Shortly before the four-person crew of Artemis II crossed behind the moon Monday and briefly lost contact with NASA’s Mission Control, pilot Victor Glover, quoting the Bible, urged humanity to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. “To all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the moon,” Glover said. Forty minutes later, with its signal restored, the crew made history as it reached nearly 252,760 miles from this planet, the farthest human beings have ever traveled.

Most days, the vastness of space has no appeal to me over the comforts of the Earth. But the following morning, as I stared at my phone in disbelief, I grew jealous of the astronauts who were away from it all on that mission to orbit the moon.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Tuesday morning, referring to Iran and its people. The previous evening, Trump had warned that “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” His threats hung over everything like a miasma Tuesday, embedding in our brains and setting our nervous systems on edge.

What a juxtaposition: Trump’s threat to obliterate an ancient land with an astronaut’s reminder of an ancient commandment to love our neighbors — and with the awe-inspiring images of Earth being beamed back from the Orion spacecraft. One photo, which captured our world in all its splendor, was taken by mission leader Reid Wiseman and titled “Hello Earth.” The astronauts also captured the majesty of a solar eclipse with the Earth passing between them and the sun.

Contrast the warmongering happening far below with the moment when Canadian crew member Jeremy Hansen told Mission Control that the crew intended to bestow the name “Carroll” upon an unnamed moon crater, in honor of Wiseman’s late wife. Microgravity made it easier for the rest of the crew to surround Wiseman in an embrace, a poignant moment of human connection tens of thousands of miles from the nearest living thing.

In Trump’s genocidal vow, our barbarity as a species was made bare. How stark the contrast to Glover’s words from space: “In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist in together.”

From the crew’s vantage point on the other side of the moon, Wiseman snapped a photo of the Earth, the shadow of the moon rendering it a crescent. Titled “Earthset,” the image now forms a matched pair with “Earthrise,” one taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968.

 “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth,” Bill Anders, the astronaut who took “Earthrise,” wrote in 2018.

Someday, some future crew of astronauts may find themselves as far out as the Voyager I satellite when it sailed out of the solar system in 1990. As it departed the outer edge of the invisible boundary tying us together with our neighbors around the sun, more than 13 years after first leaving, Voyager’s camera was turned homeward one last time to share its parting view.

In “the Pale Blue Dot,” the Earth is a tiny, blue-tinged pixel in a sea of black, barely discernable from the stars thousands of light-years away. Astronomer Carl Sagan looked at that tiny pinpoint and asked us to think of “the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”

When Trump abruptly changed course Tuesday evening, agreeing to a ceasefire just hours before his prime-time deadline for Iran’s surrender, a weight lifted. The war may not be over, but the promised carnage had been averted — for now. It left me with a modicum of hope for the world the crew would find upon their return.

Artemis II’s capsule is due to set down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday afternoon near San Diego. We can hope it won’t be the last lunar mission that NASA undertakes, especially with the boost in interest in the space program Artemis has driven. But in any case, as mission specialist Christina Koch pledged, “Ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

As previous astronauts have done before them, the crew of Artemis II reminded us that we must appreciate this fragile oasis we’ve been granted. In bravely facing the cold vacuum of nothingness, the four humans on that spacecraft carried the warmth humanity holds with them. And by briefly becoming more alone than anyone has ever been, they served as a reminder that we can face the darkness together.

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