Motus Exterioris
Experiment 1: Slowing down earth
It has been couple of years, I remember, that Motus Exterioris was send. The whole construction of the launch station could contain a couple of houses. The spaceship shined brightly; reflecting the dim light of the sun on its white polished surface. As soon as the rocket was launched into the atmosphere, it would not return for a long time, if it would return at all. The people on earth who had seen the spaceship launch into the boundaries of air had hugged each other in excitement of the success. The people inside the spaceship though had looked tentatively out of the windows to see fire and smoke clouding the vanishing ground.
The astronauts had looked at each other with mixed feelings crossing their faces, but neither of them talked about their own. Their ozone layer has been surpassed and from that moment on they cannot call the earth their own again. From the mouth of space they dive deeper into the insides of the universe.
Now at this moment the spaceship is still there moving outward. Regret is what they would feel if they would allow themselves to feel anything. They keep their hands and eyes busy with the tasks at hand. They face their destination; the outer realms, but they too keep another eye on the diminishing world. As the suns around the earth cast light on the earth it is reflected into the eyes of the astronauts sometimes looking down with an enhanced telescope.
It is an endless night or day again for the astronauts. Physical traveling without time is impossible and it is taking forever without ending if you do not have a fixed destination. The light that makes them see the earth takes time to travel with the speed of light. As they move farther into the bowel of the beast of the universe they see earth slowing down making forever even longer. An astronaut wonders if you could and would move with the speed of light you could see earth as standing still. They have become alienated as time has stopped for him and his colleagues as time is measured with the turning of earth around its axis and around the sun. The nothingness of the universe is a silent unmoving monsters and because they are scared they try to cling on the thought of earth that is beyond their grasp and their presence is somewhere in-between where they are and the place they have left.