Of Orbital Encounters
“For this we go out dark nights, searching / For the dimmest stars, / For signs of unseen things”
“For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things”
Rebecca Elson
I’ve recently returned from a long weekend spent in a place so beautiful it felt imagined, tucked away in the English countryside. It’s my second time attending the Realisation Festival, and if the first time, two years ago, I could see, sense, and connect with the place more vividly than with the people, this time I experienced the opposite encounter. The place, as striking and abundant as it was, became just an insignificant character beside some of the most beautiful people I had the pleasure of conversing with.
In a group of 150 people, the chances of truly connecting with everyone are impossibly slim, especially over just three days. So are the chances of having a second in-depth conversation with someone we really clicked with. Those first, impactful conversations are gemstones, liquid gold, already deeply ingrained in us, and we carry them for a long time if we preserve them well.
I spent the weekend in a constant flow of conversations: some brief and comforting, some long and heart-opening, some extremely raw, and a few deeply confusing and unsettling. Regardless of the outcomes, most of these conversations reinforced Rebecca Elson’s beautiful reminder of our “responsibility to awe”. 1
One idea that keeps returning to me, in different visual shapes and forms, is that of relationships mapped through the energy and eccentricity of orbits. There’s something reassuring about visualising our interactions as orbital shapes, defined by brief moments of intense closeness, stretches of distance, and then the inevitable return. Reassuring in the sense that we escape the mindset of seeing our relationships through a timeline: there has always been a flow, a pull, a return, and, if we are lucky, moments of Lagrange points.2
In orbital mechanics, or celestial mechanics3, we find the science that describes how objects move under the influence of gravity: planets circling the Sun, moons orbiting planets, or satellites traveling around Earth. Two main parameters define the shape and fate of any orbit: energy, which combines kinetic energy (motion) and potential energy (gravity), and eccentricity, a measure of how stretched the orbit is.
An eccentricity of 0 means a perfect circle. When it falls between 0 and 1, the path is an ellipse. If it reaches exactly 1, the object follows a parabolic trajectory, with just enough energy to escape. And when it exceeds 1, the orbit becomes hyperbolic, carrying the object away with more than enough energy never to return.
Contemporary thinkers have explicitly drawn analogies between gravitational orbits and interpersonal relationships. For example, astrophysicist Avi Loeb notes in the article The Three Body Problem: From Celestial Mechanics to Human Interactions that strongly bound pairs become stronger through interactions, while weakly bound pairs tend to break apart.
As for the shape of orbits, circular orbits mapped onto relationships are those enduring, long, steady friendships that exist in our lifetime from almost the very beginning to almost the very end. Even in celestial mechanics, these are very rare in nature, as all real celestial bodies have at least some eccentricity, even if it is tiny. Some examples are Neptune’s moon Naiad, Venus around the Sun, and some small moons and ring particles.
Most of our relationships are of an elliptical nature: distant at certain points and very close again after a while, always in motion as we go through life. They remind me of how planets orbit the Sun, like Earth, with its almost circular orbit, or Mars, with a more pronounced ellipse, and Pluto, whose path is even more stretched out.
This ebb and flow, closeness and distance, is defined by what Rebecca Elson beautifully phrased as “things unseen” in her poem Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter). I’ve always been fascinated by how, after a long unmeasured distance, in some friendships, we always find our way back.
For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:
To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.
Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.
Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.
Rebecca Elson, Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)
As for the hyperbolic orbits, defined in celestial mechanics as paths with an eccentricity greater than 1 and enough kinetic energy to escape a body’s gravity forever, these are like the interstellar object ʻOumuamua4: sweeping through our lives only once, unreturning, and all the more striking for their fleeting passage. These relationships have a lasting effect, even if their exit and non-return are quicker than the blink of an eye. In contrast, parabolic orbits have a less dramatic exit, but they too are marked by their never returning.
All this web of relationships, the movement of ideas and impressions, is something that we carry with us, willingly or unwillingly, with a promise of return or not. All I know is that those of us who are meant to continue the conversation will find our way back eventually, at least once in our lifetime.
There’s something reassuring about the fact that our relationships and lifetime trajectories are shaped by energy and eccentricities. Reassuring, because most relationships in our lives are elliptical: there will always be closeness after distance, and distance after closeness. And because there is a comforting urgency and acceptance in those rare, fleeting hyperbolic encounters. They never really fully leave us. They are carried as a resonance throughout our lives.
Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome your comments and stories.
Patricia
We astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.
We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.
But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,
And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,
Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.
Rebecca Elson, We Astronomers
“They are places around a planet’s orbit where the gravitational pull of the planet and the Sun and the motion of the orbit combine to create an equilibrium — requiring very little energy to stay in orbit.” What are Lagrange Points? We Asked a NASA Scientist
I found this NASA presentation on Introduction to Orbits very useful.
ʻOumuamua was the first known interstellar object observed passing through our solar system, discovered in 2017. Its name means “scout” or “messenger” in Hawaiian. It traveled on a hyperbolic trajectory (eccentricity ~1.2), confirming it came from beyond the Sun’s gravitational influence and would never return. (Wikipedia: 1I/ʻOumuamua)