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We’re All Lost Without the Earth Under Our Feet
Astronauts, Antaeus, and a rainy day in the woods
It’s still within memory
Until my dad was a teenager, no one had managed to leave the earth behind. There had been thousands of years of human innovation, of dreamers looking up to the stars and wondering what was out there. But it wasn’t until after the Beatles formed that Yuri Gagarin managed to do it.
They knew it was wildly dangerous. A study of US astronauts found that to date, nineteen percent of them have died on the job. For Gagarin, the odds were much worse.
What they couldn’t know until long after Gagarin’s brief flight was the strange effects being so far from Earth has on the human body. Cancers bloom long after the mission is over, thanks to unshielded radiation. Isolation and confinement create a host of psychological disorders. And distance from the earth, from everything we need, makes survival an extraordinary challenge.
We need the earth under our feet. We need to breathe the wet air unfiltered, to face the mud and monsters. And as we isolate ourselves more and more from nature, as we shield ourselves in air-conditioned bubbles, our lives become longer and more comfortable and less worth living by the day.
