[A little something I wrote when I was more optimistic. Before 9/11.... It's a very long read.]
"He lay on his bed and the wind blew through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic cave to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:
" 'Look. Look, we've done it!' "
--Ray Bradbury
Icarus Montgolfier Wright
From the stars he was born, to the stars he’ll return, whether through conscious effort, or in the collapse of a dying sun, remains to be seen. His journey is not yet complete. In fact, it has only just begun. From the moment his progenitors rose from the primordial ooze and saw their gods in the sky above, they longed to be among them. Birds flew over their heads to kiss the very hem of heaven's garment, and from that moment man has envied them their grace and power. His understanding of the world, however, was limited to the ache in his belly and his body's thirst-- the means of his survival. It would take tens of thousands of years for him to take his first tottering step toward the all-important question; "who am I, and where am I going?"
But the question of returning to the stars has always been a philosophical one. There's little doubt about the science involved in such an endeavor: escape velocities, calculus and physics, and many more questions man hasn’t begun to ask. But what of the question of environment, can man live in a vacuum? For that is what space is. How will this new environment affect his physiology? Simply put-- How will man hope to survive beyond the cradle of his birth? These are not easy questions to answer. They are the descendants of questions asked and answered throughout man's entire history—one answered question building upon another, until finally he’s endowed with understanding enough to ask again; "Who am I, and where am I going?" Robert Goddard, inventor of the liquid fuel rocket, in 1932 said, "Aiming at the stars... is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning." And that is where man is now. He is just beginning. Who am I? Where am I going? It’s taken him a long time to get to the asking of these questions. Everything he has accomplished; every discovery, and new understanding, has been fueled by his insatiable thirst for knowledge, and the achievement of his greatest desire: to walk like giants among the stars.
When man first rose above the all-consuming struggle for existence and began to question the mechanics of the world in which he lived, he constructed a pantheon of gods, imbued with power greater than himself, and ascribed to them the occurrence of natural phenomena, in an attempt to rationalize the world in which he lived. Why couldn't man fly like the birds that swam the ether, wheeling and floating upon the fickle winds? There must be a price to flying, for only two men ever managed the feat and one died for it-- the sun himself destroyed Icarus for his presumption. It wasn’t enough for Icarus to simply fly; he had to see the earth far, far below, and see the shape of his world. Science, as it is understood today, had yet to even enter the mind of man, for was it not Zeus who hurled lightning to Earth? And was it not Persephone's burden that altered the seasons?
Immanuel Velikovsky, noted scientist, and author of the infamous book Worlds in Collision, said of man,
"Is man's knowledge now nearly complete? Are only a few more steps necessary to conquer the universe: to extract the energy of the atom... to cure cancer, to control genetics, to communicate with other planets and learn if they have living creatures, too?
"Here begins Homo ignoramus..."
The world was what the gods or God made of it. Should a man raise his staff over the Red Sea, it was God who parted the waters that his chosen people might pass through unharmed. If Joshua, forty years later, should shout at the sun and the moon, commanding them to stand still in the sky until the Israelites avenged themselves on their enemies, it was God who stopped them in their course, and not natural phenomena. Man’s view of the world was once a geocentric one, in which the planets, sun, moon and stars all revolved around the earth. And with no way to prove otherwise the earth was, of a necessity, flat. Some believed the earth rested upon Atlas's shoulders, or that it was a great plate sitting on the back of a monstrous tortoise.
But man has since come to know the Earth as round. Had Joshua known this, perhaps he may have been more considerate of those on the other side of the globe, who suffered great fear when the sun did not rise at its appointed hour. But there was no such understanding in Joshua’s day. Velikovsky asked a question more than fifty years ago and went in search of its answer: If the sun and moon did indeed stand still in the sky for the space of a day, then somewhere in the world night lasted far longer than it was wont. In the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan, also known as Codex Chimalpopoca, a tale is told of a time, when in the remote past, there occurred a cosmic catastrophe, during which, "the world was deprived of light and the sun did not appear for a fourfold night". It was not God who stopped the sun, Velikovsky contends, but rather some other event, which caused the earth to shift on its axis for a relatively short period of time. But man was incapable of understanding this.
