More than anything, when I stare up into the night sky, stargazing in the middle of nowhere, I am struck by how lonely it must be out there. Even the distance to our closest neighbor, our moon, is hundreds of thousands of miles. Almost 10 full circumnavigations of the earth. A journey that took days even in the fastest machines of man, days hurtling through black void; A giant leap of faith.
And how lonely must the other planets be? Mars, at its closest, 30 million miles, would take years charting endless black seas in your little tin ship. But at least when you landed on its rocky surface, alone, you would still be close to home, in the same neighborhood, if on another street. You would still feel the warmth of the sun, the protection of Jupiter (3 hundred million miles out), the community of the ‘solar system’.
How lonely, then, is Pluto? Is it worse to be given a taste of connection, only for it to be torn away from you? Or to have never experienced it at all, ignorant of the joy you’ve been deprived? To be called a planet, then kicked out, or to never be known by humanity in the first place?
Left alone at the icy dregs of the kuiper belt, stuck in eternal twilight, the sun a tiny spot but still blocking out the twinkling of other stars, leaving the sky empty and eerily black. Its surface an amalgam of ices so cold they might as well be called rock.
But even Pluto has a moon. They’re gravitationally locked, forever facing one another, spinning through the void past Neptune. And at only (on average) 12,000 miles away, they might as well be touching.
A popular theory for the formation of Charon posits that they, in fact, were touching at one point. Rather than the violent, passionate, but short lived impact that could have formed our moon, Pluto and Charon came together slowly, taking their sweet time, gradually heating up as friction continued to build..
And then they kissed.
Too fast and they blow each other apart. Too slow and Charon never forms at all.
Did it feel like eternity? Or like a single second?
Does the sun look on in envy while you dance around her fields?
I like to think so.
-Goner
