A cold, dark, black emptiness
An excerpt from William Shatner’s new book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder is doing the rounds, for good reason. It’s written “with” Joshua Brandon, so the quality of the writing may be due to him.
We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.
I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
That’s always how it strikes me, when I see a photo of earth from Out There. That’s obviously far less visceral and intense, but the basic idea is the same. Save it, cherish it, protect it, put it first – it’s all we have.
That is beautiful. And it captures the sense I have whenever I teach my students about Astronomy; I save that for last in my Earth Science class. There is beauty out there, captured by our telescopes, in the form of nebulae and other bodies, but it isn’t beauty for us. It’s not accessible in human lifetimes, and maybe not at all. It’s nice to see it and learn, but if it doesn’t lead to a humbling feeling, and a feeling that we are together on the most unique planet in the solar system, the only one that supports the diversity of macroscopic life, then we’re doing it wrong.
Anyone who can see that picture without a stirring of environmental sentiments is someone who lacks something in their emotional make up.
“Or… and hear me out on this… we could just set up a colony on Mars. With me as God-Emperor, of course.” — Elon Musk
Haldane’s quip about any putative creator’s “inordinate fondness for beetles” only applies down here on the surface of our planet. In the wider view, what is in evidence is an even greater love of hard vacuum, radiation, and dark matter.
Back in the summer, my wife and I were part of a tour that went to Manitoulin Island, on Lake Huron. On one of the days, we visited the Wikwemikong Unceded Territory. “Unceded” means that the First Nations People of this place never signed a treaty surrendering their land to outsiders. Wikwemikong Territory comprises about a fifth of Manitoulin Island, and is the largest unceded territory in Canada. Our local guide recounted the history of the various, attempts to wrest the land from its people, and the people from their land. The question that could never be answered was “Why should we sign away our land? Everything we need is here.”
This applies to Earth as a whole. Everything we need is here. If we use it up and burn it down, that’s on us, and our increasingly apparent inability to distinguish needs from wants. Our technical prowess and power, developed within an incredibly brief span of time, underwritten by a one-time infusion of fossil fuel capital, have far outstripped our knowledge and wisdom of if, and how to use them. We are starting to get a glimpse of our sample-of-one investigation into one of the final, crucial, unknown variables of the Drake Equation, L: the lifespan of a technological society capable of interstellar communication? Right now, the answer we’re approaching for this particular term is not large. We’ll be extremely lucky if we can eke it out into a three digit number of years.
I remember at the time that Shatner said something about seeing how fragile the Earth was and how we were destroying it, but that most of the video of his post-space remarks cut that stuff out.
Everything we need is here, and nowhere else. It could be here and other places too, but it isn’t. It’s here only, and we’re busy destroying it.
…and doing anything other than that is seen as the “radical”, “extreme” position…
Not to forget the late Carl Sagan’s memorable hymn to the ‘Pale Blue Dot,’ in his summing up of the historic photo taken by the camera on NASA’s Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990, as that vehicle left the Solar System to begin its endless journey among the stars and galaxies.
https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
I remember reading about a photo taken of the earth and the moon from the Apollo 11 command module in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface of the moon with the lunar landing module. Michael Collins, the pilot of the command module was the most alone photographer ever: every single human being that existed at that time, and had ever existed, except himself, lived within the sight of his camera.
I also had a friend who told me that she “had to” believe in God, because the universe was too cold. For myself, I’d rather know the truth, no matter how cold.
As much as I have enjoyed science fiction stories like Star Trek, I have always considered “the Final Frontier” an unexplorable territory. It can’t be a new “Age of Exploration” as in the late middle ages exploration of Earth. Terrestrial explorations took place in a breathable atmosphere, with prospects of food and water in any new lands discovered. Space ships have no such advantages, not to mention the impossible times and distances of any exploratory voyage in space. There’s no destination with reliable air, food, or water. It’s an enterprise (!) doomed to death and failure.
It’s like hoping for an unknown, unknowable, undetectable, and likely non-existent afterlife, when this is the one and only life we have.
