Last night, my wife and I walked our dogs though our neighborhood shortly after dusk. While we walked up our street, I gasped and pointed at the sky.
“Yeah,” she said, “Venus is huge and bright tonight, isn’t it?”
I blinked and looked at her. As far as I know, Anne isn’t nearly the science nerd I am.
“Hey,” she said, “I learned it by watching you.”
“I love that.” I said.
Have you ever stopped to really think about how vast the universe is, and how small we actually are, in comparison?
Have you ever gone outside at night, looked at the stars, and thought, “I’m actually looking back in time, because the light that I’m seeing left those stars millions of years ago"?
Do you ever feel the warmth of the Sun on your face and think, “Holy shit, man, that’s coming from a star that’s just 93 million miles away”?
If you do, you’re probably a stoner or a science nerd. I am the latter, and I have been all of my life, starting with my earliest memory, looking at the moon with my parents.
We lived in the Northwestern San Fernando valley, in a converted chicken coop on my grandparents’ property, which was one of many one-acre farms that shared space with weird-o hippie communes from the late sixties through the mid-seventies.
My dad was excited as he took me and my mom out of the house to stand beneath the walnut tree. Once outside, he didn’t even need to tell us why. There, rising over the pasture behind our house, was the biggest moon I’ve ever seen in my life. It was yellow and full and covered the entire horizon, like a drawing from a science fiction pulp novel. It was nighttime, but the glow of the moon lit up the ground in front of us as far as I could see, turning the leafless trees at the back fence into bony hands, reaching into the sky.
I stood between them in my OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, mom holding my left hand and dad holding my right, and stared at it while it slowly climbed into the sky. Though I was too young to understand the concept of beauty, I was still impressed; it was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
My dad picked me up and held me close to him. “That’s the moon,” he said. I can still hear the awe in his voice. In that moment, my life long love affair with space and science began.
A few years later, we moved to Houston so my dad could go to medical school. My grandmother came with us to help out my mom, and she bought me a series of books called the National Geographic Books for Young Explorers. They were big, colorful tomes filled with pictures and fairly sophisticated (for a five year-old) explanations of scientific phenomena. My favorite was called Let’s Go To The Moon, and it was all about the Apollo missions. I sat in the deep shag carpeting of our living room, Goodbye Yellowbrick Road playing on those giant black headphones with the mile-long curly cord, and read it so much, I cracked the spine. I wanted to ride in a rocket! I wanted to go to the moon! I wanted to feel weightless and eat mysterious astronaut food that stuck to an upside down spoon!
My parents must have sensed my growing love for science and especially outer space. They took me to the Johnson Space Center so I could see the real places that were pictured in my book. When we got back to Los Angeles (after a stop at Meteor Crater in Arizona on the drive home,) they took me to the Griffith Observatory and the Museum of Science and Industry, and to see a movie set in space called Star Wars. While the kids in my elementary school all wanted to be firemen or policemen or athletes, I wanted to be an astronaut. If I couldn’t be an astronaut, I wanted to be Luke Skywalker . . . which I guess I sort of pulled off ten years later.
I continued to love science, even when I was a rebellious teenager (of course, being a science fiction nerd helped) and can thank authors like Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku for affirming and challenging my developing brains. But nothing affected me as much as words spoken by Carl Sagan in 1996, which inspired his book The Pale Blue Dot:
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.
[. . .]
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
To this day, I can not read those words aloud without getting choked up. The photograph that inspired him to write those words was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. All the way back in 1979, that spacecraft flew past Jupiter, and returned some of the most stunning photos of our solar system that had ever been taken. My great grandparents, who knew how much I loved space, opened a savings account for me at a long-defunct bank in the Valley because it was giving away a package of the photos as a premium. Those photos were precious to me, and I kept them in pristine condition and treated them with the same care that I’d treat my comic book collection when I was in high school. Sadly, I think they were lost in a move sometime in the mid-90s, but their threads are clearly visible in the tapestry of my life.
In 1999, the Leonid meteor shower was at a massive peak. Astronomers expected that we’d see hundreds an hour if we could get under dark skies, so I convinced my wife that it was a good idea to take our kids out of school, drive to the desert, and stay up all night to watch the celestial fireworks. This time, it was my turn to be the awestruck parent, sharing the wonders of the universe with my kids. A few days later, when I heard Ryan – who joined Mensa when he was 16 – explaining to his friend across the street that we saw too many meteors to count, and that the meteors were just tiny bits of dust from an old comet, it was my turn to be the proud parent. Ryan starts college in a couple of months, and he wants to study neuroscience. If he follows through with that, it will most likely be the result of the butterfly effect, started by the Moon Illusion I saw in 1974, and maybe one day, he'll hold his own son in his arms, point into the Autumn sky, and tell him, "That's the moon!"
Wil Wheaton has been riding the pale blue dot for about twenty billion miles.
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