vastly rare in that we are a habitable planet that has eclipses like this.
When we have space travel, perhaps the novelty won’t be the appearance of the eclipse, but the rarity of one where you can stand on a habitable planet and just look up at it.
There are things that are like being in the totality of an eclipse, but nothing is all of them together. Looking at a picture and experiencing it all together aren’t the same thing.
One of things someone who would be a space explorer who wants to see strange new worlds should do is consider the strange world that is already around them. What is common here may be incredibly rare somewhere else. We should look forward to the joys of exploration of space by indulging in the exploration of what is rare and uncommon here and now.
That perhaps sounds very anti-exploration and perhaps anti-space, but that’s not how I mean it. How I mean it is that we cultivate in ourselves attitudes. If what we want is to experience the joy of exploring strange new worlds, we should start by cultivating joy in exploring the strange here. So that when we do actually explore new worlds, we will have cultivated the capacity for it.
In 2017, I chose conformity and normality over cultivating my capacity for wonder. In 2024 I chose another path. My next post will probably be about what exactly what path I’m choosing and how that impacts my blog here.