Space, the final frontier.
Actually, the beauty of Star Trek has always been that the creators, writers, and producers know that the show – the final frontier – is about exploring human nature. The Romans, Vulcans, and Klingons all represented particular facets of human experience held up to the light for close scrutiny. And as the real-life astronauts know, experiencing the vastness of space, and seeing the earth from space, is an incredibly humanizing experience. In 1948 Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
The American space shuttle program has come to an end. That doesn’t mean NASA is turning out the lights (there seems to be some misunderstanding about that), but we are closing an incredible chapter in American history and opening a new one. Watch our beginnings, politically speaking, at least (the speech is lengthy, and well-worth watching):
What’s next then?
An interesting difference between the first and second videos is that the second talks about international cooperation and various kinds of partnerships. I suspect that once you are in the “space community” as one woman said, you see things differently. In the words of former astronauts:
Alan Shepard:
“If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.”
Ulf Merbold:
“For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”
Jim Lovell, of Apollo 8 and 13, said this:
“We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself—all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are, but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy loving here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself.”
Mike Collins, of Apollo 11:
“Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.”
Wlly Schirra;
“I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”
Aleksandr Alexsandrov:
“We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth.”
Donald Williams:
“For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”
Michael Collins:
“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”
Edgar Mitchell:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
“We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.”
Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud
“The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.”
William Anders:
“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.”
(Thanks to www.spacequotations.com for the great quotes)
I really love all of these quotes.
I’ve gotten some weird looks from people, but have long felt that a pretty good basis for determining whether something makes sense would be to imagine an alien flying by the planet, looking down.
It’s (too, for some) simple, and here’s a really simple example: does it make sense that, say, millions overeat in one part of the planet and millions die of starvation in another? No. Are there good reasons? Yes, of course, and bad ones, too. But if it doesn’t make sense, fixing that should be a priority.
Simple is the point. Life’s too short.