Apollo Pilot by Donn Eisele Francis French

Author:Donn Eisele,Francis French [Eisele, Donn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO023000 Biography & Autobiography / Adventurers & Explorers
ISBN: 9780803262836
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2016-10-21T06:00:00+00:00

8.

The Grandeur of Earth

I watched the earth roll past the spaceship windows. Earth is a fascinating thing to watch from two hundred miles up. We managed to put on film a great deal of what we saw, but a camera cannot capture the sweeping grandeur and dynamism as whole oceans and continents pass below in minutes. There were thunderstorms at night that looked like frosted light bulbs blinking at random. In daylight they were puffs of cotton. Dunes rippled across a light-tan desert that spread its sands to the base of distant purple mountains. As we sped on, dark-green forests came into view. Great plains of pale yellow and green stretched to the far gray horizon. Rivers snaked across the land like twisted silver ribbons.

I remember once passing over the north coast of Africa and seeing in the distance the entire southern coast of Europe. I got a fantastic view of the North African coastline and all of the Mediterranean Sea. There was Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya—and the trackless waste of the Sahara Desert to the south. As I looked northward I saw in the distance Sicily, Greece, the Aegean Sea—and there was the island of Cyprus. Then, directly below, the green Nile River valley, the Red Sea, the Sinai Peninsula—an entire continent went by in minutes.

Another time we flew down a chain of islands in the Pacific for two thousand miles. The islands were little rings, ribbons, and blobs of light green or brown embedded in the velvety deep blue of the ocean. A halo of light-green water encircled most of them.

There were some parts of New Guinea and Indonesia that hadn’t been seen from orbit before because they were always under clouds. But we were lucky—the clouds parted and I got some good pictures of the New Guinea coastline.

It was almost like a big map except for one thing: you couldn’t see any man-made boundary lines between countries. It’s funny, all those countries look the same from up there. They’re lovely, but you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I’d never thought about it. You could see natural boundaries, like coastlines and rivers. But those lines they print on maps to separate one country from another—well, they just aren’t there.

With a world so rich and beautiful, you would think humans could learn to get along with one another. I guess it’s just human nature to fight. Mankind has always had to struggle to get what we need. And after all, we are different from the animals. Maybe that’s the trouble. Humans think they are so important. And they are never satisfied. The more they get, the more they think they need.

The world looked so beautiful from that lofty perch—I wondered why we must have wars and poverty and pollution. I realized that the abundant earth will sustain us forever with air to breathe, water to drink, and all the other good things we need—if we take care of it. Mankind needs the earth but the earth does not need mankind.

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