It took time, but man eventually realized that certain phenomena occurred regardless of the whims of petty gods, and that these phenomena were very predictable. He began to ask questions. Questions that would eventually lead to theory that centuries later, would lead other minds to greater discoveries. The Greeks are famous for their mythology, and have often been noted for their contributions in philosophy, but few people recognize the significance of their contributions toward man’s Ultimate Goal. Greek and Roman philosophers were the early progenitors of modern science. Their philosophies formed the first known foray into explaining the nature of the world and the universe. It was Aristarchus who first proposed the idea of a world that rotated around its sun, but the idea was too much, too soon. The whole idea seemed impossible. Eratosthenes calculated the earth’s circumference at 24,675 miles, an estimate within 200 miles of the actual figure. But still the idea of a heliocentric view of the universe was too much for man to accept. Instead, he gravitated toward the ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle, who espoused the belief that the universe was earth-centered, or geocentric. How else could it be? Surely man was the center of all things, and the universe existed and moved for his benefit. And it was Ptolemy’s geocentric view that dominated the minds of men for centuries to come; sponsored and vigorously defended in its final day by one of the world’s great religions.
The universe, however, was far from defined-- its mysteries yet unbreached --and it was not until millennia later that man at last began to see beyond his mistake-- his conceit --and begin to ask the questions that would take him beyond the breach of earth. In the sixteenth century, one Nicolaus Copernicus, endowed with a new understanding, the roots of which lay in the Italian renaissance, and a revived interest in the works of ancient Greek texts, began at last to describe a recognizably sound universe. Copernicus believed in a sun that stood still, and an earth, along with its brothers and sisters, that revolved around it. But there were mathematical problems. Circular orbits around the sun could not account for certain problems, and it took Johannes Kepler and his theory of elliptical orbits to resolve the anomalies.
But it was more than just determining what revolved around what. It was a new way of thinking, a new age of enlightenment, where the likes of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon could be free to change the way man thought. Out of this new age, Descartes gave to the world the premise of deductive logic; and Bacon, the scientific method of inductive logic, both of which became essential to the ultimate goal of leaving the bonds of earth in flight.
Then there was Galileo Galilei. Until the 1500’s the Roman Catholic Church held a strangle hold on the worldview and Earth’s position in the universe, under God. If the earth and all his brethren revolved around the sun, and the furthest sphere of the heavens was not the habitation of God, His angels, and all the saints, then where was the proof of their doctrine? How then could they control the minds and hearts of the people if they could not point to the habitation of God and say, "This is where He dwells?" The Church was therefore forced to suppress these new ideas with the threat of excommunication. Twice Galileo was put to the question, and twice was forced to recant his theories, under threat of expulsion from heaven. But despite Galileo’s fear of the Church, and its very real authority at the time, his views endured. An Englishman by the name of Isaac Newton would eventually bring everything together. Called the Newtonian Synthesis, his findings brought all previous theories together and made sense of them. The Law of gravity, his most important contribution, remained inviolate until Einstein gave the world his General and Special theory of relativity. Yet one law yet remains inviolate: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Though it was never written in stone that man should come to learn to fly, or eventually sail among the stars, it was written in his spirit. Throughout time, and in every generation of belief, men have been born with a desire to reach for a goal they had no name for, and their endeavors laid the groundwork for future generations of explorers. And the questions given him, by fate or providence, fueled his spirit-- that unquenchable fire --driving him to challenge the popular conventions of his day, explore and learn more of his world, and risk his own well being by stepping out on the limb. No one knows for sure what drove the Polynesian peoples out onto the Pacific, but they were the earliest ocean-faring people. They spread across the ocean with the most primitive of vessels, and the most stalwart of hearts, traveling extensively and establishing their island kingdoms throughout the Pacific. Christopher Columbus is credited with the discovery of the America’s, but the Vikings beat him by almost 500 years.
With the evidence of his discovery standing before Isabella of Castile, Queen of Spain, Columbus emboldened other explorers to set out and discover what they could. Ferdinand Magellan rounded Cape Horn and threaded a course through what is now called the Straits of Magellan. For many years this route was considered a state secret, for it established Spain as a commercial powerhouse in their exploitation of the Orient. Of the five ships and 227 men who started out from Seville in 1519, only one ship returned. Magellan died in the Philippines two years into the journey, but the last ship, the one that managed the feat of circumnavigating the globe proved, at the very least, if one traveled far enough in one direction, he would eventually end where he started.
But none of this would have been possible at the time were it not for the Nation of Islam preserving much of what the Christian Church destroyed. For nearly ten centuries the Roman Catholic Church controlled Europe. In its endeavor to save the world for Christ, it suppressed everything that ran contrary to its perception of the truth, the world, and indeed, the universe. In its zealousness the church erased, destroyed, or re-wrote much of what man had achieved through the early Greeks, and Romans. Were it not for Muslims saving the works of such thinkers as Aristotle and Archimedes, much of what is taken for granted today would be lost. It was the Muslims who gave the sextant and the astrolabe to European explorers. Without these navigational instruments, for the plotting of latitude and distance on a featureless sea, Columbus and Magellan might not have had courage enough to match earlier explorers.
