Pre-empting the Future

“I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”

– Stephen Hawking.

I'm really not that old, but I do remember when space shuttle launches were front-page news. I still fondly recall my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Levititz, wheeling a television set into her classroom on a cool April morning in 1981 so that we students could witness history in the making. The memory of this event would for us, match one of her greatest childhood memories: Neil Armstrong's moonwalk (which was also televised) on a hot summer evening back in 1969.

In the time elapsed since that first shuttle mission, entire lives have come and gone. I speak not of the space program casualties of the Columbia explosion in 2003 or the Challenger disaster before it in 1986, but of the hundreds of thousands of lives spawned and lost in the twenty-eight years that have passed between then and now.

This weekend the space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station, 200 miles above the Atlantic ocean. This space station has been manned by astronauts from 16 different nations since its 1998 launch. Have you ever even heard of this international space station? No? Who can blame you when news of this magnitude is trumped by "Safe easy way to open clamshell packaging." No kidding -check Yahoo. The future is here, ladies and gents, it's just not newsworthy.




It's possible that the amount of NASA mishaps over the last (almost) thirty years have stunted the love affair the American public once had with space exploration, but without a good opponent in the quest for space, there has been no space race. The absence of quality competition has given way to intergalactic indifference.

There's another thing that has dulled the veneer on the once and future space age: Hollywood.

When the first footage of astronauts in the Apollo program was televised into homes across America and the world, nothing of it's equal had been seen in any other media, films included. Since then (shortly thereafter, really), sophisticated special effects have captured the imaginations and fueled the dreams of earthbound audiences. The technological leaps in movie magic have far outpaced those of transportation astrophysics. To this day a total of twelve humans has walked on the face of any terrestrial body that is not the earth. The six moon landings in the Apollo program comprise all twelve. The last of these lunar visits was in December, 1972. I was a little over a year old then, and as a child I expected to be commuting to work on Mars by the time I was thirty-eight. George Jetson, eat your heart out.

Much of what we see at the movies is achieved so convincingly that it blends seamlessly in the cerebral cortex with our actual, real memories. That may sound like paranoid, Manchurian Candidate type stuff, but it's true. It's a psychological defense mechanism that helps us cope with the unthinkable. The mind stores pieces of similar information in the same areas. It's only context that allows us to differentiate them. In that respect, movie magic sometimes helps to cushion the blow of the real life tragedy. It's called desensitization, but it's not always a bad thing. For instance, when you first saw the twin towers collapse, how many of you immediately thought of Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, and the horrific, shocking imagery of the White House and Empire State Building being destroyed? I remember the tiny hairs on my arms standing straight upward when I first saw that ID4 trailer in the theater. I can only speculate at the state of catatonia into which I might have fallen had I not seen that film before a phone call from my parents prompted me to switch on the television set that fateful September morning in 2001 to see the inconceivably tragic footage of the World Trade Center that was showing on every channel.

But technology can only advance as far as the available materials allow. The gas crisis in the seventies definitely sidelined the US space program. So did the Vietnam War. By the time the Space Shuttle program was up and running, the Soviets were soon to be just Russians again, and the Chinese were our allies. The need to repeat a moon landing was eclipsed by new financial woes brought about by small conflicts in places like Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Most Americans were looking to advance out to the suburbs rather than up into the cosmos. The very public casualties of the Columbia and Challenger disasters roused a public outrage with NASA's budget and unmanned probes replaced the majority of personnel-driven missions. The much-hyped Mars mission was announced, delayed and finally replaced by an unmanned probe which crashed on the red planet's surface and was rendered useless after a multi-billion dollar budget.

In recent years, the greatest scientific minds on the planet have reiterated the importance of advancing human civilization on other worlds. The last two presidents have committed to an international effort to further explore the universe and collect intel on the resources available within our own galaxy. We are no closer today to colonizing another planet than we were in 1972, when Americans last walked on extraterrestrial soil. But when we do, I sincerely hope they hire a better publicist than they have now. If the first human steps on Mars are the fifth headline down the news feed, the first four had damn well better not include the latest employment opportunities of a famous-for-nothing half-wit.