Right now, while we can’t safely gather together, it can be difficult to feel part of a community. When most of our interactions are through a computer screen, it’s tough to support and inspire each other, celebrate special occasions, and discover new experiences together. But our stories in this episode will explore the ways in which our storytellers managed to do just that.
Our first story is from Emily Levesque, an award-winning astrophysicist and author of the newly released book The Last Stargazers. As telescopes around the world shut down due to the pandemic, Emily longs for the shared experience of gazing up at the sky with others.
After Emily’s story, our host speaks with clinical psychologist and affective neuroscientist Aaron Heller about how new and diverse experiences (or a lack there of!) affect our mental health.
Stay tuned for THREE more stories about Community in Part 2 on Monday!
Story Transcript
Comets. They're supposed to be harbingers of doom. We hear legends from all across the world telling us that when a comet appears, bad things are going to come with it. And that kind of sounds pretty accurate these days.
Emily Levesque is an award-winning astrophysicist and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of the popular science book The Last Stargazers, which shares the stories and adventures of life as a professional astronomer.
When the brightest comet in more than 20 years showed up this past July, it showed up in the midst of a viral pandemic, massive political upheaval. It was sharing the headlines with murder hornets, so it for sure sounds like comets should be synonymous with doom and gloom and horror.
But this has never been how I see comets. I've never associated comets with fear or danger or bad things, because in my life comets have always brought me joy.
I saw my first naked eye comet back when I was just two. In 1986, Haley's Comet made its last close flyby of the earth. It does this about once every 75 years. And my big brother Ben was studying this comet for a school project. My whole family, so Ben, my parents and toddler‑sized me went trooping out into our Massachusetts backyard to get a look.
And according to my family, I was just over it. I was up past my bedtime. I was fussy, cold. I was scared of the dark until they pointed me up. And in that moment I was just mesmerized by the sky above me. I was gaping up at the stars trying to look through our little backyard telescope to see this comet. I was of course refusing to go indoors until Ben did. He's 10 years older than me and my greatest little kid ambition, honestly, my greatest ambition even now, is to do everything just like Ben.
Emily, as a child, wearing her beloved Hubble Space Telescope T-shirt.
But that night marked a sticking point for me and astronomy. As I'm getting older now, my family's encouraging me. I'm starting to devour books about astronomy. I'm watching science specials on PBS. I'm getting totally on board with being an astronomer one day even though I have no idea what that job actually means. I figure I'm going to be solving the mysteries of the universe, and that sounds great but I'm less clear on what my kind of cosmos-exploring life is going to be like and I'm specifically unsure of whether I'll be lonely. I love space but will there be anyone there loving space with me?
In my school, I'm the totally unapologetic but also kind of frustrated geek. I don't have anyone else like me to share this passion for science with. I'm that kid watching squid documentaries on PBS while everyone else is watching Nickelodeon.
Movies aren't really helping me out either because movie scientists’ lives don't really look that great. Movie scientists are the lone misunderstood geniuses and nobody wants to listen to them until the volcano erupts or the dinosaurs started taking over the island.
Movie scientists are like the lone misunderstood geniuses that nobody wants to listen to right up until the volcano erupts or the dinosaurs start taking over the island.
Women scientists seem to have an even tougher time in movies. They're lonely. They're tortured over having to choose between having a man and having a career, so I'm looking around thinking, “Okay, this is what I have to look forward to as a scientist?”
I think space is awesome, and I know there must be people out there who agree with me, so where are they? Where are the happy astronomers enjoying their jobs and doing them together?
In 1994, I finally get a glimpse of what I'm looking for, and it's thanks to a comet. This is the year that a comet crashes into Jupiter and the news is showing the first observations from the Hubble Space Telescope while I'm sitting at the dinner table.
Now, we have an ancient little black-and-white TV sitting right on our table, but even with that fuzzy picture quality, I'm seeing Jupiter with this big, clear string of dark bruises from the comet impact. I remember gaping at the picture itself with like my fork halfway to my mouth and then seeing them cut to footage from Hubble's headquarters.
There's a whole group of astronomers there. They're huddled around a few computer monitors, they're watching the raw images come in and they are psyched. they're packed shoulder‑to-shoulder just grinning and cheering. They're all being these super happy, geeky scientists and they're doing it together.
So now watching them from my kitchen table on the little black-and-white TV, I want to jump through the TV screen. I want to be part of seeing that Hubble data and I want to be celebrating with all of my fellow space geeks. I want that to be me.
Emily, standing beneath the Gemini-South 8.1-meter telescope in Chile
This enthusiasm winds up becoming a key part of studying science for me. It propels me through college at MIT where I'm really delighted to find my fellow super geeks. I start learning what professional astronomy is like. I start learning the ropes at world-class telescopes. And I start meeting the people who will become my colleagues.
Emily at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
My first time working at a professional telescope is at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, and this is after my sophomore year in college. I sit down at a whole dinner table full of astronomers and when I get introduced as the new person and when they find out that this is my first night at a telescope, all the astronomers immediately start telling me stories and sharing little bits of their lives and their misadventures at telescopes. They're telling me when I should drink coffee and plan snack breaks to help stay awake, what to do if clouds roll in or if something on the telescope breaks. They start telling me all these wild tales like bears wandering into observatory buildings or this epic story of a telescope that got shot.
And all of this is giving me something beyond just professional tips and wacky stories. I'm sitting there going, “I could listen to them all night,” because these are professional astronomers welcoming me, giving me another glimpse of what astronomy is like and then telling me these stories from the observing I'm about to go do for the first time. And this experience I'll be sharing with them.
