Before dawn, I went to see a comet

This morning, before dawn, I went outside to look for a comet.

I did not see it.

C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS) is approaching its closest point to the Sun today. For a few mornings, it has been drifting near the Great Square of Pegasus, low in the eastern sky before sunrise.

I had neither the place for it nor the glasses for it. Where I live, there is no high ground with a clear view. My glasses were made for reading, not for distance. Nothing I had with me was suited to the thing I was trying to see.

Still, I stood there, watching the sky turn pale, imagining.

What astronomy does to my sense of scale

I am not an astronomer. I have never studied it seriously.

But I have always loved astronomy not for what it explains, but for how it unsettles my sense of scale.

I work in sustainability consulting. Most of my days are spent reading corporate disclosures and measurement frameworks — turning emissions, biodiversity, human capital, governance into numbers that can be compared across companies and fiscal years. So perhaps it is not surprising that the things which refuse to be measured are the ones that tend to stay with me.

When I was a child, someone told me that the light from the stars I was looking at had left them long ago. I could not really understand what that meant. But I liked that I could not understand it. Something in me preferred the not-understanding to the explanation.

Not the knowledge itself, but the way my sense of things came loose.

This is not scarcity

What struck me about this comet was not that it is rare.

Rare is a commercial word. It suggests something scarce and collectable — a rare book, a rare coin, a rare bird ticked off a list.

This is a different kind of rarity.

C/2025 R3 is a long-period comet from the Oort cloud, on a hyperbolic trajectory. After it swings past the Sun, it will be ejected from the solar system. It is also unclear whether it will survive the perihelion passage at all.

It is not coming back — not as poetic metaphor, but as orbital fact.

This is the register that geologists and philosophers sometimes call Deep Time: a timescale on which human lives, civilizations, even the age of the Earth itself begin to feel provincial. We are used to reaching for phrases like once in a lifetime, once in a century, once in the history of the Earth. Those phrases already try to gesture at something large.

This comet makes them look small.

It does not move us beyond human time into something grander. It does something more unsettling. It makes the very act of slicing time into human, civilizational, or planetary units feel like a local habit.

I find that I like the feeling.

What we measure, and what we try to measure

In the sustainability world I work in, the conversation right now is about natural capital.

The logic is straightforward. Companies have spent years reporting what they did for nature — commitments made, policies adopted, hectares pledged. But if nature itself is not getting better, those disclosures mean very little.

So the field is shifting toward metrics that capture the state of nature itself. Not what companies did, but what the ecosystem is actually doing. The TNFD framework, state-of-nature metrics, biodiversity indicators tied to ecological baselines.

I agree with this shift. It is necessary.

What cannot be seen tends to be ignored. What cannot be measured tends not to be managed. Drucker said something close to this, and he was right.

So I am not, in any way, against measurement.

But.

Measurement creates optimization

Here is what sits uncomfortably with me.

Once something becomes measurable, people and organizations begin to optimize toward it. That is natural. In many ways, it is healthy. Measurement is what turns vague intentions into accountable action.

But optimization does not stop at the metric. It reshapes the world around the metric.

Measurement creates optimization. Optimization compresses reality.

What was once wide and complex and resistant to any single indicator begins to be sorted into the shape of the indicator. Nature, which is not a spreadsheet, starts to be managed as if it were one. The parts that fit the metric receive attention. The parts that do not, quietly fade from the conversation.

I am not sure reduction is the right word. But compression certainly is.

This is not a reason to stop measuring. It is a reason to remember what the measurement is doing, even when it is working.

Back to the dark, and the sky turning pale

This is why I want, from time to time, to stand in front of something that does not fit.

Not fiscal years. Not five-year plans. Not even the grand planetary metaphors we like to reach for when we want to sound serious about sustainability.

Something that simply does not fit.

This morning, I stood outside in the dark, looking for a comet I could not see. My glasses were wrong. My horizon was wrong. Nothing about me was configured for the thing I was trying to observe.

But I could still imagine it. I could still think about the light moving, right now, through the inner solar system, getting brighter for a few more days before it turns away from the Sun for good.

In a few days, that light will leave the solar system. It will not come back.

The sky turned pale. Somewhere above the rooftops, a comet I could not see was approaching the Sun.

I stood there a little longer.