Flybyreader’s Reviews > Orbital > Status Update

Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive?
Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly
good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is
curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an
idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.

Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the
centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and
normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average
everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is
going to explode or collapse.

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.