Back to Earth: part I

In the year before the first Earth Day, a team of American technicians had landed for the first time on the Moon.  And from that other world, Man saw Earth from afar: a starkly glowing jewel set against the spangled black velvet of outer space.  And this is what these lunar astronauts had come so far to discover: Earth.

In five centuries of fevered explorations, geographic and scientific, Western Man had sought to rise from the mucky earth to the splendid heavens.  And now he had left the Earth and touched down on the first way station to the planets and stars beyond.  But on the Moon there was nothing, but a sun-blasted, asteroid-pitted rock incapable of sustaining life in its hyper-frigid vacuum.

But looking back, they saw Earth, Only Home of Life.  It was lovely, precious, a living presence, God, all that mattered, all that is.  And so, 'back to Earth' they then came, having discovered that this latest crusade in Western Man's urge to explore everything, to uncover every secret of the Universe, to conquer Nature, to become God, and having made this impressive technological leap beyond our bounded world, which though a triumph, was also a futility-- except for those famous backward views which satellites and men had been taking from ever further vantages, culminating perhaps in the 'Earth-rise' photo. Around the planet, humans had been captivated by these amazing new photo-views, and some said-- and some knew-- that this would cause an inexorable change in our species' consciousness.