A day before their White House visit, Aldrin and Collins spoke at an event about “space diplomacy” at George Washington University. Collins, who went on to work for the state department, gave a lyrical description of seeing the moon up close – but said there something even more beautiful in the opposite window: Earth.
From more than 200,000 miles away, Earth’s national borders don’t matter any more.
They are artificial and arbitrary, a human construction. If presidents and prime ministers could enjoy such a view, the astronaut noted, they would probably struggle to identify their own countries.
It’s an argument reminiscent of astronomer Carl Sagan: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.”
Yet chance has decreed that as the world celebrates the golden anniversary of the giant leap for mankind, the occupant of the White House is a man obsessed with borders and building a wall where the US meets Mexico.
He has also spent the past week issuing racist tweets and basking in campaign rally chants of “Send her back!”
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