Staying faithful to Earth

A meditation on our planetary kin in the universe

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  • Published 20241105
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-01-2
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

IT HAD BEEN a long year, and I needed a holiday. I was so tired I didn’t even know where to go. Just somewhere different, faraway, even exotic. I browsed online travel agencies and tourism sites until I found myself exactly where I wanted to be: at NASA’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

‘Scroll to take a trip outside our solar system,’ they urged, so I did. Vintage travel posters in the style of romantic US national parks advertisements from the 1930s made me long to visit an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another sun. The posters are speculations created by designers who worked closely with scientists and futurists.

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Home is where the haunt is

Ghosts, like people, tend to be attached to a particular place. The term ‘to haunt’ in English has three linked meanings. First, for a ghost to manifest itself at a place regularly: a grey lady who haunts the chapel. Second, to be persistently and disturbingly present in someone’s mind: the sight haunted me for years. Third, to frequent a place often and repeatedly: that’s his old haunt. Home and haunting go hand in hand. Ghosts don’t haunt an entire city. They haunt a specific house, a dwelling, usually assumed to be the place where they died.

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