What Does Earth Look Like?

On a bright, summer day, a group of friends were talking and laughing on a grassy field. The flowers were vibrant, the birds were chirping, the grasshoppers were wildly flinging as if the blades of grass were catapults. The temperature was high and the sun shone undisturbed except for the occasional puffy clouds drifting along the sky like white rafts in the ocean. It was a beautiful afternoon.

The group of friends were all children with ages ranging between the years before and during adolescence, a mix of little boys and girls relaxing on a hill. At the bottom was a playground, to the left was the school they all attended, all around were the houses of their neighbourhood. 

At first, the topic of their conversation had been about trivial things such as favourite flavours of ice cream, or what vacations they had previously gone on in the summer. When silence took its course a new topic was needed. Eventually, one girl thought of a proposition in her head. She asked, “What does Earth look like?”

In the beginning the tiny crowd of children stared at her as if she had said something very stupid. But sooner than later they refuted that belief when they all suddenly began to talk at once, answering her question. They talked over each other, argued at the same time, raised their voices to be more dominant in the conversation, and quickly all things resorted to an uproar of mayhem. What had been a moment of tranquility was altered by a disturbance of opinions.

“Earth is green and blue,” says one boy. “It has lush, green vegetation and vast, empty swaddles of water as broad as the horizon.”

“Earth is nothing but white,” says another boy. “Sure, it has plants and water that make it look green and blue, but the question is what it looks like. And from space all we can see are the clouds because they block everything else.”

Nods go around the circle, leaving some members agreeing and some deep in thought. On one girl’s turn to speak she ponders something divergent to the current line of reasoning and suggests, “How do we know the clouds are white? Our eyes only see them as white. What if in reality they aren’t white? How can we know for sure Earth does not actually look purple?”

“Because we can see them, and they’re white,” says a boy. 

Another boy smacks him on the head and says, “That’s her point, idiot!” The circle of friends laugh as he rubs the spot.

“I can explain more if you want,” says the girl, pitying the boy. “If our eyes see the clouds as white, then we can only trust our eyes. Is that enough reason to believe the clouds are white?”

Murmurs and nods all around.

“We’re all missing a detail that’s pretty important,” says another girl. “All this talk of colour. There is a whole spectrum of light that we cannot see, might I remind you all.”

“Of course! What if we viewed an X-ray of the Earth?”

“Yippee! An infrared view, perhaps? Thermal radiation? Is Earth actually red, orange and violet?”

“Cease this discord and poppycock! Who said we need to view Earth from the outside?”

“What do you suggest? We drill a hole to the centre of the Earth, then look outwardly?”

“That’s exactly what I suggest!”

Laughter at such an outrageous idea.

“Back to what she said earlier… suppose we cannot trust our eyes, and they deceive us. Then what if we must trust our souls? Must we view Earth through the art we create of it, paintings and music and literature and such?”

“Easily the dumbest approach I’ve ever heard.”

“You try one better!”

“All of you! I propose we view Earth as its compositional elements. Hydrogen and carbon and iron and calcium…”

“Let’s take, I don’t know, a knife, and slice Earth up individually atom by atom. Then line it all up in one straight, big line. Would that help with anything?”

“What if we play a really loud sound, like a concert speaker, then record it back and map out the Earth with sound waves, like bats and submarines do?”

“That’s so stupid!”

Smacks on the head. Fighting.

“Shush!” says the original girl who had posed the question. Everyone is quiet. She points to a small kid with glasses near the top of the hill, at the corner of their group. All the children follow her eyes. “I want to hear what he thinks.”

The little boy, possibly the smallest of them all, if not the youngest, pushes up his glasses, anxious to have learned all the attention has been focused on him.

“Well?” says the girl. “Go on now. What do you think Earth looks like?”

“Come on now, he’s the quiet kid!”

“Yeah, he’s not going to say anything remarkable.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Why are you putting him on the spot?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Silence please!” shouts the girl. She looks back at the kid she had pointed to and clears her throat. “So? What do you think?”

The boy takes a moment to answer. He looks up at the clear sky, his pondering mysterious in all its wonder to the mouths itching to say around him, his eyes trained on something past the clouds as if there was a torrent of rain coming only he could see--and near and far, the rain droplets, magnified a million times, time slowed down, and one can see a whole ocean full of fish in each one, and pedestals with creatures standing on them, holding umbrellas to protect them from the typhoon of the world.

