Forget Covid. Forget politics. Go outside tonight if you have any kind of clear sky and a view to the southeast and southwest—even if it’s between the trees and buildings. To the southeast, Mars and the Moon are about to fall into a dangerous, non-distancing embrace. They are spectacular together, with or without city light pollution. And to the southwest, Jupiter and Saturn continue to dance brightly (well, Jupiter is bright, Saturn is less so) at arm’s length.
I saw them all while walking the dogs (I couldn’t even see any stars), and was thrown right back to the 1950s and early 1960s, when the solar system was a simpler place, and we just knew that in another fifty years, we’d be able to head down to the Atom City Spaceport and hop on a luxury space-liner to any of those places. Those were the days! The Golden Era of Space Travel (as it should have been)!
no greater intrusion into our poor empty-heads, than thinking about space travel – Nothin’s hap’n’n so might as well think of space travel!
Space travel is a terrible invasion into our thinking. Knowing space is wildly different from succumbing to consumerist need to taste everything up close – at a cost!. Space travel is a wholly bad idea. It messes with peoples’ minds.
Capitalist commerce treats it as though it’s something. It’s Not. It makes money for a few people – not us; gives some people comic-book-style jobs.
What a rip-off!
I could not disagree more, but I thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I am reminded of a moment from the series Babylon 5, in which the captain of that space station is asked if it is a worthwhile endeavor and replies yes. Paraphrasing, because some day our sun will expand into a red giant and then burn itself out, and all human achievement — Mozart and Gandhi and Lao Tzu and Austen — will be gone forever . . . unless we find a new home in the stars.
I believe that now we also need those dreams and that perspective. (Which is why, among many other reasons, I love astronomy.)
Very well said, Deborah.