We Voyage This Magic Sea
This image of the Full Earth was taken half way to the moon by the Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans. Three men were in the spacecraft and only one man used the camera for this image. But the photo was, in a larger sense, taken, printed and distributed by the collective scientific and technical effort of millions of human beings. In one way or another, in the interconnections of nature, wealth, politics, and knowledge, every person and every creature of Earth participated in capturing the image. It is a self-portrait of a living planet.
This is an image of a human egg.
It is a tiny sphere, only 0.1-mm in diameter.
The two spheres have many similarities.
1. Both are small on their own scales, and yet filled with awesome potential.
2. Both spheres are alive.
4. We, individually, develop from memories and elements in our egg, a sphere afloat in a sea of darkness. We, collectively, develop within the elements of the planet, a sphere afloat in a sea of darkness.
5. Both are images of all mankind, we collectively exist within earth's sphere and each one of us looks exactly the same when we are an egg.
6. We are created - each one of us, like all other plants and animals on our planet - as an image of a sphere floating in space, carried along by forces we neither perceive or understand.
7. Both the Earth and the egg are a very small, isolated spheres filled with ancient memories, heading out into an unknown ocean of possibilities.
8. Both spheres are beyond the horizons of perception of our unaided eyes. They can only be seen with the aid of technology. They are a collective perception. Although only a handful of individual humans have ever actually seen either sphere, millions of us have seen the photographs, and many more realize the spheres - and our identity with them - are realities, not metaphors.