Note: This is an AI-generated translation from my original Italian article: Una macchia arancione

What happens when you look high enough to see both the best and the worst of what we are?

---

The book

On February 18, 1993, I was ten years old and my mother gave me a book. The Children's Atlas of the Sky by Robin Kerrod. Hardcover, dark background with the shuttle pointing upward, the planets in a row, a star map and a spiral galaxy in the corner. The entire cosmos condensed into a cover.

There's a dedication, handwritten on the first page.

I leafed through that book hundreds of times. In the evening, in bed, with the bedside lamp casting that warm, slightly yellow light. The glossy, heavy pages, full of photographs and illustrations. Each planet had its own section. Jupiter with its colored bands and the Great Red Spot. Saturn with its rings. Mars, red and dusty. I'd look at them the way you look at postcards from places you've never been but where someday, who knows, maybe.

And then there was Pluto. The last one. The farthest. The most mysterious.

Pluto's page was different from the others. While the other planets had detailed photos, Pluto had a dot. A blurry glow surrounded by darkness. It wasn't a photograph: it was the best humanity could offer you in 1993. That wasn't an image. It was a promise. "I exist, but you don't know me yet."

I was that same curious child who had his parents drop him off at the Feltrinelli bookstore in Pescara to leaf through science books sitting on the floor. The same one who rode the bus home with a book on his knees and a head full of questions. But Pluto was different from the others. The other planets you could see. Pluto you could only imagine. And for a ten-year-old, that empty space between the blurry dot and reality was the most fascinating place in the universe.

Twenty-two years in the dark

That book stayed with me. I still have it. Now it's in my son's room, the pages a little more yellowed and my mother's dedication still there, on the first page. I've changed, the world has changed, but that orange spot remained the same in my mind for twenty-two years.

Meanwhile, someone was working to change that.

On January 19, 2006, from the Cape Canaveral launch site, NASA launched a probe the size of a grand piano. They called it New Horizons. Its destination: Pluto. The distance to travel: about five billion kilometers. The estimated time: nine years.

Nine years. Nine years of travel through the dark, at over 50,000 kilometers per hour, toward a dot that in my childhood book wasn't even a photograph.

July 14, 2015

I remember that day. Not where I was physically, but what I felt.

The first high-resolution images of Pluto began to arrive. And Pluto was no longer a spot. It had mountains. Ice mountains three thousand meters high. It had plains of frozen nitrogen stretching for hundreds of kilometers. It had a thin atmosphere, hazy, visible backlit like a halo. And it had a heart.

Yes, a heart. An enormous heart-shaped plain that scientists named Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. Pluto had crossed a century of anonymity, had been demoted to "dwarf planet" in 2006, and when someone finally went to look at it up close, the first thing it showed the world was a heart. (I'm not making this up. Look it up.)

That day, I cried.

Not a dramatic cry. Not a sob. That thing that happens when something catches you off guard and your eyes fill up before you can do anything about it. Because that orange spot from the book I had when I was ten years old now had a face. What had been unknown for twenty-two years was now real. And I was there, somehow, from the beginning. From that bed with the yellow lamp and the glossy pages.

The signal from the probe took four hours and twenty-five minutes to reach Earth. Four hours and twenty-five minutes, at the speed of light. That's how far we are from Pluto. And we got there anyway.

What humanity can do

Stop for a second and think about what's behind that photograph.

Not a probe. Thousands of people. Years of work. A chain of decisions, calculations, sacrifices, funding defended tooth and nail, nights in the lab, code written and rewritten, materials tested and redesigned. Someone, in 2001, began designing a mission to photograph a dot that most people couldn't even find in the sky. And that someone convinced enough other people to make it happen.

Humanity, when it comes together for a common purpose, is capable of things that take your breath away.

Reaching a point five billion kilometers away. Photographing something that for decades was just a shadow. Landing a rover on Mars and driving it from Earth. Building a telescope like the James Webb, placing it a million and a half kilometers from Earth, and using it to look at the light of galaxies that existed 13 billion years ago. Thirteen billion. Light that departed when the universe was still young, captured by an object built by human hands.

Every time I look at a photo from the James Webb, every time I see an image of a nebula or a galaxy cluster, something inside moves. It's not just awe. It's something deeper. It's the awareness that that photo is the product of thousands of minds that worked together, that agreed, that decided to push their gaze a little further. It's the proof that when humanity collaborates, when it sets aside everything else and focuses on a goal, it can do things that seem impossible.

How many minds did it take to photograph a planet nobody had ever seen?

There it is: this is the part that moves me. The capability. The potential. What we are able to do.

Then you lower your gaze

And then you look down. From the sky to the earth.

And you see wars. Bombs falling on houses where children sleep. You see forests burning, year after year, hectare after hectare, to make room for things that in ten years will be abandoned. You see islands of plastic in the ocean, as big as countries, that nobody collects. You see water being poisoned, air being polluted, species disappearing one after another in silence, without anyone noticing.

The same brain that calculates interplanetary trajectories decides to wage war. The same hands that build telescopes build weapons. The same species that managed to photograph Pluto can't stop destroying the only planet it has.

How is that possible?

It's not a rhetorical question. I truly wonder. How do you reconcile so much capability with so much destruction? How is it possible that the same humanity that makes me cry with wonder in front of a photo of Pluto makes me cry with pain in front of the evening news?

I feel a pain inside when I see the evil in the world. Not anger, or at least not just anger. Something duller, heavier. Something that resembles the bewilderment of someone who looks at infinite potential and sees it wasted, trampled, ignored.

A personal note

What I write now is the most personal thing I've written on this blog. I say it without defending myself and without wanting to convince anyone.

I am a believer. I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses. And when I look at the world, when I see that contrast between what humanity can do and what humanity chooses to do, a verse comes to mind that has always struck me for its honesty. In Genesis 6:5, speaking of the period before the Flood, it reads that "Jehovah saw that man's wickedness was great on the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only bad all the time."

It's not a condemnation from above. It's a diagnosis. And when I turn on the evening news, when I read the headlines, when I look at what we do to the planet and to ourselves, I find it hard not to recognize it.

But there's another verse that stays with me, and that for me changes everything. In Revelation 11:18, it reads that God will "bring to ruin those ruining the earth." It's not a threat. It's a promise. The same promise that makes me look ahead, that keeps me from stopping at the pain.

I don't ask anyone to share my faith. That's not the point. The point is that when I look at the sky and see what we're capable of, and then look at the earth and see what we choose to do, I need to believe that this isn't the final word. That the potential isn't destined to be wasted forever. That someone, sooner or later, will set things right.

And that hope, for me, is as solid as the ice mountains of Pluto.

Looking up

That book is still in my son's room. The Children's Atlas of the Sky, with the slightly worn cover and my mother's dedication on the first page. And on Pluto's page there's still that spot, that blurry dot in the dark.

But now I know what Pluto looks like. It has mountains, ice plains, a thin atmosphere. It has a heart.

And I also know what the world looks like. I know what we're capable of when we look up, and I know what we choose to do when we look down.

The pain remains. But it's not the final word.

And I keep looking up.