Reflection on a Grain of Sand
From ages three until six I lived in Rarotonga, the largest island of a disparate group in the middle of the Pacific that make up the Cook Islands. This meant that I grew up during those three formative years with the night sky more clear and visible than I’ve ever seen since. Asking questions about space, and the earth’s place in it, probably came naturally with all those stars and satellites spread above me every single night.
Around age 4 my parents bought me a videotape of Sam Neill’s TV program Space. In my favourite episode Sam Neill stands on a beach and picks up a hand-full of sand. Letting the grains run slowly through his fingertips, he explains the vastness of space by saying that for every grain of sand on every beach in the world there are more than a billion stars, each with their own planets and moons. And so on that small Pacific island surrounded by one endless beach I let the grains of fine white sand run through my own fingertips and thought about the enormity of space. Though it may sound strange or ridiculous, I could comprehend it: that grain-of-sand analogy was the perfect way for my young and malleable brain to understand that this tiny island I lived on, surrounded by vast ocean, was itself the same as the tiny world we live on surrounded by vast space. And with that understanding came the sense that there was no doubt that there were other habitable planets out there: with so much sand on earth pure chance means we will eventually discover another planet like ours (said my young brain).
Space was my childhood fascination, and from ages five until ten I was determined that I would be an astronomer. But somewhere along the way I simply stopped thinking about space and the earth. Perhaps it was when I moved to Manila, a light-filled metropolis, and for a year didn’t see the night sky. Space practically exited my mind, and what filled it was concerns with how islands and continents within this earth can best organise themselves. Global affairs became my fascination: empires and wars, ideologies and negotiations. International Relations takes as its premise that the earth and the resources on it are finite, and therefore conflict is to a degree inevitable. Statesmen concern themselves with working within the confines of this earth to secure the interests of a subset of its people. Planets for me during this decade were the different continents that different ideologies occupied.
And now, reflecting on earth and space in the first year of my third decade on earth, I have a sense of incredulity: did man really go to the moon? Is a man-made object truly in interstellar space and still transmitting to earth? Everything that I have consumed my mind with for a decade has been confined to continents and islands and managing the conflicts that flare up in the world. How could humans have possibly exited this atmosphere and looked at the whole of earth at once? With so much still to do and organise on this earth, how is it possible that humans have left its atmosphere to search for other worlds? In this decade, planets seem almost to be fiction.
But when I think back to those grains of sand on all the beaches on earth I’m left with a sense of ridiculousness. How can people consume themselves with something so small? “Every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant”; “every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species”… has been absorbed in one infinitesimally small grain of sand no different to all the trillions of others. Even the Voyager 2 image of our “pale blue dot” privileges our position in the universe, because we can make it out amidst the darkness. I prefer to conceptualise Earth as a planet as just one of those grands of sand on one of the beaches on earth, indistinguishable from the rest.
The great irony is that humans only started leaving Earth’s atmosphere during a period of intense human competition and rivalry: it was preoccupation with portions of this Earth that led humans closer to discovering other worlds. Are other planets therefore only discoverable and reachable through human rivalry? In these moments of reflection, Earth becomes a symbol of the confines and preoccupations of the human mind.
