The Privilege of a Lifetime

I will make this brief, even though this photo inspires so much thought and wonder that I’m left speechless at the sight. The photo (click it to expand) was taken from an app that I have on my Droid tablet, which gives me a live feed from the International Space Station (ISS). I’ve captured other photos over the past few weeks, but this one grabbed my aesthetic attention with its milky cloud cover and the hint of a vast ocean beneath it. This feed, as I noted, is “live” so as I watched this, the Earth was spinning beneath me at its customary 1037 mph.

I’m not sure exactly what I want to say about this other than I feel an absolute privilege to have this as an option in my day-to-day life. I simply tap a button on my tablet, and I suddenly find myself in orbit. How crazy is that? Imagine how Kepler, Copernicus, or Newton, all titans from our cosmological infancy, would have felt at viewing the earth at this height so casually. What a privilege it is to have an option at my fingertips that would have blown each of their minds.

“We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. That has to change something.”

Saul Bellow, from Henderson the Rain King