I felt odd hope when I learned yesterday that Swiss astronomers believe a planet outside our solar system might be ripe for life.
Growing up, I drew controls on the undersides of every table in the house. My G. I. Joe wore fatigues I’d painted silver, and he orbited the living room in a converted KFC bucket. In preparation for my own capsule life, I spent hours in the hamper and drank enough Tang to float the General Mills stock for years. Any TV launch would find me on the couch, my back on the seat and feet in the air, counting down. During the last mission to the moon, I was one of the seven people who watched the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) leave the moon that last time. I may have been the only one who misted up.
I’m not ready to sign up for a mission to Gliese 581c—which is circling a red star 20 light years away in the constellation Libra—but news of the exoplanet threw me back to the naïve time I believed in final frontiers. No frontier seems final now.
As an adult I can see that the invention of velcro can’t justify multi-billion dollar budgets, and I have no counterargument when someone says we have enough trouble down here to spend billions on.
I used to defend the space program by quoting Tennyson’s “Ulyssess”:
all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life.
It is truly dull to pause—sometimes life seems all pause. I like to dream of going out there. But does keeping up a sense of hope have to be so expensive? I used to say we can’t put a monetary value on exploration and that, regardless, it’s human nature to probe the unknown. Sure, but I’m more the age of Tennyson’s version of Odysseus. Now I see he is as complex as the original—stirring, yet also deluded by his desire to address new problems instead of solve old ones. Is he running toward something or running away?
As the arch of progress keeps moving and moving, we leave more and more behind.
But having that earthlike planet out there, so impossibly far away, is different. Not even Odysseus would think of trying to get there. It’s well beyond the pillars of Hercules, and its inaccessibility generates a sort of hope without attachments, one we don’t have to do anything about.
One my colleagues at work said it “Creeps him out” that aliens are out there. Not me. If Gliese 581c harbors life, I’m glad.
It’s good to think God hasn’t put all his eggs in this basket.
Filed under: American Life, Art, Culture, Education, Gliese 281c, Life, Literature, Memory, Musings, Odysseus, Poetry, Science, Science and Art, Society, Space, Tennyson, Thoughts, Writing
I look at it this way: How could there not be other life forms? Conspiracies and paranoia aside, it seems irrational to think otherwise.
I have not read the writings of people who were witnesses as Europeans began exploring the unknown domains of the globe, but I do remember reading about how Lloyds of London evolved from its early funding of lots of voyages with the simple hope that just one made it back loaded with spice. How we weigh the economic costs against the future benefits of space travel, well that’s for a bigger spreadsheet than I’m capable of creating.
Thoughtful and compelling blog. I’m glad I found you.
Thanks for commenting! Your cosmic spreadsheet argument is compelling. The young astronaut inside me is still looking for good reasons for going out there, reasons for hoping.
Interesting, although the only way to get there is to prove black holes exist. With that revolation, we would be able to bend time and space, letting us appear next to this. . .ah, Earth-like planet.