Stewart Brand, writing about space (groups of people or other living things), watched/followed that "if you live in a satellite, the Earth is something that goes on in your sky."
For Felix Baumgartner, the person (who likes to do dangerous stunts) skydiver who flirted with the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming (inability to be harmed in any way) to fear (and who broke the sound (something that blocks or stops something) with his body last weekend) the Earth is something else. The satellite he jumped from, a weather balloon 24 miles above the Earth, wasn't his home. But briefly, and especially for the millions who watched the delicate and pretty balloon float upwards to the strange blue-black (incline/smooth change of something between two points) of space's edge, it turned our home, the Earth, upside-down.
New opinions/points of view on familiar sights have strange, very intelligent (but a little too much to take) effects. The Space Shuttle Effort/try caused extreme anger in Los Angeles last week as it paraded to its grave at the California Science Center; the (compared to other things) dull trip through what Angelenos call "surface" streets started (trouble) more hype per mile than its previous twenty-five travels to space and back, probably because people were able, for the first time, to feel the scale of the thing, to see it in weird contrast against the (wide view of a nature scene/wide area of beautiful land) of everyday life. Photos of its slow march through L.A. streets show the shuttle, a little worse for the wear, in outline against a Sizzler, a Midas tire shop, and the brown-to-runway (incline/smooth change of something between two points) of Californian (things related to cities). Maybe NASA should have paraded the Shuttle around before its fun trips in low-Earth orbit. Who doesn't want to see something fly (beautifully)/increase into the sky that once rolled through a Bed, Bath & Beyond parking lot?
On a larger scale, Earthrise, the famous image taken from Apollo 8 as it shot towards the moon, started (trouble) a worldwide reevaluation of the planet. It was a new way of seeing things on something we all took as something that will never go away, and many credit the picture for catalyzing (the health of the Earth/the surrounding conditions)alism movement in the 1970s. But as far as new opinions/points of view go, seeing the curve of the Earth from space with your own eyes is the final/very best (change in the way people think). Suddenly, the world, which for your whole life you've known to be solid ground-the very definition of flatness, made from dirt to be kicked up and buried under-is a round, dimensional planet. Like an apple, it whirls silently in space, as Dusty Springfield sang.
My parents, as children, gathered around black and white television sets to watch a man step onto the surface of the moon. The video was blurry, delayed. Last week, my friends and I gathered in a different way. Alone, and together, we closely examined the tiny face of the Internet, watching in (happening or viewable immediately, without any delay) (and high-def) as a man stepped out of a capsule not different to the Apollo lander. It was just as tin-smart, as extremely afraid of being inside a small space. In, fact Baumgartner himself suffered from such extreme strong fear of being inside a small space in his spacesuit that he almost couldn't bear to wear it. "As soon as the visor closes, there's this nightmarish silence and loneliness," he said in an interview, "the suit shows/indicates (state of being locked in a prison)."
"The sky starts at our feet. Think how brave you are to walk around." -Anne Herbert
Unlike the moonwalkers, however, Baumgartner didn't take a step onto solid ground. He jumped into the nothingness, and thanks to the placement of the camera, we jumped with him. We didn't just watch the record-breaking skydive from the ground, or from his weather-balloon diving board. The 21st century is a period of time in history of P.O.V. feats, of go-pros taped to helmets and steering wheels, streaming the direct visual stimulus of (too terrible to think about) feats directly to our eyes. It's a kind of exploratory telepresence; in our (happening together) visual culture, in which appearance is often combined with experience, we feel we participated. After all, the moment Felix Baumgartner opened the door of his capsule and stood on the cliff edge, we all saw the curve of the planet at his feet. Would the moon landing have been different if the camera had been mounted to Neil Armstrong's helmet? If his steps were, in a sense, ours?
Why is Felix Baumgartner's jump so (very interesting)? It's an act of bravery of the most extreme order-and for that we all toast our Red Bulls-but there's something more to it. It's a (hand/arm movement)/action that actually inverts our picture of the home planet, shifting the Earth from something you walk on to something you leap towards. There's no equal.
Well, maybe one: in 2007, I interviewed French parachutist Michel Fournier. Before Red Bull and Felix Baumgartner started plotting their total rule of the form, Fournier hoped to break Joseph Kittinger's 1960 record for human free fall with an almost the same weather balloon-helped technical leap called Le Grand Saut. "When you're in the air," Fournier, who had 8,600 parachute jumps under his belt, told me, "you are struck with such a high dose of energy-giving body chemical that you immediately take yourself for the most beautiful of birds, the bald eagle. Only parachutists truly know why the birds sing."
No amount of Twitter feeds and livestreams can broadcast the unthinkable thrill and horror of making the jump ourselves-truly, only parachutists themselves can know how it feels. But even from the digital backseat, it goes to show that we haven't yet run out of ways the Earth can amaze us. The Earth, maybe, is the new moon: an edge of something/unexplored area that belongs to everyone.
Felix Baumgartner didn't just jump. He fell to Earth. He left alone himself to the single most universal faith we have in our planet: that no matter how far we stray, it will always take us back.