Giant Steps Are What You Take

Newt Gingrich knows how to play to an audience, and in the upcoming Florida primary, there is no better group to pander to than the thousand along the Space Coast, home of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. The roll out and roar of the Space Shuttles is now a dim and fading memory, and while commercial payloads and scientific exploration may still find harbor there, the heyday of America's spaceport seems to be behind it. Gingrich stood before them and proclaimed that he would put America back on the Moon, building a lunar colony in only eight years from the time he took office.

Bombast and braggadocio are Gingrich trademarks, and anyone who has any inkling as to what was required to even put Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin's boot-prints on the lunar surface in 1969, would have worked very hard to suppress a guffaw. Even with bits and pieces of previous promises percolating still trough NASA, to go from essentially a cold start to a full-blown lunar colony in eight years is a cup of tea even Jack Kennedy would have not dared to sip from.

Those of us who listened to the brash pronouncement could not also help note the timing, coming as it did during the week of NASA's Remembrance Day, when the space community and the nation pays respects to the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. Their deaths are reminders that even the most noble goals come at a cost, a payment we must be willing to make if we are to continue the tradition of exploration that marks humanity's history.

Many pooh-poohed Gingrich's remarks out of hand, and how can you not? It was just another election-year promise, after all. Strip it, though, of an unreal timeline, unreasonable expectations, and self-indulgence, and the goal is not as absurd as one politician made it. After all, even before the creation of the Saturn V rocket, Werner von Braun had space stations and lunar colonies on his mind. It was his hope that the Moon program at NASA would not become a crazy, flash-in-the-pan leap to beat the Soviet Union, but would instead be a continuous and growing series of step to lead humanity into space. His dream was not realized, with political expediency pushing aside long-range thinking, and he would die a frustrated man.

Plenty of people still miss the point of the exercise. They will go on-and-on about the things undone on Earth, as if we cannot work on more than one thing simultaneously, and as if the technology built to accomplish such a goal would have no application here on the ground. They will go on about the waste of money, even though NASA's budget is a tiny fraction of the money spent on wars, subsidies, legal wrangling, and political campaigns. They will complain about how few will be able to make the journey, as if the Mayflower were comparable to the Queen Elizabeth II. There are a thousand reasons not to invest in a lunar colony, and only one reason why we should, but it is a big reason: survival.

Our home seems a solid, reliable, and vast place, but we are beginning to see that it is not so. Resources that seemed unlimited are approaching their limits. The systems that protect us are breaking down. The weather is slowly changing in ways we could not fathom a hundred years ago. We are only now realizing our total interdependence on even the most insignificant life forms and their by-products. As we look outward, we see a universe filled with not only wonder, but danger. Our planet is not invulnerable, it is not enchanted, it is not incapable of being done harm by any of a myriad of natural forces extant in the great spaces around us. Our species is not immortal, and right now, all our eggs are in the one basket.

Imagine if we could tap the Moon for its mineral resources, its energy, it's pristine conditions, and turn it into the workhorse that supplies us. Imagine no longer filling our skies with pollutants, our water with poisons, and restoring the natural environment to a level where it could support the teeming billions. Certainly this would not happen in fifty or a hundred years, but it will not start at all if we do not take the steps, even the first step. Every giant leap of humanity begins with but a single step, and that first step having already been taken, how long until the next? A virgin world awaits, if we have the willingness and the foresight to go.

Social Networks

The conviviality and comradeship expressed in a human get-together cannot be simulated nor synthesized. It is a product of the multivariate social interaction of people with so many different points of view and experiences, that whatever commonality brings them together, the end result is a Brownian soup of interplay. Whatever we may be, as humans, we are a social species, starting with the act of parenthood, all the way up to the formation of nation-states. It is our interaction and interlocking that built the greatest works of humanity... and, occasionally, wrought our worst upheavals.

The world we live in now, a world our ancestors would no doubt find exhilarating and confounding, is a global village, where the barriers between continents are breached as easily as between localities. Our planet is girded by highways of earth, air, and sea; the rarest and most precious things, the greatest sites, the most palatable foods, are now close at hand, rather than longed for at titanic distances. Where we cannot go physically, we are not barred, flinging ourselves across wires and into the depths of space, to reach across the breadth of our home, touching others with words, and pictures, and sounds.

