Oliver Jeffers

It's easy to forget when you're up close to the dirt, the rocks, the foliage, the concrete of our lands, just how limited the room for maneuvering is.

From a set of eyes close to the ground, the horizon feels like it goes forever.

After all, it's not an everyday ritual to consider where we are on the ball of our planet and where that ball is in space.

I didn't want to tell my son the same story of countries that we were told where I was growing up in Northern Ireland, that we were from just a small parish which ignores life outside its immediate concerns.

I wanted to try to feel what it was like to see our planet as one system, as a single object hanging in space.

To do this, I would need to switch from flat drawings for books to 3D sculpture for the street, and I'd need almost 200 feet, a New York City block, to build a large-scale model of the moon, the earth, and us.

This project managed to take place on New York City's Highline Park last winter, on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's mission around the moon.

After its installation, I was able to put on a space helmet with my son and launch, like Apollo 11 did a half-century ago, towards the moon.

We circled around and looked back at us.

What I felt was how lonely it was there in the dark.

And I was just pretending.

The moon is the only object even remotely close to us.

And at the scale of this project, where our planet was 10 feet in diameter, Mars, the next planet, will be the size of a yoga ball and a couple of miles away.

Although borders are not visible from space, on my sculpture, every single border was drawn in, but rather than writing the country names in the carved up land, I wrote over and over again, people live here, people live here, people live here.

And off on the moon it was written, no one lives here.

Often the obvious things aren't all that obvious until you think about them.

Seeing anything from a vast enough distance changes everything, as many astronauts have experienced.

And human eyes have only ever seen our Earth from as far as the Moon, really.

It's quite a ways further before we get to the edges of our own solar system, even out to other stars, to the constellations.

There is actually only one point in the entire cosmos that is present in all constellations of stars, and that presence is here, planet Earth.