“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

-Neil Armstrong

I work in a job where my specialty is… information. And “helping” people, sadly, not hoarding the information as I should be doing. So people come in, they have questions and curiosities, and I try to help them out, and in turn, it helps me out. The desire for knowledge, to always know more, is the first step towards seeing the hidden map of the world, and as cliche as it is, even a moron’s stupid question can be enlightening about something.

The other day a man came in asking for help trying to find pictures of the Earth and the moon, all in relation to the rest of the solar system. He was really quite insistent about this, in fact. I warned him that it might not be the easiest thing to find, not impossible, but not easy, and I mentioned this because he kept telling me what a hurry he was in. But we gave it a look and…

Most pictures of the solar system of planets we reside in just don’t include our moon, or most other moons, matter of fact. Our moon is just too small to make it to that scale, for one reason, and for another, it’s a glimpse at planets, not their orbiting moons. I tried to explain this to him, but he was still hung up on my earlier attempt to explain to him that the planets themselves orbit and rotate around the sun (which, in turn, rotates around the center of our galaxy, which rotates will all the other galaxies, etc.), and finally he allowed me to ask an all too important question: “What exactly are you looking for and why?”

He mentioned that he had heard President Obama speaking earlier in the day about how we were going to Mars next and that Obama was going to fund it. Having seen parts of that particular speech, I tried to tell the guy that I think he had misheard what it was exactly that Obama had said, but he was convinced: Obama was going to direct NASA to go to Mars next. I then tried to explain that that was not going to be an easy mission. The trip alone would be a matter of years, in fact. And that’s one way. All this logic and reason didn’t impress this man though. His next question: “So how far away is the Moon?”

Off the top of my head, I guessed that it was about 250, 000 miles. I wasn’t terribly far off, but the guy distrusted the velocity of my answer. I said, “Trust me, I know a little something about the moon,” but he didn’t like that answer either. And, well, I guess I didn’t blame him.

But again, I pressed for him to continue with the why of all this and he told me that he was tired of being curious about the larger universe and not being able to add anything to the search to answer all those questions man had. So, he wanted to add his unique brain to this particular quest, the quest for Mars. “How so?” I asked. And he told me that he wanted to write a letter to NASA and suggest to them, since he couldn’t figure out how far the moon was from the Earth or where it was in relation to the Earth and Mars, that a manned mission to Mars shouldn’t launch from Earth towards the red planet, but instead, it should launch from the moon!

I thought about explaining about how that wouldn’t really make sense or cut down on time or fuel or… well, anything, really. And I didn’t add that it would add a mountain of costs on top of a continent of costs that would already lead to a mission towards Mars. I just smiled and nodded my head and said, “Sounds great.”

As Hemingway said, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” And there are something like 6 billion people on this planet, and though I don’t know the exact statistics of it, I’m willing to bet that at least something like 60% of those people are fucking morons. Just gloriously stupid people walking around, watching TV, and procreating like there is no tomorrow. But some of them are curious about things and want to help, even if they are years late to the party. I think I admire that. I should be talking about other things on Earth Day, like ecological preservation and shit like that, but I don’t know that Earth Day is really solving that problem. We’re either too stupid and oblivious of the problems our planet has, the problems we tend to be the cause of, but we’re curious and we want to help. Actions make speak louder than words, but this is the internet. Outside of LOLcats, stock quotes, music, videos of fat people getting hit in the nuts with footballs thrown by children, and pornography, all we have is our words.

How the first Earth Day came about.

Not buying Earth Day.

Golden apples, crimson stew.

Green up your sex life!

The world tree.

Also, “Sun-Earth Day” and “Fossil Fools Day.”

And don’t forget: Today is the day that Richard Nixon died.

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls.”

-Carl Sagan