LONELINESS

Hi guys, Aaron here, today I'm going to talk about Loneliness :). But first, I just learned this yesterday, Bear Grylls the host of Man vs Wild has three sons and I'm not kidding their names are Jesse, Huckleberry and Marmaduke :). Well here is another name for you Michael Collins, not the Irish revolutionary leader, but Michael Collins the NASA astronaut.

This guy was part of the apollo 11 crew, meaning that he was part of the team that landed on the moon and became the first people to walk on the moon. Except you might not know Michael Collins name as well because he did not get to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked around but Michael Collins had to stay orbiting the moon in the command module to link up with them later. This is where things get lonely... People realise that Michael Collins, there in the command module, orbiting the moon alone was in a quite unique position. When he circled around the far side of the moon, the side that faced away from the earth he lost all radio contact with earth and with Armstrong and Aldrin. For about 48 minutes that Michael Collins was orbiting around the other end of the moon he was quite literally the most lonely a human being has ever been. He was the furthest from any other humans that any human has ever been since the beginning of man kind. We tend to think that he moon is actually much closer than it really is because most illustrations we see put the objects quite close to each other because it's easier. We actually measure the distance to the moon quite frequently using reflectors that we left behind after the landing.

That's right they're just sitting there on the surface of the moon waiting for us to shoot lasers at them, by looking at how long the light took to come back to earth, we can measure the distance quite accurately. And we've been doing this for a while now and one of the most bizarre thing we've learned is that the moon is actually spiraling away from earth quite slowly. Every year the moon is about 38mm or 1.5in further away from the earth. Those reflectors aren't the only things we left on the moon we've actually left a lot of man made junk there. There is an entire wikipedia article, just listing the big stuff we've left behind. But there are objects that are even further away from the earth than the moon. In fact there are 4 things that humans have built that have travelled so far away from the earth that they are no longer within our solar system. Voyager-1 is actually the furthest man made object from earth ever. And aboard NASA included a gold plated record that contained information about humanity just in case anyone out there found them. You can see everything that NASA put on that disk here https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html
But the item that always resignated with me was the song they choose. They've put lots and lots of audio on the disc but the song they have chosen to represent us to whatever or whoever found it, what the human emotion of loneliness. The song is by Blind Willy Johnson and it's called Dark was the night cold was the ground. There are no lyrics just humming you can listen to it, following this link here and when you listen to it, think about the weight of that meaning the song was picked to represent to aliens what loneliness is ;)

Blind Willy Johnson wasn't blind his whole life, he was blinded as a child when his stepmother threw lye in his face and he died of malarial fever after his home burned down and he had nowhere else to live but on wet newspaper. But now, his song is waaaay out there in interstellar space representing us... Thanks for reading, follow if you like my work, and don't be shy to upvote and read my other articles :)