Josephine Condemi
Dear reader,
what’s out there? From our earliest observations, gazing upwards, to today, we know that we are moving on a planet that rotates on its own axis, while the Moon revolves around it, and together, the Earth and Moon orbit our mother star, the Sun, from which we are approximately 150 million kilometres away.
The Earth is just one of eight planets kept in orbit by the Sun’s gravitational pull, which holds more than 99% of the mass of the system that bears its name. In turn, the solar system is located in an outer, peripheral arm, the Local Arm, of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun “drags” the other planets, causing the entire system to orbit around the galactic centre, part of a larger, spiral movement, which sees the Milky Way moving at about 600 kilometres per second.
In the Milky Way alone, we estimate that there are between 200 and 400 billion stars. So far, we know that there are more than 2000 billion galaxies in the universe, and that ours is part of a group of at least 50 galaxies bound together, called the Local Group. The largest of these, Andromeda, seems to be coming towards us, with a collision and merger with the Milky Way expected in about 4-5 billion years. As you know, we risk extinction long before then.
In this month’s Mangrovia, which you’ll read on these pages and hear in the Zenit podcast, we’ll try to explore how the exploration of the stars has changed us and impacted our evolution as human beings: from the first observations to the space race during the Cold War to the cyberspace race from the 1990s to today. Often, we’ve applied the patterns of the “inside” (Earth’s orbit) to the “outside” (space), using the same earthly, all-too-earthly power structures to manage, dominate, and control what still remains largely a mystery. What is out there?
At the same time, the efforts of women and men who have dedicated their lives to space research have allowed us to live better and better here on Earth: from thermal clothing to HD camera sensors, from LIDAR to memory foam mattresses, many techno-scientific innovations developed to “go into orbit” have proved useful on our planet. Will we find the solution to climate change in space? Some hope, not surprisingly, that we will be able to move to another planet. Around here, we find it ambitious enough to avoid replicating the worst of Earth’s models in space— from surveillance disguised as monitoring, to waste production that we don’t know how to dispose of.
Certainly, trying to look at ourselves “from the outside” is an is an uncommon and, at times, brave exercise: what we do with the images that reach us is, once again, the responsibility of each and every one of us.
Thank you for being here. Enjoy the journey!
