What would the earth look like from above right now, from a spaceship or another planet, for example, those planets that humans have reached or flown in their orbits? How would the empty city streets look like? And the empty tourist sites? The silent buildings crowded together as if their tenants had built them a long time ago to live in and have now turned into dens for them to hide inside out of fear of the unknown roaming in their neighborhoods?
These questions occurred to me while I was reading the news of the International Space Station’s return to Baikonur in South Kazakhstan last Friday morning. The astronauts unboarded the ship to find everything on earth had changed. No hugs. No handshakes. Human bodies standing at a distance from one another with their mouths and noses covered with masks. A scene that the three astronauts had not seen when they had left on their ship six months ago. Life was normal back then, and health precautions were normally taken to protect those leaving earth to explore other planets and not those on earth. Now things are reversed, precautions that are taken on earth are much harsher than those undertaken by astronauts inside their ships, where there is neither a need nor capacity for social distancing and where precautions are limited to a specified and known period.
The three astronauts, two Americans, Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir, and a Russian, Oleg Skripochka, were surprised to see the technical team at the station on earth where they had landed hiding their faces behind masks and wearing gloves. The medical team that was assigned to take care of the astronauts and to rehabilitate them for life on earth, was forced to quarantine and undergo medical monitoring for an entire month to ensure that they were free of COVID-19, the stage name of the famous pandemic. This scene was reversed in the past: those going to space were the ones who needed precautions, isolation and hand sanitizing. Earth before coronavirus was fit for human interactions while space was the unknown world that we needed to take precautions against. Understandably then, Jessica Meir noted that returning to earth as it is now was difficult. Drawing from her experience, she advised people living in quarantine to find ways to spend their time with the least harm possible: working out daily, being nice to people around you and trying to fill up time with hobbies that you love.
Jessica said: “It looks like we’re coming back to a different planet. We were the only three people that did not have to undergo the precautionary measures and isolation that were imposed on billions of people today.”
The harshness of the situation that people on earth are living through and that are open to the unknown makes leaving to space in a spaceship sound like a dream. Of course, earth has been struck by pandemics and disasters before, and after it took the lives of millions around the world, humanity was able to overcome them. However, for some reason, we believed that the scientific advancements that we are living through in our era would save us from imminent dangers like coronavirus, or at least, provide a roadmap to see the end of this nightmare.
On the contrary, the more opinions we see on the screens, from scientists, experts and physicians, the more anxiety we have before the painful sentence being repeated: “We are doing our best to find a vaccine or treatment, but do not expect a magic solution or a near end. The problem will go on for a while, and we are facing a dangerous pandemic that humanity has never witnessed before.”
You turn off the screen after hearing this agonizing warning and go to bed. You dream of the days where you used to plan to wake up in the morning and go to work, avoiding traffic, finding a table in a restaurant to meet with your friends or family, a seat at a music club, or to plan a trip to a city you’ve never been to before. All of this is now part of the past.
The only activities we can engage in today are inside the narrow rooms of our houses or on nearby streets, where we walk like guilty thieves sneaking around to avoid being seen or being near others.
On the ship that was launched to space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, after the three astronauts’ ship had landed, there was an American space scientist named Chris Cassidy, who said: “I cannot hide how happy I am to have this chance to leave earth during these difficult times that I have never witnessed before”.
Cassidy and his two Russian colleagues will spend six months in their spaceship. They will be asking themselves the same question that we’re all asking: Will our planet have succeeded in defeating the virus by then, or will it still be fighting to control it?