Having circumnavigated the globe, discovering new lands, and advancing society as he went, man was still no closer-- the stars were still beyond his grasp-- new questions needed new answers. Enter the Montgolfier brothers, two men who saw something unique in debris and embers lifted into the air by the smoke of a fire. From this they devised a plan to experiment with the lifting power of smoke. They buttoned together pieces of linen into a sphere thirty-nine feet high, and lined it with paper to prevent hot air from seeping out. On June 5, 1783, they invited the public to witness the launching of their new invention, the hot air balloon. It was an unmanned flight--a sheep, a duck, and a rooster notwithstanding --that rose to 6,000 feet, and flew for approximately one to one and a half miles. This event spurred others on toward the realization of the unspoken dream. But man’s understanding of the force that lifted the Montgolfier balloon was couched in ignorance. For many years afterward, the lifting power of smoke was referred to as "Montgolfier’s Gas", though it is taken for granted today that hot air rises.
But man was closer than he had ever been before. Now he could rise into the air! But despite this discovery, it soon became clear that to rise in uncontrolled flight was simply not enough. Bird’s manipulated eddies and currents of air to float or turn, swoop or rise; yet always in control, and man would not be satisfied with less. Otto Lilienthal built a forty-pound glider with twenty-three foot wings made of muslin soaked in wax and stretched over a wooden frame of split willow. It was his hope to demonstrate a sustained and semi-controlled flight, and despite the looks he undoubtedly got from his contemporaries, his first glide gave proof to the possibility of sustained flight. Though he only flew sixteen feet on his first attempt, he continued on, eventually flying as far as one hundred and fourteen feet. His experiments ultimately led to his death, but his successes inspired the next generation of explorers who, on December 17, 1903, provided the final piece of the puzzle. At the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright forever changed man’s perception of the impossible. For if man could fly, what other seemingly impossible thing might he do? Could he fly across oceans? Perhaps go into space? Could he go to the moon?
In 1961, responding to the Soviet Union’s 1959 landing of an unmanned craft on the moon, President John F. Kennedy, though motivated by politics, set in motion the events that would lead to the first man setting foot upon another world. On May 25, 1961 he announced that the United States would make every effort to "land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth before the end of the decade", and in so doing, spoke the dream into existence. Kennedy managed to galvanize an entire nation into action and dared men everywhere to dream, asking, "Can we really do it?" Kennedy stated further, on September 12, 1962, in an address to the assembly at Rice University in Houston Texas, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." And it was a hard thing to accomplish, but that alone made it worth doing. The race was finally on. The Russians had beat the Americans at putting a craft into space, putting a man in space, orbiting the Earth, and sending a craft to the moon, and Kennedy was determined that the man to first set foot on the moon would be an American. Though he did not live to see the dream realized, America did not lose sight of the prize, and 240,000 miles away, on Christmas eve, 1968, Apollo 8 made the first manned flight to the moon and back. Barely seven months later, in July of ’69, Apollo 11 put two men on its surface. It was perhaps the bravest feat in man’s entire history. But while it’s one thing to traverse the Pacific in an outrigger canoe, with only the wind and stars to guide him, it was quite another to leave the cradle of Earth and enter the cold vacuum of space to visit another world. Before Apollo 8, no human had ever seen the earth as a globe. Now, suddenly, the human vision of the earth had changed "and our mother planet became like all the others, a very small lonely object in space".
The dream, however, is not over. Despite his accomplishments, man has yet to realize his dream of walking among the stars. A new environment requires a new understanding, and the solution to new problems. Cost is still the greatest prohibitive. There is a paradox of sorts in achieving orbit. The heavier the payload, the greater the amount of fuel required gaining orbit. But the more fuel you carry, the heavier the payload. And so achieving space is not cheap, and won’t be for some time to come. But some progress is being made toward lightening the payload itself. Miniaturization is the key: the catch phrase being, "the smaller the better." Thirty years ago, an onboard computer would weigh as much as a ton and take up ten times the amount of space. Today’s computers weigh far less and require only a fraction of the space the old behemoths once utilized.
