let’s talk about niall and space
an anon asked arwa about what niall’s favorite planet would be, and she gave a characteristically well thought-out eloquent answer. (she’s right about europa, too - scientists say it’s probably hospitable to life.) as usual i agree with her, so i’m just gonna talk more about what she started with the answer, “earth.”
my space tag is from a quote that reads, “the king-times are fast-finishing; there will be blood shed like water and tears like mist, but the people will conquer in the end. I will not live to see it, but I foresee it.” matt damon made two movies about space so it’s gonna happen eventually, but there’s also the fact that, you know, human beings aren’t taking very good care of this planet. it’s tragic, but it’s also something i love about human beings. we consume and consume until we run out of fuel and that drives us to move on, to look for greener pastures, and to develop civilization to the point where we can talk about a boyband and the almost infinite vastness of space and john green’s forehead all on the same platform. it’s also what’s gonna force us into space, one day.
this is a picture of a mars desert research station where scientists are figuring out how to cultivate life on mars, in case that’s the direction we go.
venus’s sky also might be habitable. if we can figure out how to build a sustainable environment above the clouds, then we’re in business.
niall probably knows all this, bc we’re a big bunch of nerds on the internet talking about space.
the left picture is what earth looks like from mars. the picture on the right is what mars looks like from earth. there’s nothing like remembering just how tiny you are to put things into perspective. maybe that’s part of why niall likes space so much, and why we associate it so heavily with him. he’s the most grounded member of one direction in a lot of ways and he’s never let us, or himself, forget it. it can make you feel very small.
the problem you run into when you’re grappling with the near-infinitude of space and the fact that it’s humankind’s next manifest destiny (assuming we don’t all accidentally die first) is that it’s big, and empty, and nothing makes any goddamn sense. everything that we rely on for context in knowing what our world is made of, how it works and what we can depend on changes. there’s not even the concept of a day, really. i imagine that’s probably what it’s like to be flung from a fairly ordinary day-to-day existence for niall in ireland into the x-factor. i bet he relates.
so what you do is, you populate the galaxy with entities you can count on to be there from one moment to another, like sailors braving the terra incognita with the lines of a wind rose spanning from one monument to another, navigating by human beings building things they can orient themselves around.
i think that’s why, when astronauts go up to space, they always turn around to have a look at the earth. even when they send up drones, they point the cameras back around so that we can see what we look like from a distance. When Neil Armstrong did it way back when, he said, “It suddenly struck me that the tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up one thumb and shut my eye and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
arwa was right: the earth is important bc it is life. i think leaving it must feel a lot like leaving home for the first time, whether you’re going to college or joining the military or joining a boyband destined for something much bigger than themselves. it’s only as important as we make it, just like home’s just a place made up of the people we love and who, hopefully, love us in return. so we consume and grow like our very own little hungry caterpillars until we can’t stay at home anymore, like a little boy dreaming of becoming a famous musician one day or like any human being who’s ever looked up at the stars and wondered if they’d live to see themselves amongst them.
it can be lonely, though. maybe it’s always seemed a little lonely, and that’s why we started the Voyager Missions. the voyagers were a couple of space probes designed to be launched into space carrying all of humanity that would fit on a record at the time. that’s such a romantic idea itself, but what really breaks my heart is what else made it onto the record. carl sagan and annie druyan worked to decide which tiny glimpses of humanity would go onto the record, which is a monumental task. one thing they decided on was that they’d send up a recording of annie druyan’s brain working through an EEG. annie was asked to think really hard about earth and space and life and what it’s like to be human, so what she quietly thought about to herself and to the great vastness of space was the love she’d developed for carl.
space is already populated the same way we populate all our futures: with our hopes and dreams. human history has a way of consuming itself, so wherever we land next, we’ll probably take too much and not leave enough behind there, too, till the only way we can save it is by moving on.
maybe niall can empathize with the astronauts who fought so hard to be the one to go to space and looked back and earth and was amazed by what he saw, and what he lost. you maybe can’t really go home again. not as the same person. that’s okay. you’re not really meant to.
some things, like Halley’s Comet, you only live to see once, or twice if you’re lucky. they’re the highlights of your life and maybe you know that they are, but that doesn’t make the time before or after any less meaningful.
the new york times had this headline in 1919, and it’s always sounded a little like niall to me. sometimes you find yourself in unfamiliar territory, so you draw new lines from the places you’ve come from and you start mapping out the places you’ll go. it feels very big in the beginning, but the hardest part is to start.
on that note, happy birthday arwa!
