French astronaut Thomas Pesquet could see the deterioration of Earth from space.

In 2021, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet spent six months living in the zero gravity environment of the International Space Station. He would regularly spend time gazing down (or occasionally up) at the Earth, taking in the view, but these viewings proved to be both comforting and concerning. Pesquet had previously been in orbit back in 2016, and in comparing his memory of the view of Earth to how it looked in 2021, the signs of environmental deterioration have become even more stark.

“When you’re on the Earth, you feel that everything is so vast, everything is endless,” Pesquet said in an interview with CNN. “You have a hard time understanding how limited we are. Then, when you take a step back and you see the Earth in its entirety, you suddenly understand that we live in an oasis in the cosmos. All around us is nothing, no life, blackness, emptiness, absolutely nothing — apart from this blue ball with everything we need to sustain human life, and life in general, which is absolutely fragile.”

“You can see a lot of the consequences of human activities from space. Some of them are from climate change, and some of it is just plain old pollution, e.g. river pollution, air pollution. The most visual visible effect is glaciers retreating year after year and mission after mission. But what you can see as well is extreme weather phenomena. They’re getting stronger and stronger year after year. My first mission was 2016-2017, and my second mission was five years later in 2021. I could see a net increase in the frequency and the strength of extreme weather phenomena like hurricanes, like wildfires.”

While the truth is disconcerting, Pesquet believes humanity still has the capacity to right its course. “If we set ourselves on the right path, there’s nothing we cannot do. We built this unbelievable facility in space for good reasons. We’re using it every day, in peaceful cooperation between countries that were not always friends. So if we can transfer that model to the way we deal with the environment on Earth, I think we’ll get there.”