'A Thin Seam of Dark Blue Light'

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist

     A half century or so ago, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to orbit our planet, was awestruck at the spectacle laid out before him as he gazed through his tiny window down at the passing Earth. As with many other subsequent cosmonauts and astronauts, he experienced a special sort of epiphany: - "Circling Earth in my orbital spaceship, I marvelled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty, not destroy it!" So many to follow him into Space have expressed similar combinations of rapture and anguish. There hangs the great, blue ball against the implacable blackness of a deep and lifeless void. We are utterly alone. 93,000,000 miles away lies our star, the Sun, a vast thermo-nuclear fireball more than eight hundred times the diameter of our little world, fusing billions of tons of hydrogen into helium every second, bathing us in a mighty river of electromagnetic radiation that we simply know as 'Light'. Ah, Light - and we see that it is good.

A thin blue seam...

     The finite nature of our planet is now a well-established fact. Gone are the days of limitless, earthly frontiers. No more the blithe assumptions about the inexhaustible bounties of Nature. When the Apollo astronauts first ventured out beyond low orbit, released from the gravitational bounds of the big, blue rock, and beheld the receding vision of their world as they trundled out towards the lifeless hunk of rock that is the Moon, they were unnerved at the fantastically weird sensation of leaving the only brood that they or any other living thing had ever known. They described a pining, visceral, umbilical ache as the miles between them and their home lengthened. Yet they also thrilled to the solemn majesty of this orb, so beautiful, so singular, so beguiling. The simple fact of this great sphere with its water and its wind and its mountains and its forests, and its throng of creatures with their barks and their hoots and their roars and their poetry and their tools and their all-pervading interconnectedness, with its rock and its lava and its rumblings and its shakings and its white-hot nickel core - the simple fact of it is almost more than the human mind can embrace - almost, but not quite. For embrace it we can. Because those very Apollo voyagers took cameras with them - big old clunky Hasselblad analog film cameras. And they took pictures of this swirling, blue marble from 240,000 miles away. We have seen it. We know. Our neighbourhood is very, very finite indeed. We are alone. There is nobody to rescue us - no cosmic EMS to haul us out of the ditch and pack us off for repairs. The 911 call rings our own phones. Nobody else is listening.

     It is instrumental to pause from time to time to consider such things. An old friend of mine, a man of science and erudition, had the whole garbage thing summed up nicely in an oft-used phrase. When confronted with something no longer useful, he would like to say, with a certain wry touch - "Done with that? OK, put it on the surface of the planet." Because that's just exactly what we do with everything we don't want. There is no such thing as 'throwing away' something - there is no 'away'. Whatever we don't recycle, which is an almost infinitesimally small bit of the vast mountains of 'stuff' that we produce, we summarily deposit on the surface of the planet, either massed in vast, seething dumps on the land, or floating in huge, gyrating, maelstroms of plastic cess in the sea, or released into planet-wide clouds of volatile, disruptive gases into the air. Every day, in every way, we conspire to contravene that most ancient of rules pertaining to society, politics, friendship, business and biology - viz. 'Don't shit where you eat.' Soiling the nest is something even most birds and bees manage not to do, and yet we, the most impressively enabled creature of intellect and deduction ever to see the light of day, consistently pour filth on the very ground from which we seek sustenance. We operate about on a par with a lazy old cow who gets up from her nap, stretches, and idly drops a mighty pat atop her very bed.

     Our planet is about 7,000 miles in diameter and weighs about six sextillion tons, give or take a few billion. The reason it stays in the neighbourhood is accounted for by Sir Isaac Newton's work on mechanics and gravitation. In his great Law of Gravitation he states that 'every particle of matter attracts every other particle with force varying directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them.' This is why we are bound to our Sun. He goes on further to observe certain other truths regarding motion. In his First Law of Motion he states - 'Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled by an impressed force to change that state.' Hence the stately circumnavigation we call the Year. These are constants upon which we may build not only our worldview, but also our deepest motivational awareness. For these Laws also have deep philosophical implications.

     Gravity keeps your car glued to the road. It also prevents you from floating off across the rooftops of Pincher Creek. It sends the water down your drain and allows for a tear to fall down your cheek. It is the very nature of grounding, of connection to the Centre. It never sleeps. Apparently free-floating astronauts are not free at all, but still bound to the planet, to the Sun, and to the core of the galaxy. If I pass you in the street we experience mutual gravitational attraction. This is our umbilicus. Similarly, the inertia implied by the First Law of Motion, whether static or dynamic, speaks volumes about our evolutionary processes. We are living this Law. We keep motoring on down that 'straight line' like there's no tomorrow, pedal to the metal all the way, eating up the world, killing off our fellow creatures, altering the chemistry of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans, compromising our diminishing water tables and witlessly engendering conflict based on nothing more than a pernicious disinclination to do otherwise. But physics abhors a straight line - it is really nothing more than an intellectual construct of us overly-clever apes. For the trajectory always curves - Time itself always curves - and the trajectory of our behaviour as a species is curving very hard indeed, right into that most inevitable of cosmic motions - the spiral. That giant sucking sound is the Big Drain - round and round the sink we go - lower and lower and lower................

     But people, for all their foibles, are surprisingly inclined towards good will and brightness of outlook. Despite the best efforts of the end-of-the-worlders and the doom-mongers and the avaricious capitalist freaks and the purveyors of poisons and of killing tools, there remains a sublime spark of ineffable cheer deep within the human psyche. Given the chance, we explode into outpourings of fellowship and collective joy that vastly outweigh the fractious stupidities foisted upon us by the scratchings and the scrabblings of our lesser selves. For it is indeed the rising and triumphant voice of our Greater Self that will carry us out of this dreadful spiral - or it will die trying. Anybody who has been to a really good rock n' roll show in a big arena understands the power and unbridled thrill of immersion in the ancient drumbeat. This is our original heartbeat - older than the hills themselves, and older still than even the world.

     German astronaut Ulf Merbold took his rookie orbit in 1983. He had this to say afterwards - "For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light - our atmosphere. Obviously, this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance." Terrified by its fragile appearance. This should be our daily regard for the world around us. We take and take and take, and we do not return in kind. This is not only poor economics, but it is also both bad manners and indicative of a poverty of spirit. That sense of terror must open our eyes.

     It is the Spring Equinox. The Light is returning. If we do indeed open our eyes to it, just maybe we will be able to see that thin blue seam for what it really is - our skin - that which shields us from sickness, from the fathomless cold, and from the biting winds of our own fates.

Phil Burpee

March 24, 2012