“I see a season of mist,” he says. “A careless hue of colours unbeknownst to any who might even dream of them so. I see the prosperous citizens of the Earth, in all their tragic glory. Pain and suffering, love and heroism, warfare and a peace we’ve never known. This morning I was prepared to find out something wrong with the world. A touch here, a touch there, of something terrible, one that eyes can see but cannot feel. Perhaps the Earth forced to warm by man’s hubris, or the seas forced to vomit the wasted food we’ve shoved down its throat onto land, unable to eat anymore. But despite so, and in such a masterful manner, with utmost clarity and brevity I can say that no hardship has ever deemed us dead or depressed so. I seem to recall, cold in the soil that nurtures the vegetables at our very feet, far, far in some odd distance, over the mountains, to the grave and back and to the moon and back, that when alone we escape ourselves but when together we transcend impossibilities--what I recall is a light that empties any doubts we have of our kind, what I recall is this. On this Earth we have many a people and prides. Now we have mastered this art of coming to know every trifling detail about this place we call home. In all its splendour, all its rich features. A broad expanse, swathes of land, bourbons and velvets, alphabets and colours, something we have yet known to live while we lived--we still keep in mind all the grace, the beauty, the majesty, the flush of gold and silver, the darkness of black and ominousness, the places of squares and circles of towns and cities, the shores of our pasts and futures, the shadows of our trails and roads, the bushes of our forests and reefs, the unobstructed lights of our sun and lampposts, the leafy greens of our farms and harvests; then here and there so and so would there be grounded heights, poetic prose, wild domestication, malnourished capitalists, solitary socialites, humble imperialists, somber happinesses, loving hatreds, dead livelihoods, soft hardships, elegant poverty, poor wealth, sick health, marvels of every passing moment flowing like boats in the river of time--people pushing their fire lanterns into the air, what a sight to behold, into the sky of the eve where thousands of these drift through the soft breeze of the night above their legions of sails. This river begins the moment our senses are sophisticated enough to view this magical place all of you wish to fully see called Earth, and the river delta ends when we close our eyes for the last time, eternally grateful to witness the splendidness of such a wonder of a planet. We stand bewildered on our feet, inhaling it all in speechless din, surmising that all that we know and all that we will know about this place where everyone and everything has ever known and lived will be greater than anything the capacity of our brains can comprehend, so infinite in awe are we of such a world beheld, worth more than all of the rocks and mountains and rainforests and deserts and oceans and skies combined--volcanoes rupture here, avalanches scatter snow there, a dragonfly chases a mosquito, a fish in a river jumps up to catch the dragonfly, it only jumps into the paws of a waiting bear, but before that it is snatched by the talons of a swooping eagle, shot down from the sky miles later by a hunter waiting in the bush, retrieved by a dog for its master, a master who returns to his family waiting at home, a cabin on the edge of a lake brimming with life like a child who overflows his glass while pouring his milk. Then, far above the atmosphere, all which is oblivious to such preordained events, happens the colliding of stars, movements of galaxies, speeding of comets, pulsing of quasars, and heaving bellows of such behemoths of black holes, hungry for endless food of the cosmos, seeking to delete its existence. Then, back in this tiny speck of a rock we call Earth, now we can see the full picture. There are no white clouds, lush greeneries, or blue oceans. There are no infrared rays or thermal perceptions or sonar waves. There are no deceptions of the lenses of our eyes. There is only Earth.”

The children stare at him blankly. One child yawns.

“I didn’t think it was possible for a person to read too much,” one says. The rest laugh.

One of them suggests they play hide and seek. Tired from a conversation of heart and cordiality, the children eagerly rise to do so, back to their competitive, practical, superficial nature. Non-profound action. Meaningless disarray. They scatter like a pack of wild buffaloes or the particles of a supernova, one and all the same.

Though, is it possible to say? With each and every child laughing and running down the hill, one counting from one to a hundred, two hiding under a porch, three hiding behind separate bushes--the collective glee of these children was a microcosm of something greater, this something that does something for all of us, whether it be touches our hearts, or arouses our passions and desires, or imbues our souls with dread. This something that we all know, but some might not have the wisdom to say it or the foresight to speak it. This something that we stand on, cherish, hate, worry for, condemn, pursue victory over, desire all of it for our dreams, give to it like presents on Christmas--this something that births nature and human nature and even our reality, in all that is good or bad, of a land we come from and return to after death, of a soil we grow our characters and lives upon. This great nation of a home as white as the light we share, as blue as the tears we cry for it, as green as the trees of our families, both ancestor and descendant, burdened with the heavy task of ensuring, without drastic change, that we view it all the same. For years and years to come.

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