It must have been a relief. For about 40 minutes, those four astronauts were incommunicado, completely cut off from any news transmitted from Earth. 

It has been a surreal split-screen, toggling between those absurdly high-functioning, yet adorable spacefarers, beaming their astonishing photographs and goodwill back to an Earth wracked by war and suffering, energy shocks and US President Donald Trump’s cavalier threats of genocidal destruction.

What must it have been like to hear the commander of humanity’s most powerful military muse about raining death on a whole civilization, posting on social media with the menacing nonchalance of a domestic abuser operating at global scale, all while witnessing the obvious miracle of that same tiny blue globe suspended in the vast inhospitable void?

They’re astronauts after all, so they must surely have thought of Carl Sagan’s words, inspired by a picture of our miniscule speck of rock taken by Voyager 1, back in 1990: “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” he wrote in Pale Blue Dot.

The Artemis II crew’s spin around the moon is a good moment to exhume the opening lines of Sagan’s reflection: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us,” he wrote. “On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The Artemis astronauts didn’t go nearly as far as the Voyager probe that took the “mote of dust” picture. The Artemis II photos are wonderfilled, but from a more familiar perspective. The Earth is small, precarious and precious, but recognizable. My own favourites — the “Earthset” photos of a glowing crescent planet behind a bleakly beautiful moon — harken back to the famous “Earthrise” photo taken in 1968, widely considered to have inspired the first Earth Day.

My own vague personal connection to that image was to be born just as astronaut William Anders clicked the shutter on the Hasselblad to capture the iconic Earthrise photo. Family lore has it that the nurses were shuttling in and out of the delivery room with updates from the Apollo mission. My mother loved to tell that story. I think she felt she had given birth to an environmentalist (as we would come to be known), graced by the “overview effect” — the profound impact astronauts often report about seeing our planet in the whole, dwarfed by the infinite blackness.

At the time, my mother was charged with teaching the next generation, but she was not even allowed a credit card in her own name. How she would have thrilled to watch Christina Koch, the NASA mission specialist with her wild clouds of zero gravity hair, back in space for the second time, with a career approaching a full year of days in space.

The feminist revolution is one among many that have won an extraordinary amount of progress in those intervening years. Useful perspective for those still hoping for the Earth Day promise of an ecological transformation which has (so far?) arrived only in fits and starts. That perspective is very much the thesis of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End. “We in the 2020s live in a world that would be unbelievable and maybe inconceivable to people sixty or seventy years earlier,” Solnit reminds us. In fact, much of the current surge in authoritarianism and Manospheric mayhem — the revelling in selfishness and environmental rollbacks — can all be seen as backlash to the sheer amount of positive change in recent decades.

“It’s the past that shows us the possibilities, how the world has changed, how power can appear in places and among peoples assumed to be powerless and irrelevant, how the most foundational things can be transformed,” Solnit writes. 

As a childhood immigrant to Canada, deeply committed to the country, my mother would also have been heartened to watch Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist floating through duties in the Orion capsule with the Maple Leaf next to the Stars and Stripes. And, particularly, that tearful embrace when Hansen named a lunar crater after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife. Some sterling male modelling in that moment. Such a contrast to the violent petromasculinity roiling the home planet.

One of the most important aspects of the images beamed home from space is one we are only beginning to grasp, decades on from Earthrise. Look at the pictures, and look again. Zoom way in and only then can you make out the thin skin of atmosphere that differentiates us from any other rock plummeting through the void.

Just recently, I heard the extraordinary writer John Vaillant describe the atmosphere as an “amniotic sac” on an episode of Energy vs Climate. Such a good analogy for the nurturing, protective qualities of the atmosphere. And it does feel that way from our earthbound perspective, when we happen to think of it at all. An enveloping, life-sustaining cocoon, as big as the sky.

But give it a little perspective and the great sky is as thin as the peel on an apple. Or the skin of an onion. “When you see the blackness and harshness of the universe, and the one layer of onion-skin atmosphere that’s around our planet, it becomes so vivid in your mind that it permanently changes your thinking,” said Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station (although probably better known for his shocking good cover — from orbit — of David Bowie’s Space Oddity).

The thickness of an onion skin or an apple peel. A preposterously thin ribbon that protects us from the deadly void. A gossamer layer of gases that sustains life. From that perspective, it is no wonder at all that our current spew of more than 100 million tonnes of CO2 every day has turned out very badly.

One of the most famous Earth photos of all is the Blue Marble, taken in 1972. That same year, Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko turned his groundbreaking work on understanding the Earth’s “heat balance” (what we now call Earth energy imbalance) into projections for the next 100 years. At this point, we are actually running hotter than he projected.

Perhaps he couldn’t have anticipated we would burn enough fossil fuels to dump a staggering two trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere between then and now. But he was almost exactly correct that we’d have melted half the Arctic multiyear sea ice. The effects don’t stay at the poles though. The great tropical coral reefs are being extinguished as mind-boggling amounts of heat accumulate in the oceans. Storms, droughts and heat waves set records year after year.

It’s not that we haven’t made progress against climate change in the past half century. People all over the world work on problem-solving every day. Great majorities of the global population want governments and industry to tackle global heating. Alternatives to fossil fuels are widely available and ever more affordable. 

But, for all the perspective we’ve gained, we continue to act as if that onion-skin atmosphere were infinitely thick, as if it could absorb anything we choose to pump into it. That must stand as one of the great delusions of our time.

The Artemis mission was, in so many ways, a blessed contrast to the bloody bombings and egomaniacal domination playing out on our pale blue dot. So many thousands of people coordinating on immensely complex tasks. Multigender. Multinational. Multiracial. Warmhearted and whip smart.

The astronauts that make it home are changed by what they’ve seen. Many of them have dedicated the rest of their lives to communicating what they’ve learned. The question is whether the rest of us will learn the lesson without leaving the ground.

© National Observer