Leaving London one Midsummer Night
we will strive to walk our regular commute back to Cambridge England by the end of day, covering over 60 miles and 120,000 steps to edge around one degree north up the London meridian on the fragile surface of this bright blue ball we call home.
Commuting
Many of us have a long commute to work. In 1968 three astronauts commuted over 200,000 miles for one day’s work at the moon and caught 3.5 billion of us in this “selfie” before taking three whole days to bring it back home.
The upper view is the “pale blue” dot of colour in the void was taken by the International Cassini robot space probe. Sent up in 1997 it took nearly 7 years to complete its 1000 million mile one way commute and reach Saturn a 1000 million miles away. It spent the rest of its two decade career working non-stop and occasionally sending our portrait back home. NASA/ESA asked us all to look up and smile when it sanpped this particular digital selfie in the summer of 2013. If you look closely the Moon can be just be seen very faintly off its right side. Powered by plutonium it could maybe have kept on going, visiting Saturns rings and moons and collecting data, but it was deliberately sent to its destruction in the burning heart of Saturn in September 2017 when its often extended contract was finally considered done. Find out more here
The lower view was seen by the NASA astronuats who went to the moon a 1/4 million miles away in the 1960s and captured our portrait on old fashioned film.
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Maybe you or your parents were down in Africa, about to join lions in the shadow of night in our ancestral home; or up top in South America the “new” found land, enjoying some lunch in the summer sun; or further left on the blue South Atlantic, buffeted under the swirling clouds of that storm off Antarctica, as the distant moon dragged your boat on the tide; or a polar explorer further left, enjoying endless frozen summer days of midnight sun walking on water locked up for millennia a mile high above land, out of reach of seas. Two thirds of all our fresh water keeps a dazzling white lid on our warming world.
As the astronuats looked back home that Christmas Eve, I was there in the shot, down at the far right about to ride back into the long shadow of a winter’s night. Maybe I was gazing back up at the moon, with my transistor radio on, listening for news of our intreprid scientists above, or isolated under one of the notorious London smogs as king coal clung on. I sure would have been looking forward to my presents: I got a moon globe and spaceman that year. Some of you were with me, riding our bright blue marble, flecked with lush green and cool white, as it rose above the dry airless surface of our grey lifeless moon.
Cars were scarce and some roads in London suburbs were still dirt tracks. I never imagined that I would “spend” more than a year on the roads commuting the distance those astronuats did to the moon. Since the 1960s we have sent research probes even further out to space, occasionally turning to radio back digital selfies. The top part of the picture taken in 2017 from Saturn, captured our tiny blue dot from a billion miles away. That’s 4000 times further than the moon but, in the days just before Covid our UK vehicles were doing this mileage every day.
Walking it
Today for once we will be on foot. It may be hard, but I hope less destructive and the precious time more fun. Over my life to date, I have already walked half way to the moon. My legs have clocked more mileage than some cars ever do before they expire. That’s five whole laps of our magnificent blue marvel! Sixty miles or so can’t be that hard but if we walked that distance every day, we would lap the world every year.
By night
These days the dark side of the earth is glittering more than it was and our astronauts enjoy a shorter commute. The picture below shows London’s side of the world at just about midnight. All the cities of Europe and India are sleeping with lights left on but the mountains, deserts, oceans and plains of Africa are still lit by the moon teeming with nightlife avoiding heat of the day. Round at the back, away from this “dark” side, the mighty Paciific is already basking in the sunlight of a brand new day.
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Upper the “black marble”
Lower view London, and south coast of England
I was somewhere down there when André Kuipers did the commute to the International Space Station in 2012 the year of the London Olympics and took his wide angle shot above. Our 100km route north of London, overlaid in yellow, disappears into the darkeness at the top, out of range of the camera, but the villages to the south are clear and the bright town right at the bottom on the south coast is Brighton.
I had probably left London, or was on the last train home at midnight, when four years later Tim Peake made the same commute and, stuck in the “office” pressed the digital buttons and sent the close up of London below back down to earth, as he whizzed over us, briefly only four times as far from London as Cambridge is today.
Close up view of London, England, from 400km up taken by ESA astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station in 2016
As we set off like ants through this glowing nest of humans, we may wonder where our colony is heading. If we escape these city lights before dawn’s rosy glow spreads across the sky, we may glimpse the spacestation or even Saturn in the sky overhead.
The sun’s rays may edge up over the wooded ridge ahead and reach back over us across the slumbering valley to catch the sky scraping shard’s sparkling tip before the rest of the city spins back out into its dazzle and the electric lights go out for the day.
I am sure we will be ready to welcome it as we stumble in the gloom through the dark forest paths. We may savour the warmth on our faces or avert our dazzled eyes and, pausing for breath in the fresh morning air, turn to see our long shadows trailing back down to the stirring nest behind, before we continue to rise with the chorus of lifes morning chatter in the green glades around us. .
Turning north up the Meridian from Greenwich to Cambridge, a degree or so closer to the melting white top of our spinning world, we may ponder what we can learn, as we walk amongst the fragile green life, spread thin over the crusted dust of life long past, pushed, cracked and crumpled by her burning heart softening the restless rock just sixty miles below our feet.
We may glimpse our vast dark cradle, which has been flashing her blue and white signature for billions of light years into space, as she is dragged across our rocky shores by the nearby barren moon, jealously pulling at us as we spin together into the new day and our little boats battle the morning tide in the wide mouth of London’s young river, which some call Old Father Thames.
We may spare a thought for the families who came before ours, in sickness and in health, the places they left and things they did to put our precious planet into perspective and keep us safer, saner, and happier in our own times.
Perhaps the ocean’s spray will join the swirling white ribbons braiding the blue marble as our space station looks down, or will appear above us as sun-drenched pillows spoiling a perfect blue sky, before splashing and thundering down on us, as we bridge the rivers and ford the streams, joining the waters of earlier rains, carving away at London’s basin full of life’s clay remains, before carrying them down the dirty brown Lea and out past the docks to the muddy sea to feed the algae blooms.
Gushing rivers, blooming seas
Midsummer 2020
Perhaps the rain will flow ahead of us over the hills and under the learned bridges of the Cam in chalky trout streams running north towards the Wash. Some may spill into the swaying reeds laying down carbon in the dark peat beds of the few living fens. Some may make the sea to feed the plankton blooms, dropping their carbon as tiny white skeletons to the sea bed below. Their white chalk or black coal may yet rock up once more at some far distant place and time.
The midday sun may beat down behind our backs casting the shortest shadows of the year on our restless feet, before coming back around on our left and sinking slowly ahead of us with a ruddy glow to wish our sleepy bones goodbye, as we trudge on the last few miles in the dark to our finishing latitude, gaining our Cambridge degree before the day is completely done.
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With your help, we may do a tiny bit to leave behind a better place for all, if we make it home on this particularly exhausting day.
Click for NASA Image