But there is also a human cost. Humans are not bred for space. Man cannot survive there without gravity. It is something taken for granted by everyone, but without gravity, man has no hope of surviving his long walk among the stars. Russian cosmonauts and scientists have performed the most extensive research into the area of zero gravity environments, and some interesting facts stand out. Prolonged exposure to 'zero-gee' weakens the physical body in two major ways: One, the body loses bone density. Often the amount of bone lost in only a three-week trip into space is the equivalent of a lifetime of bone loss on earth; and two, The muscles in the body atrophy through disuse, which is the primary cause of bone loss. Another interesting factor about prolonged exposure to zero-gee is a body’s propensity for elongating; disks expand and the spine lengthens over time in a zero-gee environment, making an astronaut as much as two inches taller in space than on Earth. The only thing an astronaut can do to avoid muscle atrophy and bone loss in space is to exercise constantly. Escaping the benefits of gravity is an impossibility living on Earth. Man takes for granted the exertion expended each minute of the day, both waking and sleeping, in simply walking, lifting, or rolling over in bed. But it’s not a luxury afforded to those who would live in space. It takes hours of exercise each day to simply maintain one’s physical condition. The question of gravity also raises questions for those who would colonize another world, say, Mars. A person born and raised on Mars could not visit Earth without risk of life-threatening injury. A body accustomed to one-third of Earth’s gravity would find it difficult to stand, sit, lie down or even breath on Earth. The possibility of broken bones would be a very real hazard.
Knowing this, it’s surprising that governments do not invest more in the future of exploration. Research moves far too slowly, and new discoveries are dealt with far too conservatively. Man is afraid of moving too far, too fast, despite his accomplishments. He knows where he wants to go, he dreams of it nightly, but now he has new questions to ask-- new answers to go in search of. Man might personally venture to Mars by 2030, but it will be at least a century before any colonist goes there to live and work. There is no better investment for a society than research, but governments hinder exploration. They weigh cost against potentiality, despite the fact that it’s individuals who make the great discoveries, not governments. Governments do not see what neighboring planets have to offer, nor do they care to know if they can truly visit the stars. They do not ponder the same questions that dreamers do. Governments do not ask, "how shall we live?" or "What will we take with us?" Philosophically speaking, Government’s primary concern is the perpetuation of itself.
But here is a question Governments would do well to ask themselves: "What have we to lose by not going?" The answer? Everything! From the stars he was born, to the stars he will and must return.
As George Harrison once sang, "...all things must pass away." So too will man, whether through conscious effort-- killing himself through war or simple stupidity --or in the collapse of a dying sun, remains to be seen. But in time, when his sun begins to swell, consuming Mercury, Venus, and his own Earth, before collapsing in death, man will lose much more than the cradle of his birth, he will lose the pyramids of Egypt and the Coliseum in Rome. He will lose Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. He will lose Gandhi and Mandela, Di Vinci, Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. He will lose Marilyn Monroe, and all remembrance of a being called Man, unless he leaves the cradle for the stars.
The Polynesians were perhaps the most courageous of explorers. With little more than the stars to guide them and a fickle wind to fill their sails, they moved and proliferated across the world’s greatest ocean. Similarly, the astronauts of Apollo, with little more than the hopes and prayers of an entire world, proved that man could venture beyond his own doorstep. This is the kind of courage that will take man far beyond his own sun. No one alive today will likely see it, but the possibility remains. In the meantime, modern man does have one option available, should he wish to go out into the universe. For a very reasonable fee, the Encounter 2001 Project will place a sample of each explorer’s DNA upon a deep space probe launching in 2003. For thirteen years the explorer’s DNA will see the planets stream past until, reaching the Ort Cloud at the very outer edge of the solar system, will enter into the vast unknown. Anyone brave enough-- and with a spare $49 in pocket change --can send a piece of himself into space with a short message to whomever might find it. At www.encounter2001.com, the call is being made for intrepid explorers to join the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," on the long voyage into the cosmos. Clarke himself is sending a short note with his DNA that says, "Hello, my clone!"
Man has longed for this. Throughout all of history he has yearned for flight, and realizing there was something beyond his world, to sail among the stars. It used to be his Holy Grail, but now it’s become his Manifest Destiny. It’s the fire burning in his heart that will impel him headlong into space-- if he doesn’t kill himself first. But asking questions and seeking answers has gotten him this far, perhaps it will take him farther.
"...A single day will see the burial of all mankind. All that the long forbearance of fortune has produced, all that has been reared to eminence, all that is famous and that is beautiful, great thrones, great nations – all will descend into an abyss..."
--Seneca
Naturales Questiones III, xxx
"As surely as the sun has risen this morning, and as surely as it will set this evening, the human race is going to the stars"
-- Neil Armstrong
"And if no one was there or if someone was there behind him, he could not tell. And whether it was one voice or many, young or old, near or very far away, rising or falling, whispering or shouting to him all three of his brave new names, he could not tell, either. He did not turn to see.
"For the wind was slowly rising and he let it take hold and blow him all the rest of the way across the desert to the rocket which stood there waiting."
--Ray Bradbury
Icarus Mongolfier Wright
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