Looking Back at Planet Earth: Circus Tycoon Reaches Space Station
This morning Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté boarded the International Space Station and conducted a news conference wearing his trademark red clown nose.
Laliberté made the two-day journey in a Russian Soyuz craft along with Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams. The space station is 350 kilometres above the Earth.
I always wanted to go to space. I remember watching the TV as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made that first moon landing in 1969. I told everyone that I wanted to be an astronaut with NASA. I never did reach my goal but sometimes when I’m looking up at the stars, I imagine what it must be like to be out there gazing back at the Earth as Aldrin and Armstrong did 40 years ago.
“It suddenly struck me,” said Armstrong, “that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
But “a person’s a person no matter how small” according to Horton the Elephant in the incredible Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who! In the story, empathetic Horton finds himself caretaking a tiny speck of dust that is actually a planet called Whoville. While many people focus on the lesson Horton learns about defending something even though others ridicule you, for me the big lesson was how fragile our own own planet is. After all, we are the Whos in Who-ville, building busily away.
As we deal with our busy lives, it’s so easy to forget that our own “speck of dust” or “tiny pea” is what sustains us. We need this planet; it probably doesn’t need us. One day we may go far enough into outer space to discover other livable worlds, but right now this planet is all we’ve got. We are just tiny, fragile creatures on a strange blue and green ball floating in the middle of a universe we don’t yet understand.
Not Just Clowning Around
In that spirit, Cirque de Soleil’s Laliberté plans to use his trip into space trip to draw attention to the importance of access to clean water on Planet Earth. He will hold a two-hour webcast “Moving Stars and Earth for Water Event” on October 9, featuring Al Gore, U2 and others.
It’s worth passing on here one of the most poignant things anyone has said about observing the Earth from outer space. American scientist Taylor Wang, the first ethic Chinese person to go into space, said, “A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, become her protectors rather than her violators. That’s how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. I could not help but love and cherish her.” Blessed be to that.