“The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that . . . no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.” —George Orwell

Stargazing has long been called a solitary pursuit. Picture an astronomer in your mind and you probably envision a lone figure hunched over a telescope eyepiece under a veil of stars. Which is to say, astronomy remains a sanctioned activity in the time of the coronavirus.  

Tonight, my telescope is pointed at a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Leo, a group known as the “Leo Triplet,” located 35 million light-years away. As I struggle to bring these dim and staggeringly distant targets into view, the world has been put on hold. Businesses are closed. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and more than 25,000 have died. Millions, meanwhile, are quarantined in their homes—either by governmental decree or by choice—in a collective attempt to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. At this moment, our health is contingent upon our remaining apart.  

The operative term in recent weeks has been “social distancing,” which is really just another way of saying “isolation.” Isolation is difficult for a social species like ours. We crave closeness, contact. But out there, beyond the shelter of our atmosphere, in the universe-at-large, aloneness is the typical state of affairs. Distances are unimaginably vast, and space is, well, mostly just that. 

Astronomy, like few other human pursuits, allows us to reflect on that fundamental cosmic isolation. The great distances of the universe confound simple understanding. What we see is not what it appears to be. Even the closest objects in space are reflections of the past, as light—which travels at 186,282 miles per second—struggles to span the wide gulf of space.  

Life itself depends on contact, a coming together of organic and inorganic molecules. This merging requires a very specific set of environmental conditions: Gravity, but not too much of it; warmth, but not extreme heat; water in liquid form. Earth is often said to inhabit the “Goldilocks Zone” of the solar system. The conditions here, 92 million miles from the sun, are “just right,” it seems, for life to flourish. As astrobiologist Caleb Scharf wrote, “[L]ife, and specifically life like that on Earth, will always inhabit the border or interface between zones defined by such characteristics as energy, location, scale, time, order, and disorder. Too far away from such borders, in either direction, and the balance for life tips toward a hostile state. Life like us requires the right mix of ingredients, of calm and chaos—the right yin and yang.”

And yet, in spite of our propitious position in the solar system, the urge to stray from our home planet remains. A century of space sci-fi movies can be read as a kind of declaration of our collective longing. Beneath the romance and swashbuckling action of Star Wars and Star Trek, I think, is a desire to be less alone, to rub shoulders in exotic space cantinas with the likes of Vulcans, Wookies, and Minbaris, to know if we are members of some larger, far-flung cosmic family. 

As I gaze at the galaxies of the Leo Triplet, each an assemblage of hundreds of billions of stars as vast and complex as our own Milky Way, I wonder how many habitable planets and civilizations may exist (or have existed) within those elegant pirouetting arms. I must admit I also feel a tinge of fear of those who peddle deep space travel as a practical solution—a kind of planetary ejection seat—for what they see as the inevitable destruction of our own planet. 

A few prominent scientists have asserted that some planets and moons could be manipulated (or “terraformed”) to support us. Perhaps. The closest candidate, Mars, is 143 million miles away. Reaching the Red Planet would require astronauts to undertake a grueling and lonely seven-month journey. Truly habitable planets, wherever they might exist, are located much farther away. Getting to them will require spacecraft upon which generations will be born, live out the duration of their lives, and die. Even if we could suddenly develop the means to travel efficiently among the stars, little of what we’d find out there would be friendly to our kind. Surveys from observatories have revealed how hostile—how un-Earth-like—much of the universe seems to be. Take for example the recent discovery of WASP-76b, an exoplanet 640 light-years away, where winds blow 11,000 miles per hour and liquefied iron falls like rain from the sky. 

George Orwell likened Earth to a life raft, a small vessel adrift in a vast and hostile universe. Adlai Stevenson described it as a spaceship, one “preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.” The British chemist James Lovelock described Earth, or “Gaia,” as a kind of homeostatic superorganism adrift in space (one that passes through stages of birth, growth, flourishing, sickness, senescence, and death). Even if we discover that there are millions of potentially inhabitable planets—that Earth is not unique in the overwhelming confines of the universe—we will most likely never reach them. Our small raft is all we’ve got, and it must be cared for.  

Disasters have a way of refocusing attention—of returning the gaze to public welfare, to the here and now. The coronavirus outbreak is revealing that there is, in fact, a way forward. Since the virus struck, global carbon emissions have plummeted. In China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, CO2emissions have dropped by a quarter in the past month. Addressing the global climate emergency will require instituting permanent measures as ambitious as the temporary ones we are taking now—ramping down fossil fuel combustion, reducing consumption and waste, protecting huge portions of the biosphere—in essence, learning to live within our planetary means. 

Now, as never before, it is clear that our survival will require a collective acceptance that we are alone, together, on this one planet—and it’s time we began acting that way.