Hope

Today our world faces many challenges. Over the past year, rising tensions between countries has meant that nuclear war has begun to creep back into the minds of our collective societies as we again perilously tip-toe on the edge of the metaphoric tightrope. Climate change has also established itself in our minds with a passion, with plastic being found in vast clouds in our oceans and freak weather occurrences becoming ever more and more frequent. These and other contributing factors lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently move the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. The closest we've ever symbolically been to our own destruction since the Doomsday Clock was invented in the height of the Cold War.

But there is hope.

Today two American Astronauts and one Russian Cosmonaut are being launched to the International Space Station. Ricky Arnold, Drew Feustel and Oleg Artemyev will launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at 17:44 UTC onboard a Russian Soyuz MS-08 rocket, becoming a part of the Expedition 55/56 crew on the International Space Station currently orbiting Earth. They'll arrive at the station two days later on Friday after they've matched their orbit to meet it.

(R-L) Feustel, Artemyev and Arnold. Credit NASA/Victor Zelentsov

It's safe to say that America and Russia don't particularly see eye-to-eye on things at the moment but here they are working together to advance the well-being of all humans here on Earth.

Earlier this year the company Rocket Lab launched a satellite called the Humanity Star into orbit. Basically a big mirror, the concept was to make humans look up and realise how small they are, how they need to work together to preserve their planet, their cultures and indeed their lives and to provide hope for the future. The satellite is degrading from its orbit quicker than expected but I don't think it needed to be launched anyway because all humans need to do to consider those points, to feel those emotions, is to look up when the International Space Station is flying overhead. There people from countries who don't agree on everything work together for the benefit of humanity, they trust each other with their lives, they reach out into the great unknown of space together as colleagues and as friends.

If humans and this wonderful blue and green planet are going to survive we need to take more inspiration from our orbiting beacon of hope.

Look up.