Look Up. Stop

The stars whisper, why the heck are we killing each other? Our borders are invisible from space

Growing up in a Manipur village, Ronaldo Laishram would spend nights looking up at the stars. Children have done this for a long time. Maybe even those who roamed African savannas where Homo sapiens evolved. Maybe even the questions that the stars make us whisper have remained the same: What is all of this, and what am I doing in it? Now leading a research team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Laishram can attempt the answers in an epistemic way. He’s found a 12.6bn year old galaxy protocluster and chosen to name it after Manipur’s beloved Loktak Lake. Along with this stark reflection: “Earth is very small…and here we are killing each other.” 

Scientists arrive at this perspective, both peering into the far corners of space from down here, and looking back at Earth from up there. On one side, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell called the profound cognitive shift experienced while viewing Earth from space, “instant global consciousness”. On the other, when Voyager 1 took the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image of this planet in 1990, from some 6.4bn km away, it made Carl Sagan call out the terrible absurdity of inhabitants of one corner of this pixel visiting endless cruelties on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. The Subaru and James Webb telescopes that Laishram works with today are capturing different data, with the same message. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” The borders we kill for are invisible from star distance. They don’t exist in any cosmic sense. 

Plus, for all our searching, we have yet to find life anywhere else. Meaning, a) what we have here is extraordinarily rare, and b) nobody will be coming to rebuild what our wars destroy. But if thinking like this begins with gazing at the stars, and we can no longer see them in our cities, are even the seeds of peace becoming an endangered species?

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