Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game.

all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

For a split second Shaun thinks, what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can. Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence. 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

The earth is a place of circular systems: growth and decomposition, rainfall and evaporation, alive with the cycling of air currents that shunt the weather around the continents. You know this of course, but in space you see it. The looping weather.

wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?

How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf. And isn’t it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren’t we so insecure a species that we’re forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.