You are on the Moon! Wow! This is absolutely incredible! Your two very feet are stepping firmly on the grayish, dusty surface of the Moon. Your memory does not offer you any clue as to by what means you made it up here – nor does your reason. But you don’t bother with wondering about it. You don’t give a monkey’s to know how you covered the 385.000 km of empty space separating the earth – where you remember being last – and the Moon. The only thing you care about is that you are now here. Finally, your dream has come true! You are standing on the Moon!
You are taking profound pleasure in witnessing this new world around you. It feels like every photon contributing to transferring this novel imagery to your brain is bedaubed with a layer of endorphins. You’ve traveled a good deal around the earth, but this new scenery enfolding you now does not remind you of anything you’ve seen before; all this seems a bit… unearthly.
Though the horizon seems a little less extended than the terrestrial one, it still is vastly broad. There is hardly any feature – craters, mountains, hills – within your field of view. The horizon describes a perfect disc around you. You are standing amidst an immense sea of molten lava. Rather than having poured out of the Moon’s bowels, all this lava seems it must have rained down from the sky in some distant past.
The sky’s pitch-black. A few dim stars are scattered here and there, but the presence of one bulky object dominates the lunar firmament. There is a gigantic Half Earth adorning the southeastern portion of the sky. You can see Europe’s and Africa’s western portions. Utterly enchanted, you are standing still, attending as the old world slowly moves into the darkness and the American coast appears within the illuminated part; while cloud formations are traveling across the ocean in whirling patterns.
And then, at a completely unsuspected moment, the Earth’s figure blurs, and all the moonscape around you is deluged by bright light. The sun just rose over the east lunar horizon. It all happened very suddenly. There was no hint of it coming. The sky remains as black as ever and the sun looks like a radiant hole on it. What a beautiful morning! A new day just started on the Moon!
It’s the perfect time for a first stroll around this new world. You make the first leap and start bouncing your way across the lava field. But something’s not quite right; not as you’d want it to be. Sure, the gravity is much weaker than what you’ve known it to be, but still present and imperative. You could also jump as high on a trampoline. Did you really need to come all this way to the moon just for that? But wait a minute… You never came to the moon! You just found yourself here, the first thing you knew! And how are you supposed to know how to get back?