This kind of bonding is something I just love about astronomy. I love this draw that space has for people. The fact that when something like a solar eclipse happens everyone does the same thing, they look up. They smile. They get curious. They ask questions about how things work. It's this great human bonding experience of being these intelligent creatures sharing the same planet and the same sky and just all wondering about something together.
So this kind of shared experience is the thing that I have really most started to miss during COVID‑19. Up until this year, you could pretty much guarantee that on any given evening around the world, telescopes all over the planet would be starting to open if the sky was clear, getting ready for a night of studying the universe with astronomers standing next to them watching the sun go down.
And then during the pandemic, observatories all over the world have wound up closing due to safety concerns. Telescope time is really precious for an astronomer. And normally, keeping a working telescope closed for even one night is almost unthinkable.
My colleagues and I all find out about these telescope closures in our email, and as the emails roll in, at first they're startling. How can we possibly close telescopes for more than a couple nights? Then they just start to feel inevitable or almost exhausting and almost unreal. We're watching this slow creep of astronomy grinding to a halt across our entire planet.
And the idea that telescopes across the globe are closed for months is hard to fathom. I start to feel almost unmoored hearing this news. Global astronomy and worldwide stargazing has just been a constant for me. We'll always be looking up. We'll always be enjoying the beauty of the sky and we'll always be using these beautiful telescopes to answer our questions. And all that has suddenly stopped. It's unbelievable to me that it even can stop.
It's also hard in all of this to gauge where my friends and family and my colleagues are even emotionally from day to day. There's an avalanche of absurd news coming at us every day. And from moment to moment, it can leave one person encouraged or another person just enraged and another person numb or just unwilling to take in any more news at all. The thread of common experience and emotion and reactions has started to feel like it's slipping away.
Astronomy itself is really fading into the background as I watch all of this. When I look around, people don't seem like they need what I do anymore. I study the physics of how stars work, how the most massive stars in the universe age and then die and make supernovae and black holes. Normally, this is so cool but it starts to feel useless amid everything that's going on.
People don't need the physics of stars. They need doctors and vaccine research and child care. They need help to just keep going in their day-to-day lives. And it makes me start to feel a little useless. Does astronomy even matter anymore? It can't keep people fed. It can't keep them healthy or safe so what does what I do have to offer to people?
I start getting an answer on my walks through my neighborhood. The local shops around here have all been boarded up as they lose customers and people are now covering the plywood with art or poetry or block-long murals. Kids are leaving chalk sketches on sidewalks. They're taping up drawings in their windows and leaving stuffed animals in their windows for people to spot on their walks. One of my neighbors is a retired opera singer and he's giving nightly concerts from his backyard.
Art is usually the first thing to lose funding. It's the first thing we see is frivolous or non‑essential. And walking around seeing how quickly people brought beauty to our neighborhood starts driving home to me how important art is to people and how valuable that beauty is.
When it seems like the world is shutting down, art is the first thing people seem to need and creating something that brings joy or beauty is the first thing they turn to to try and share their feelings and share their experiences.
Astronomy has always felt a bit like the art or the music of science. Its appeal is partly in its beauty. It's in the fact that it's bigger than us and it's in the fact that it's shared.
So in early July, in the midst of pandemic news and political news and the just daily disasters that we were getting hit with, a comet suddenly starts making headlines all over the world. It's becoming hard to miss in the northern sky when you look up.
I actually see it for the first time almost by accident. I spot it from my driveway in Seattle. I run into the house and practically drag my husband out into the street at like 11:00 p.m. to take a look at it. I'm suddenly excited to look at the sky again. I'm jumping around the street in pajamas and I'm getting this sudden thrill of seeing a comet with my own eyes.
To get a better look at it, we wind up driving out to this shadowy park nearby to try and get a really good look. And even during a time when we're all supposed to be avoiding each other, I'm delighted to get to this park and see people, to see that we're not alone. There's little clusters of people all over the park. They're all wearing masks. They're all in socially‑distant groups. But everyone's pointed in the same direction. Everyone's pointing their eyes or their binoculars or their phones at one patch of sky.
Emily’s photo of Comet NEOWISE.
I know all those phone photos are headed for the internet. I'm getting photos in my text messages from my brother in Massachusetts, because he has two teenagers now and they're all looking at the comet in their yard. And it immediately feels like one big group suddenly sharing something again for the first time.
The comet’s captured an entire hemisphere's curiosity. And in this little park, everybody's wandering across the grass and kind of ducking under trees and blocking out street lights. Everyone's finally pointed upward and standing together to try and get a look at this little neighbor in our solar system that's just dropped by for a visit.
It gives me the surprising and beautiful moment of togetherness. Everyone in the park with me is living through a pandemic, but everyone in the park with me is also looking at a comet. They're whispering to each other about it. They're trying to stand in the right patch of shadow to get the best possible look.
The pandemic has hit all of us on a truly global scale and it's really given people this shared experience through tragedy and through all sorts of loss. To me, what makes astronomy so precious right now and so important right now is the thing that comets have given me for more than 30 years and the thing that we all shared in the park that night. Astronomy can offer humanity this same unity and this shame shared experience through joy and through triumph and through beauty.
That night in the park looking at the comet was a shot of pure energy. Seeing the comet itself was incredible but seeing it with the collection of people, even total strangers all standing six feet apart was an invaluable moment of feeling just a little less alone.