To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet. As such, the significance of the first photographic confirmation of a habitable exoplanet was lost on me. I suppose every childhood is one of blind assumptions.

The way I look at it, if the impact of one house-sized object is enough to disrupt an entire evolutionary thread, that thread didn’t have much of a shot to begin with. A spacecraft landing is no different than a boulder shifting, a meteor crashing, a tree falling. And unlike those objects, we do leave, and we do clean up after ourselves. We try to be mindful tenants and ethical observers, to have as minimal an impact as possible. As possible. At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.

We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship – to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.