Space Race
4 . IN THE ORBIT OF LAIKA
Orbits , it turns out , are uncanny . There is something strange and unsettling about them from the get-go . The moon , for instance , isn ’ t so much orbiting the Earth as it is slowly spiraling away from the Earth . Or rather , the moon and the Earth are slowly drifting apart from each other . This is due to the Earth ’ s oceans , sluggishly catching up to the rest of the planet ’ s rotating mass , pushing the moon about one-and-a-half inches father away each year . Few orbits are stable ; none are truly stable forever . Most planetary orbits are ones in which , given enough time , everything would smash into everything else because most orbits are actually extended versions of things falling into each other .
As humans , each of us is falling into the ground , into the grave , that same way . Little by little , day-by-day , closer to that smashing ending that awaits each of our individual orbits . Life is so busy that we tend to worry about little unimportant things along the way , forgetting that we are spiraling down the entire time�spiraling , even , as you read these words . But then , if we were only to think about the ending we would never do anything in life . The moon spins and dances . We spin and dance . Perhaps that ’ s enough for now .
It is too easy to think of ourselves as the still point around which the entire cosmos rotates . This was literally a failing of ours until the Copernican revolution , but it much more importantly continues to be a metaphorical failing for most of us today . We think we are the center of meaning , the center of it all : watch how the universe rotates around us ! Even in our daily life , we forget that the moon is not really orbiting the Earth , but that the two bodies are orbiting a point between them that marks the barycenter . The barycenter is the center of mass of the two objects taken as a system . When one object , such as the Earth , is much larger than the other object ,
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