You beyond Pluto

By Kevin Reed

This is a photo of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft in 2017. New Horizon is beyond Pluto, looking back at the sun, so Pluto’s atmosphere is backlit by the sun.

Imagine that you could lift up right now, out of your seat or wherever you’re standing or laying, up into the air, then into the sky. You break through the cold upper atmosphere, into space, and fly rapidly past the moon and speed towards Mars.

You go by Mars. As you hit 111 million miles from Earth, you pass through the asteroid belt (you buzz through unharmed), and at 524 million miles, you pass Jupiter. At 1.0038 billion miles, you pass Saturn. At 1.8439 billion miles, you reach and pass Uranus, and you pass beautiful blue Neptune at 2.8612 billion miles .

You are traversing over three billion miles of space as you approach Pluto. Here, as you slow down, maybe you take a moment to look back at the solar system. The sun would look similar to how a full moon looks on Earth, but smaller. You might see Jupiter or Saturn as bright stars, similar to how we see Venus and Jupiter in our sky at night. You turn back around and head towards Pluto at intergalactic idle speed.

As you reach Pluto, you are now 3.3068 billion miles from Earth. The sun itself is 3.7 billion miles from where you are now, and light from the sun takes a full five and a half hours to reach where you are now floating in space.

You go just beyond Pluto, slow down even more, turn back around again towards the sun, and you see this:

Imagine that place, at that distance, being there right now. The emptiness around you, that vast distances to get back to Earth or near the Sun, or to anywhere else at all. That place exists right now, that far away, in space. You see the sun’s light shining through Pluto’s atmosphere of molecular nitrogen and continuing on past you into the blackness of the ort cloud and beyond to other galaxies, other suns, behind you.

Part of you, with your new found perspective, wants to return to Earth. Part of you wants to turn and head out past the Ort Cloud to galaxies, stars, and planets beyond…

This image was taken by a camera on a spacecraft, but it’s as if you were standing there, right now. You can see what it looks like to be on the far side of Pluto, looking back at your home planet and your sun literally billions of miles away.

To me there’s just something about the fact that this place - this view and perspective - exists right now as we go about our daily lives. It’s there, all the time. Your washing machine might break, or maybe you’re on the best travel vacation of your life. You could be working through a tragedy, or you might be simply drinking a coffee and reading this, but that place, that perspective, is there, all the time, just like all the other planets in the solar system, all the life on Earth, all the galaxies beyond our own, and all things yet undiscovered across the universe. All that complexity is there, right now, doing its own thing, while you are here, doing your own thing.