A few years ago, I met Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader at the Space Science Institute, who subsequently signed me up for her email newsletter. Now, normally, I'd just unsubscribe myself and move on, but something about the Cassini-Huygens probe itself that captured my imagination -- a tiny hunk of metal, hurtling through space, illuminating our solar system and its workings. It's just cool.
So I've been following along for a few years, watching as Cassini reveals hidden aspects of Titan, Dione, the Rings of Saturn and giant lightning storms on Saturn's surface, fascinated by the wider sense of "here" that photos from another planet brings into my life.
And yet, too, Cassini has done something else for me, something that really only came into focus in my mind when looking at pictures of Dione's rocky, barren landscape: Cassini has brought home to me, in a way nothing else ever has, the stark fact that in human terms, there's no there, there.
Space, even the immediate region of our own solar system, is a vast, cold, empty, airless, barren place. There is very little we want there, and there may be no good reason for going there.
When seen in comparison to the rest of known space, our little planet looks better and better, and less and less replaceable. Thinking about the Cassini probe, out there looking for us, for the first time, at one of our nearest neighbors, I feel a sudden rushing awareness of the very air I'm breathing, the water I'm drinking, the wheat and turkey in the sandwich I'm about to eat, the perfectly moderate temperature of a Seattle spring day, even the always unnoticed yet perfect gravity pulling at my hands as I type... an awareness, in short, of how perfectly suited for us this planet is, and we to it. We could, as Gary Snyder reminds us, live on this planet without tools or clothes.
And being a geek to my core, as I think of us hurtling through space on our comfy little airy, sunny, watery rock, I hear the words of Monty Python's classic song in the background:
Just remember that your standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour... That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day. in an outer spiral-arm at forty thousand miles an hour of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Perhaps it's a common enough insight, this feeling of expanded presence, of ebing at home not just in the world, but on the world; but I so rarely engage in good planetary thinking, that a jolt of planetary feeling sends a happy shiver down my spine.
