Orion Magazine

Voyager

SOMETIMES THEY LOOK AT EARTH and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the center of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very center of the waltzing universe, and they could forget all those truths men and women had uncovered (via a jerking and stuttering path of discovery followed by denial followed by discovery followed by coverup) that Earth is a piddling speck at the center of nothing. They could think: no negligible thing could shine so bright, no farhurled nothingy satellite could bother itself with these shows of beauty, no paltry rock could arrange such intricacy as fungus and minds.

So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking Earth around which all things orbited—the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from Earth than they have to find it insignificant and small, to really understand its

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