Pretty much the only thing I’m optimistic about at this point is that humans will never colonize other planets, probably not even in our own solar system, almost certainly not around other stars. As much as I loved the late great Carl Sagan, his dream of humans going to the stars fills me with dread. The human brain being what it is, I see no possibility whatsoever that we would not fuck up those planets too. Luckily, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Stupidity and evil – especially combined with destructive technology – has a way of being self-correcting. The rest of the universe should be safe. I do feel bad about all those other species bound to go down with us, though. I always thought the armadillos showed a lot of promise…
But who knows what the possibilities are for unmanned, robotic space travel? Of course, that has been the stuff of sci-fi as well, in which humanoid, spideroid, etcetraoid robots with consciousness of their own being, get switched off for the endless one-way journey, and switched back on again when the destination is detected to be approaching. Endless possibilities there; mainly however cowboys and indians in space suits; which is why I have only limited time for sci-fi.
‘Star Wars’ was fun, though.
I will take a more hopeful view of space travel.
There is the energy & elements needed to create habitats for humans in space.
To use them successfully for living in space we will need precisely the same knowledge & techniques we need to keep earth habitable.
A *possible* future is many mini biospheres (or biocylinders) in the solar system in addition to a thriving biosphere on earth.
Will we have the wisdom for that?
I don’t think that’s true. It takes MASSIVE amounts of fuel just to get off the planet. Transporting the ingredients of biospheres too isn’t doable.
But we’re not working to keep Earth habitable. Much of human activity makes doing the opposite enormously profitable for a very few, for a very short time. That’s been enough to put us on the road to omnicide. The limits are so close on a spacecraft, space station, or planet-based habitat that everyone knows that using up all the food, water, and air, punching a hole through the bulkhead, opening a hatch, or spilling poisonous materials is a bad idea with immediate, lethal consequences. Earth has the exact same kind of limits, only slightly more removed in time and space. We are pushing those limits, and going beyond them with much that we are doing, but as long as someone’s making a profit off of it, it’s all okay.
Earth has started pushing back. Going into space will only result in taking our bad habits with us, with the artificial bubbles of safety we build for ourselves at risk from the first power-hungry lunatic who decides to leverage destructive control over necessities to further an agenda.
Not to mention the ecological issues. We don’t have much success building ecosystems on Earth, in places where there is existing soil, a seed bank, and a nearby highway to readily move things from one spot to another. I worked on one demonstration project – just a five mile stretch of a lake, to show it could be done. We moved aquatic plants from south central Oklahoma to south eastern Oklahoma, a three hour drive in good situations, but five hours when you are going slow and stopping to water plants. More than half of them didn’t survive the journey. The seeds/bulbs/etc we used? Didn’t even germinate, even though we knew those plants were able to live in that lake.
The project was budgeted at $300,00 and went over budget before we even started the planting. That was for a small research project with a small crew of college boys who served as interns, and only two full time staff, one a temp the other an intern – in short, not highly paid, but as knowledgeable as any other expert.
Did we succeed? Sort of…we established plants that lived for one and a half seasons. The project was abandoned as too expensive.
We haven’t moved very far on our knowledge of building ecosystems since then, though you will see glowing reports on the web, I’m sure. People need to justify their grants. It was my job to justify the grant, and to persuade the funders that going over budget was reasonable (it was – the budget was about three to four times too low for what was needed).
Keep in mind, we had good soils with adequate nutrients (better than adequate phosphorus), water available at every step of the way, a source of materials within a reasonable distance, and a crew of ten. Plus three boats, two trucks, and the Corps of Engineers available. We failed. Not because the project was undoable, but because we didn’t know enough, and we didn’t have enough money, and the locals weren’t going to put any more money into it.
The only people I tend to see thinking we could go to Mars/Moon/exoplanet are engineers and technicians. Biologists know better. Building a colony on another planet is more than just getting people and building materials to the planet. You have to get water there. Know how much water weighs? You have to get plants and animals there. Humans cannot live without the resources we have on earth; we evolved on this planet for a reason. The only way to hope to get them there is to decimate every economy on Earth, and every ecosystem on Earth.
Those of us not wealthy enough to afford the price tag? We’ll be working back here in diminishing situations for the rich colonizers – who probably won’t live long, just long enough to decimate this planet.
And not all engineers, I think. I’ve learned something about why it’s impossible from reading about the engineering obstacles.
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