Good soup

I finally managed to catch up on the summer special episodes of The Anthropocene Reviewed, one of my favorite podcasts where John Green basically reviews things that are part of our mundane existence such as air conditioning and sunsets. In the last episode he touched on a subject I am very passionate about which is the great wonder of seeing Earth from space, with no frontiers, no barriers, just a blue rock floating in the dark and orbiting around the sun over and over again.Obviously, I've never experienced this myself, and much likely never will. And John Green didn't either. Yet, it is something that conjures particular feelings in me and sits in the back of my mind.John speaks of how we are able to grasp things we never experienced before. We can see pictures of Earth as seen from a spaceship or watch a livestream of the ISS and see the Earth, live, from space, and have a good mental image of what it looks like. Still, it won't be a comparable feeling to being there. But you can see a drawing made by an astronaut, a rendition of his impression of living that, and you start to understand. It's not the fidelity of the image, but the implied wonder in it, the aspects of it that deeply affected the artist, like seeing the starry night sky through the brush strokes of Van Gogh and realizing there is much more movement in there than we usually notice.That got me thinking about how imagination sounds, in its definition, like the most magical power ever. Think of how you would explain imagination to an alien being. It's the ability to conjure all your memories and personal experiences to form things that don't exist or that are not right in front of you. You can create the concept of a thing that could never in fact exist as something tangible to our senses, and by doing that bring it to life. It's a super power that helps us live multiple different lives at once - the one our body is physically experiencing and the ones we are forming in our heads.It is still foggy whether other animals have imagination as well or the ability to translate such imagination into art, in an attempt to let others experience this made up thing they created in a way that is closer to their senses. But what we do know is that humans do that, all day, every day. The one experience we know unites us all is death. Fear of death and its certainty is what drives all animals into living. Many philosophers way better suited for the subject than me have reflected on what death means to the human creativity - we are creative and intense because we know our time is limited. We imagine and share our imaginations to live different lives in our heads while we can, while there is life to be lived and stuff to be imagined.I highly recommend to listen to the "Orbital Sunrise" episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed for the full review and the astronaut story (and while you are there you should also try "Humanity's Temporal Range"). Thinking big thoughts is good soup for the brains.-Maíra