US-27-03-20 Widening our horizon

Out here, except in bad visibility, we have unlimited views all around.There is however this sort of line where the sky meets the water, calledthe horizon. The horizon is where mother Earth limits how far we cansee, at least if something is not poking out above it. If we stand atthe helm, our horizon is about 4.3 nautical miles, or roughly 8km away.If a passing ship has its bridge at 40 metres above the water, we canjust see the parts of the ship above that level at a distance of 24km or12.9nm. The lower part of the ship will be hidden behind the horizon. Wehaven’t had a lot of other ships in sight, just two or three sinceleaving Ushuaia. We have seen plenty of them by electronic means, on ourAIS and linked to it, on our electronic chart, but they mostly weren’tclose enough to poke their superstructures above the horizon. All ofthem were crossing our route on the busy shipping route between Asia,around Cape Agulhas and the Cape of Good Hope, to ports in Brazil alongthe Santos Basin.Out here, in our limited view of the world, an area within a radius ofjust 4.3 nautical miles and nothing conspicuous inside it, the mostobvious thing in our sight is Europa itself and the people on board.Europa, the ship, tends to focus our mind on things to do. There isalways plenty to do. Time, conditions and daily use leave their mark onany and all parts of the ship and at some point those aging effects willhave to be reset somehow, to make the ship last just that little bitlonger. Much of the attention of the crew is focused on that aspect ofsailing Europa. For the rest it is about staying alive, eitherphysically or mentally. The physical part being formed by our efforts tokeep ship and crew safe and sailing, the mental part by distractingourselves a little bit from the daily grind. For some by playing aninstrument or listening to music, for others by reading or watching amovie and for all by interacting with fellow crew-members.Looking outside the ship, there is really nothing to distract youvisually. Of course there is the ever-changing ocean and a dazzling viewof the universe above us, but the mind is free to wander. Thosewanderings take us beyond the horizon, to those parts of the world weread about in our weekly news updates and the emails from friends andrelatives. The stories we hear are mostly not pretty ones, but there isalways a positive note as well, of how Corona could magically refocuspeople’s minds on what’s important in the world. That surely won’t be aneasy thing, as many people in the world only have a limited view of theworld around them and they may not even know it.When I was a little six year old kid, I had one of the most powerfulexperiences of my life, which I only recognized much later. It wasaround Christmas time 1968, when the Apollo 8 crew flew around the moonand made pictures of the Earth rise above the barren lunar landscape.Those were the first pictures ever made by humans (not robots) of ourtiny little spaceship Earth against the backdrop of the vast and darkuniverse. That famous “Earthrise” picture has been my desktop background(on and off) since I have a computer. The twenty-seven astronauts whohave seen that distant view of Earth, all speak about how it madenational boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people seem lessimportant, and the need to create a planetary society with the unitedwill to protect the planet becomes both obvious and imperative.My experience was repeated 22 years later, when the late Carl Sagan hadthe idea of letting the Voyager 1 space probe make a picture of Earth asit was leaving the Solar System. Making that picture was not easy due tohow close the Earth appeared to the sun from 6 billion kilometres awayand the result is somewhat abstract: a tiny one pixel-sized, vaguelyblue dot, caught in rays of lens-flare. It’s maybe not the somewhatpuzzling picture that drives home the truth about our existence here onEarth, it’s what he had to say about it:“That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of,every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregateof all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions,ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every heroand coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king andpeasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every motherand father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, everycorrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saintand sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote ofdust, suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of therivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that inglory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of afraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by theinhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishableinhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent theirmisunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how ferventtheir hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, thedelusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, arechallenged by this point of pale light.[...] To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the follyof human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, itunderscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionatelywith one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, theonly home we've ever known.— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994”