As part of a course I am undertaking, we have been asked to produce an image of hope for the future. This is my attempt

The image was produced through using ChatGPT to keep reshuffling an image of the planet and some of my own photos. The text is adapted from Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital, winner of the Booker Prize 2024. The book follows the thoughts of six astronauts who are in a spacecraft that orbits the Earth. They find the distance from the Earth offers new perspectives. They see it as integrated, without borders, a common home and, at the same time, a shattering of human dominance.

And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego …