Feeling Spacy?


Wherein Our Heroine Comes Down to Earth.
SpaceShipOne has done it. It has blasted 62 miles in the air and come back again. Private enterprise has sent a man to the edge of space.

I'm more than a little ambivalent about manned space flight. It is the kind of project that people speak of in generalities - phrases such as "limitless potential" get lobbed about without explanation or context. Certainly, the vastness of space does hold limitless potential. It's Schrödinger's cat on the hugest scale imaginable. Until we actually get out there, our imaginations are free to envision happy, living cats endlessly revolving through the void. But what about the practical application? What happens when we finally get out there beyond our orbit?

Popular imagination leaps us from the Space Shuttle to The Starship Enterprise in the blink of an eye. We go from engineers frantically banging out new UNIX code to make the Spirit rover functional again to terraforming Mars into a human-habitable planet. And caught up in such visions, some exuberant souls start to see Earth, our own little blue-planet home, as superfluous, irrelevant - last year's model. Why bother fixing what's wrong here? Perfect societies and new frontiers await us in space!

...Well, no. At least, not without a lot of work, and a lot more time to do that work in. By all means, let's dream about glorious societies. Let us aim for space and limitless frontiers. But let us not forget that whatever society we create arises out of the one we have now, and you cannot build greatness upon a flawed foundation.
Posted: Tuesday - June 22, 2004 at 08:52 AM         | |

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