One of my three science fiction novels is about a group of explorers who land on a distant planet in an attempt to see if it could be colonized by people of their civilization. Many things go wrong on that planet, and that leads most of the group to consider it as dangerous and unattractive, a place to be avoided at all costs. But a couple of explorers find the planet exciting and beautiful. They are willing to look beyond the death and destruction to see the planet for what it is, a lovely and inspiring place on which they could live.
Fine. But that got me to thinking, what are we likely to find when we get into outer space and see planets and moons and asteroids and comets up close? What will we think once we land on them and take a good look around? Will we think of them as “beautiful?” Or will they be little more than desolate blobs of dust orbiting a hot, blistering sun?
Over the past fifty or so years of the US space program, we’ve seen a lot of images taken on the surface of two major celestial objects in our solar system, Mars and the moon. Astronauts on the moon (the only body outside the Earth mankind has walked on) took many spectacular photographs of their moonwalks (largely on film, mind you) and brought them back for us to wonder at. Several unmanned robotic travelers have landed on Mars and tantalized us with more vivid images, and the European Space Agency landed an unmanned probe on a comet. All three sets of images show a largely barren landscape, though to a great extent that was planned since it’s much easier and much safer to land a spacecraft on a smooth surface than on one littered with rocks. (The Russians did land a spacecraft on Venus, but its few images don’t show much.) I don’t know about you, but I found the landscapes of Mars and moon to be rather plain and not terribly lovely or “beautiful” in the usual sense of that word. They are stark, and in themselves compelling in a minimalist sense. But not “beautiful” in comparison to, say, an evening sunset on the Rocky Mountains, or an autumn landscape of the woodlands of Vermont. Just my opinion here.
Still, in our solar system are planets and moons that we haven’t landed on (and in most cases I hope we don’t), and from above they show many various mottled and unique surfaces. I imagine that the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io would be a fascinating place on which to stand. With volcanoes that spout liquid sulfur, and lava flows and what not, it might be intriguing. (Dangerous, too.) But would we characterize it as “beautiful,” especially in comparison with the Earth? I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We might have to come up with new adjectives to describe the new worlds we encounter.
Nothing we’ve ever seen on any image returned from outer space even begins to compare with the beauty of the surface of the Earth. But we’ve only just begun to explore. Who knows what we will encounter when we land on planets and moons of other solar systems. Will we think of them as “beautiful?” Do you think of the moon or Mars as “beautiful?”