A mass of rock orbiting, or in other words falling towards, the Earth at a speed of 1 kilometer every second is sometimes called our natural satellite, a celestial body, but it’s generally known as the Moon. Our friend in the night, the light that we see when we go outside during “that time of the month” in which the Moon is actually visible during the night. A common misconception involves the belief that the Moon is only a night phenomenon, when in fact the Moon can be seen during daytime basically the same amount of time that it can be seen during nighttime in a month. Another fact that comes with the Moon are months; the Moon is the eponym of the word month and it is used to describe the orbital cycle of the celestial body around Earth that takes roughly 27 days. These are all informative facts, but they are nothing compared to the feeling that comes with the realization of its existence. Below you will read the story of how I became one with the Moon, one with you and one with the Universe.
It was a Thursday evening. It was not your usual Thursday though, I had just applied for admission into a Space Academy at the Arecibo Observatory, and earlier that day the STEM Club, which a friend and I moderate, had reunited for the first time since winter break. This all meant I had Science running through my mind that evening. One of the benefits of being a part of this Space Academy was the opportunity to conduct a scientific research and actually receive investigation hours for your work. The idea I had for my investigation involved the search for an economically sound way to extract useful resources from the Moon’s surface using automated machines. Hence it could be conjectured that I was pretty hooked with the Moon during this time. That night happened to be the 12th of January, one of the twelve days of the year in which a full moon is visible. This one was what we call a wolf moon, and I was not going to miss it. That night, the Moon looked like the Moon, but deep down it started to feel as if the Moon was much more than just the Moon, and we were all much more than what we were.
There was I, looking at the Moon, it looking back at me, trying to tell me something. Its surface illuminated by the electromagnetic waves emitted by the Sun, its gravitational pull causing high tides somewhere in the globe, its astonishing beauty inspiring a young kid to be an astronaut or an astronomer right now in this instance. Forty-eight years ago a small step was taken, from the last step of the Eagle spacecraft’s descent ladder to the surface of a place 384,000 kilometers away from us… Wait what? What Moon? What are you trying to say? Yes, I see you. What do you mean when you ask if I truly see you, Moon? Of course, I do… And it was here, during this exchange between the Moon and myself that I understood the greatest fact about the Moon. It is there… It exists… Its surface is real… It is there and waiting for us…
Tears started to come down my face, as they do right now as I write this. The feeling you get when you actually realize how important the mere existence of something is can be overwhelming and it certainly felt that way that 12th of January when the Moon revealed its existence to me. The funny thing is that it didn’t stop there because it was at this moment that all my scientific knowledge came and hit me back in the face, and changed my beliefs, and changed my attitude towards everything, and finally changed my life. As I said before, I wanted to extract resources from the Moon’s surface so I already knew that its surface was made out of Oxygen, Silicon, Iron, Calcium, Aluminum, Magnesium, Titanium and other elements, but it was at this moment that I realized my body is full of those elements too. It was at this moment that I realized that these elements are simply groups of atoms with the same sub-atomic arrangement (which basically means they are made of other particles ordered in a certain way), and that these sub-atomic particles are simply energetic excitations (which means that they are little packets of energy that exist in a point in space) of energy fields that exist evenly throughout the whole Universe. It was also here that I realized perhaps the most beautiful fact about our existence… All these elements that exist in our body and in the Moon were created inside the core of stars that lived in the earliest stages of our Universe’s life. When these stars were about to die, they released all their contents into space, and as a product of those explosions, everything else in the Universe came to exist. After thinking about this fact for a moment I finally truly understood the reality of what Carl Sagan once said, we are the stuff of stars.
I could not take this anymore, my face was red and my eyes were wet, and my body was physically hurt, but my mind was clean. I felt connected with the Moon and with the stars surrounding it, but I started to feel also a different connection, a more human one. I was reminded of the lectures of the great Alan Watts, who used to say that there can be no I without a you, or that there cannot be an inner self (an ego) without an outer world. The way I understood it is that you should not exclude a part of the system from the whole system, you cannot exclude the world from your inner self because you need the whole system to work properly. Which means my fellow reader that you are me and I am you, but also you are everything, you are the Moon, you are the sky, you are the water, you are the Universe. This translates into living a life full of love and pure humility. Your life should focus on maintaining happiness and order around every place you go to because after all, you are going to yourself. I believe that this is the way in which Science says what every philosopher has said since B.C.E. until now, and it is that you should treat others as you want to be treated yourself, because again, after all, you are always treating yourself. To end all this, just please never forget that you exist and that you are made of star stuff that has been around for almost 13 billion years. This means the Universe chose you and gave you the amazing opportunity to exist, so don’t waste the time you have, and all the time be thankful and humble to the stars, to the world, to your neighbors, and to yourself. Thanks, Universe.
Fokalypsy 