ArticleSamantha Harvey’s Booker-prize winning novel Orbital is a love-letter to Earth from space. It describes a team of astronauts’ loving visions of the face of the planet as they orbit it sixteen times a day with what Harvey describes as a “monogamous” fidelity. They cannot help but long for the sensory experiences that are available on the ground, even as they collect data showing that human bodies weaken and degrade when they are taken out of their terrestrial context.
Orbital cuts across any reckless sense that the Earth can be abandoned — at least, by those with sufficient funds for an exit fare — if it is no longer fit for our human purpose.
Some political commentators expect that Elon Musk is more likely to realise his dream of taking humans to Mars with Donald Trump in power. Orbital gives some pause for thought on this cosmic enterprise. What if this dream of exploring the heavens points us back to our already heavenly existence? Harvey writes:
The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.
Our televisions, movie screens and classrooms encourage children to dream great dreams about travel among the stars and establishing human civilisation on other planets. But are our children interested in these plans or would they prefer to stay at home?
I remember, fifty years after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, providing some learning support to a high school science classroom. The lesson began with an inspirational video featuring Elon Musk, after which the students were instructed to design their own space colony — in 45 minutes. As I circled the room (or orbited, if you prefer) looking for students who needed help, a pair of boys locked eyes with me and drew me into their problem-solving. They wanted to know how best to estimate the number of prisoners in the world, so they could work out how many people to ship off to Mars.
It was, ironically, a characteristically Australian response: send your convicts far away to do the colonising for you. I didn’t think that designing a cosmic gaol was the intention of the lesson plan, but in retrospect I can’t help but feel it reflected the students’ desire to continue to call Earth “home”. Departure, after all, feels like enforced exile, or perhaps punishment for sins.
Before he departs for space, Pietro, one of the astronauts in Orbital, is challenged by his daughter: can progress be beautiful? Should people construct buildings on the moon, because “I love the moon as it is”? Initially, he struggles to see any beauty in human travel to the moon: “phallic ships thrust into space”. But as he views the beauty of the Earth, he finds that he is “an animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses”. Pietro reflects on his emotional response to his daughter’s question, and decides what he will tell her upon his return:
[P]rogress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends up in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling that he has perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments — this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars.
For Pietro, scientific progress is bound up with the profoundly human sense of the beauty of the earth — an embodied sense of wonder at that which lies outside of ourselves, inviting us to know more.
The Christian philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek might wish to link this “belly-chest knowing” to a “covenant of love”, the idea that knowledge about the world is best pursued by loving it:
To start to know is actually first a response to a dimly heard beckoning of the wonder-full real. If we can see knowing as a relationship between knower and known, we can see that reality makes the first overture. We can associate this call with our sense of wonder.
Orbital is a gentle, meditative nudge for humans to continue in this loving direction. Unlike robots, we have a real “belly-chest” response to the beauty of the Earth. The invitation to know the Earth better, to progress in scientific knowledge, is also an invitation for us to love it better and to care for it more. If we don’t heed this call to love and attentive care, we may well find ourselves lost in the galaxy, searching the constellations for a new planetary home that may not love us back.
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She is completing a PhD in literature and theology at Alphacrucis University College.