What the Astronauts See That Trump Cannot

I’ve never been to space, but as a young child my ego was obliterated by the short film Powers of Ten. I was at summer camp, on a sticky-hot day that was suddenly interrupted by a thunderstorm. We were all herded into a room, the film projector was rolled out, and red-white-and-blue popsicles distributed. This was normally an occasion for Mighty Mouse or Tom and Jerry cartoons—a much more pleasurable situation for me than trying to catch a ball. On the screen that day, though, was a bell-bottomed couple picnicking in a park in Chicago, shot from above, accompanied by a voice-over explaining that every 10 seconds the camera would be moving outward from them by a factor of 10. Within a minute, Chicago, Illinois, the United States, and then our whole planet, shiny as a gumball, was in sight, and then it became smaller and smaller, subsumed within the solar system, which in turn was subsumed within the vastness of space, our sun “only one among the stars,” the voice explained.