By Arnav Ghosh,
CEO, Blippar India
I have been intrigued by space and astronomy since childhood. I grew up wanting to be an astrophysicist, but science gave up on me. Though the world missed out on a great astronomer, I continued to be fundamentally curious about ‘Life beyond Earth’ as the country spends billions of dollars on spacecraft, roving satellites, telescopes, etc., to peek far and beyond, and our search continues for that elusive signal from the ‘aliens’… Meanwhile, we are still ‘alone’ in the big Universe until we are found out.
Each opportunity to look up into space reminds me of iconic brands that have fired the imagination and collective will of humanity… there are legions of us who swear by them, the way we swear about cricket. There is nothing beyond NASA, which has led the human race beyond Earth. In marketing, we might position it as a platform which has launched successful brands above us. There is Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler - all great brands with great followers on Facebook, they Tweet from their own handles, have a website of their own. But they are timeless telescopes and have helped us to peer through aeons in the universe and gave us great information on planets/galaxies and exoplanets, which look like our Earth, but are lifeless.
We have launched some great spacecraft to get up and close with our cousins in the solar system. Messenger for Mercury, Lunar Orbiter for the Moon, Mangalyaan for Mars, Dawn for Ceres, Cassini for Saturn and finally, New Horizons for Pluto. These are legends that will continue to fire our imagination but the real heroes who have rolled up their sleeves and done the work are ‘Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity’ which have led humans where nobody (man or machine) have ever gone before. Al of them have embodied the human resilience and quest to explore life beyond Earth, but nothing beats the Apollo missions to the Moon, when humans set foot on it for the first time. They have all been great brands for generations to look up to, get inspired to build better and bigger brands.
But all of them have lessons for us (tiny humans) in this large unending universe. Life is precious, it has taken more than a miracle of science for Earth to evolve, for us to be born, yet we have taken it for granted, we have destroyed life with impunity!
All we need to do is look up and see the stars, there may be people like us out there, who knows? We are small and fragile and can’t survive more than 80 km above and 5 km below the surface of the Earth.
I just got a tweet from Voyager 2, which says it is “about 18 light hours away from us” and beyond our solar system and believe me, it has seen it all. We are ‘Brand Earth’; for the world beyond us, we are just a ‘Pale Blue Dot’. Let us give others the same respect that we give our favourite brands. After all, we are all brand ambassadors of Earth. The best way to celebrate this brand is to enjoy the ‘Gift of Life’.
Feedback: arnav.ghosh@blippar.com
