What does it mean to grow up? We can grow to be better selves – more the self that we always were, more our self – or into perversions of what we are. At best we might hope to grow into seriousness and complexity while retaining the innocence and playfulness of the child. Or else we might grow, as a tree does tortured by the wind, into a twisted version of what we are, arrested at some young age, five perhaps, forever stamping our feet. Hitler as a grown man, at the height of his powers, would sometimes roll on the floor in anger and chew the carpet; literally he did this, there were witnesses. Despite our strongest desires to think the best of everyone, there is evil and there are facts.
In memory we see generations past as if through both a microscope and a telescope. There are details, but too much detail and the overall effect is lost. But if we spy on our subject through a telescope only, the individual gets lost in the landscape of history.
The physical condition of being an individual human being is one of looking outwards, not back on one’s self. What we see of our own self is little more than a headless body; as whole bodies are what other people look like. There are mirrors of course, and selfies, but those perspectives always come as a shock for being out of the ordinary. We see other people far more clearly than we see ourselves. We each constantly give ourselves away to others without ever knowing it. We do not know what we look like, and we do not know what we are. About ourselves we miss almost everything. And so it is, too, for humankind collectively on Earth. Until recently, we had only been able to imagine what our Earth home might look like from the outside.
The Ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was circular in some way: a disk, a cylinder or a sphere, but a Greek word that means spherical also means circular, and so who it was that first described the Earth as a sphere is still a matter of academic conjecture. It may have been Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, but everything we know about Pythagoras comes from secondary sources after his time. Plato wrote Phaedo 150 years later; an account of the last hours of Socrates’ life, before he downed the fatal hemlock concoction. Socrates described to those gathered around his deathbed the Earth as he imagined it must look seen from the vantage point of the afterlife. After death he would see the Earth as it really is; but, this being Plato, it would be an idealized, Platonic Earth not the physical Earth we know when we are alive. ‘The true Earth’, Socrates said, is like one of ‘those balls made of twelve pieces of leather, variegated, a patchwork of different colours’. The Earth – or at least this ideal of the Earth – is a vast dodecahedron positioned in the middle of the heavens, shining with colours more vibrant than any we know in life. The Roman General Scipio appears to his dreaming grandson, in a short section in Cicero’s vast De re publica (On the Commonwealth) written 400 years later. He tells him that from his vantage point – ‘a high place full of stars, shining and splendid’ – Rome looks insignificant, just a small region of the Earth, and that the Earth, too, is insignificant compared to the stars. By the time another century had passed, the astronomer Ptolemy knew from scientific considerations, by observation and measurement, that the Earth must be a sphere. But knowing is different from seeing. Where was the visual evidence? To see for ourselves we would have to rise high above the surface of the Earth. There were balloons and then airplanes, yet even in the 1950s still no one knew what the Earth would look like seen from outer space. In 1952 Wernher von Braun got it wrong in significant ways: ‘The continents will stand out in shades of grey and brown bordering the brilliant blue of the seas,’ he wrote. ‘One polar ice cap will show as blinding white, too brilliant to look at with the naked eye.’ To see for ourselves we would have to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth. And then there were rockets. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 Apollo astronauts saw for themselves. For the rest of us, they returned with words and images.