Even so, great gulfs remain, made not of stone or sand or tectonic stress, but human gall and greed.

Loss Of Perspective

We, as a species, should be very aware now of our place in the scheme of things. In all the vastness that is the cosmos, on a solitary ball of rock, circling an average star, in a typical galaxy, in a nondescript galactic cluster, 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of creation, we sit as the sole example of intelligent life. We are as a grain of sand to the size of our solar system, an infinitesimal speck in a vast, empty ocean, containing only the occasional clump of matter to relieve the monotony of vacuum.

This leads us to two diametrically points of view: for one, that we are insignificant compared to our universe, and for another, that we are the most singularly precious thing in it. Until the possible day that we make contact with another civilization anywhere out in the depths of space, we must count ourselves to be the sole representatives of sentient life. It is at once an awe-inspiring and bleak picture, humbling and glorious at the same time.

That it took millennia for us to reach the point of knowing this is not unexpected; what is unexpected, is how underwhelming this knowledge has been to human civilization. Perhaps, owing to our history, and to our penchant for building belief systems around concepts of the supernatural, we do not marvel at what and where we are, as we should. Putting our faith in the intervention of all-powerful and unseen beings, we have disconnected ourselves from the place we live, which is a far grander and more interesting place than any imagined by our ancestors. Our exploration of the universe has revealed wonders that defy conception at first glance, and have forced the brightest minds in physics and astronomy to write and re-write the rules of existence.

That the beauty and majesty does not affect us is sad; sadder still, is the idea that our singular existence as representatives of sentient life in the universe has not driven us to take a fresh look at our relations with ourselves. Still clutching to the dogmas of the past, we seem to be resigned to muddling through our lives in the vain hope that something better lies in wait for us beyond the horizon, rather than reveling in the world that we live in now. Too many of us see Earth as a disposable commodity: pull material out of the ground, shape it to our needs, then throw it away or bury it. We act as if our planet is an infinite store of things, rather than the finite ball of solids, liquids, and gases that it is.

Perhaps our lives are too short to comprehend the pace of change on the planet, though as that change accelerates, the evidence of the change becomes clearer every day. Roads choked with cars, smokestacks belching filth into the sky, garbage lying strewn about, water with a sheen of oil, a huge mass of plastic floating in the open ocean... and because the pace of our lives gets ever quicker, we do not see these things for what they are, only being interested in the next thing we are supposed to have, even as we pine for the "simplicity" of our youth.

The sooner we realize that our position in the universe is precarious, and that our resources are finite, the sooner we might finally throw off the shackles of consumerism and self-importance, and work together to restore our little world to its normal working order. The borders and barriers we have put between ourselves, and the ignorance we have allowed to blind us, keep us from these realizations, which are as factual as the precession of the Sun across the sky. Humanity, in its various parts, is very good at ignoring the truth lying at its feet, turning a blind eye to the obvious, and creating stories to salve a guilty conscience. This is all well and good, if our only intent is to gobble up what little we have until it is gone, then ever so slowly die away, fighting over the last scraps of our sordid past.

The energy we foolishly direct into so many negative aspects of our lives -- prejudice, fear, self-aggrandizement, greed, politics, gamesmanship -- is wasted and counterproductive. Were it to be turned to healing the wounds between people, and rebuilding the health of our world, we could truly say we have attained civilization. The longer we repeat the tropes of the past, the longer we build empires, only to watch them fall, the less time we have to do what is truly important. Each minute is precious to us, and too often is wasted in futile pursuits.

The survival and expansion of the human race is a greater goal than any we would call important, as it encompasses all the problems so long neglected in our race forward through time: poverty, disease, famine, war, pestilence, etc. It begs that we solve these issues, while at the same time moving away from our cradle, to take our place in other parts of our solar system and our galaxy. The human race is too precious a gift of the universe, to be allowed to die through its own hubris and disinterest. If there is purpose and value in our existence, then it is not simply through that existence, but through the potential we have to become so much more than we are. We will not reach that potential, however, until we come together as a species, and accept that despite all our differences, we are all truly one.

The Human Condition

Every living thing that has ever existed, and all the living things we know to exist, reside on the same irregular ball of rock, water, and gas, circling an average yellow star, at the edge of the arm of a typical spiral galaxy, which is part of an ordinary galactic neighborhood, streaming ever onward through the depths of space. Through all recorded human history, life has been found to exist in many places we thought it could not on our world, but nowhere beyond our atmosphere. Our scientific knowledge tells us that the chances are good, since the constituents of life as we know it are found strewn throughout the cosmos, that other life exists elsewhere, but we do not know where.

We, and everything else with us, are built of the remains of dying stars, the end products of nuclear fusion and titanic explosions, releasing torrents of energy and flinging heavy elements throughout the galaxy. Those elements pooled together to form the Sun and the planets surrounding it, and on our planet, the force of gravity and heat and energy from our solar furnace stirred the elements, and as they began to cool, helped promote the formation of more complex molecules.

Our pocket of life, insignificant against the backdrop of the universe, is not unlike a tiny pool on the forming Earth billions of years ago, where molecules began the dance that eventually led to their ability to replicate themselves, driving the engine that began the creation of humanity. Our existence is currently a footnote to the life of the universe, trapped as we are on our planet. We have only just managed a foray to our nearby lunar companion; no human has set foot beyond the immediate sphere of the Earth's influence.

All we are, and all we have, is here with us. The Earth is our home, our power supply, our breadbasket, our resource depot -- we are nothing and we can do nothing without the fruits of our world. As our population grows, our technology becomes more sophisticated, and the distances on the globe shrink, we become more and more dependent on the limited resources available. The Earth is of a finite size and a finite mass, and as resources are consumed they are no longer available, and by-products are created that we must live with, as they have no other place to go.

Given our size relative to our home, our resources may seem infinite, and the surface still capacious. The truth is, that the resources that we mark as most precious (oil, coal, natural gas, gold, diamonds) will all run out some day; the resources we need for life (food, water, air) will exist, but become increasingly unable to sustain us. We may very well strangle ourselves, bereft of necessary energy and lacking proper life-sustaining materials in sufficient quantities to support the full human milieu.

It does not have to be this way.

The inherent problem is that most human beings, despite a powerful imagination, cannot see the big picture. They do not see the totality of the effects wrought by their actions, socially, economically, or physically. They act as if the future is always far away, as if the resources that are here now will always be here, as if the refuse they create magically disappears. They do not see how their actions toward others affect social systems or physical systems. Human beings are very egocentric, their world revolving around them, the rest of humanity simply there. This explains the rise of patriarchal religions, feudal states, and totalitarian regimes, as some humans decide that their continued existence is more important than the sum of humanity's.

There must come a point, now, with the rise of interconnected global communication, the free exchange of ideas, and access to the full range of resources, that we must accept that the minuscule divisions we have sought to carve humanity into, serve no purpose now. Whatever differences there are, are differences imposed by human thought and societies, not by the universe. We must strive to reach beyond the discrimination imposed by the evolution of a human brain geared for survival of the individuals of the species, and harness our neural power to new ends. We must accept that whatever social systems and organizing principles we have used in the past, which have allowed us to reach this point, must now be superseded by a greater set of principles geared toward the survival of humanity.

All the eggs of life are in one basket, a basket that drifts through the coldness of space, subject to the vagaries of forces beyond comprehension to a species that has developed thermonuclear weapons, which seem puny in comparison to hurtling asteroids, whirling black holes, supernovae, and gamma ray bursts, to name a few. Even our own world continues to heave and roil beneath our feet and above the ground, hurling death at us through earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The grip of our species on life is tenuous, though we may not know it to look around us.

If humanity is to be more than simple footnote to the history of the universe, then it is up to us to cast aside misgivings, mistrust, and misunderstanding, and put our energies toward fortifying our hold on life, and moving away from the cradle, to spread our seed amongst the stars. Only together, can we ensure that humanity continues its existence, and is not merely marked by the remains and relics left behind on a quiet, dead, desolate world, spinning disregarded through the void.