On October 4, 1957, imagination
became reality when the launch of Sputnik made space travel a fact. Not only
had the theoretical become tangible, but cultural beliefs also changed, if more
slowly—but much more momentously.
As a 12-year-old "space nut" reading
everything he could find about the coming "Space Age," even I knew it was going
to be a breakthrough chapter in human history, just as it reflected innate
human instincts for exploration. And it did.
But perhaps the grandest gifts were
too subtle, too glacial, too diffuse to detect at the time, especially with all
the distractions of Moonwalks, rocket explosions, "space races," Teflon and
Tang. Now, a half century later—almost an entire human lifetime—a picture has
emerged.
Shortly after the Apollo
11 landing (and shortly before his death), my grandfather spoke with me of
the cultural changes he had witnessed from the time of the Wright Brothers'
flight up until the first Moon landing. "I doubt you'll ever experience such
immense changes," he remarked. And in later years, as it became clear we
weren't going to leap from artificial satellites to interstellar travel in my
lifetime, I reluctantly came to feel he was right.
But not any longer; I had been too
narrow-minded and too shortsighted (and I wasn't alone). I now think I've seen
an even bigger change.
The flight revolution of my
grandfather's lifetime, a transportation-technology quantum leap, brought
peoples and places on Earth much closer together. It changed exotic foreign
lands and their inhabitants into neighbors, for good or for ill. It changed
each person's own native land into just another country, one of many. Sure, the
communication revolution helped too, but airplanes were the point of the spear.
The space revolution was the next
giant conceptual leap. It made our entire planet just one of many worlds by
driving home—through vistas of extraterrestrial landscapes and images of
footsteps and tread marks on alien worlds—the mind-blowing concept that some of
those lights in the sky constituted worlds of their own, not merely fuzzy
images on the wall of a planetarium. Views of Earth
itself from space, even just views of the curved horizon from a rocket,
began that shift. Oblique high-altitude views of surfaces of other worlds, and
their horizons against the blackness of space (or with the Earth itself above
the Moon's horizon), pushed the concept further. Sure, we had intellectually
known this was "true," but few of us had really ever believed it—or acted on
such beliefs.
As the images grew sharper from
additional worlds, any pretense of earthliness—of the world as usual—collapsed.
We watched motion imagery of the bizarre behavior of dust on the airless Moon,
as the lander engine cut off or as the wheeled rovers
dug into the ground, spewing dirt with no dusty swirls. We saw images of Jovian system geysers of molten sulfur; we saw eroded
shorelines of the ethane seas of Titan; we saw bizarre collapse holes on
Martian calderas; we saw the shadow of a far-ranging space probe on the small
asteroid it was approaching. These images reeked with unearthliness, they
tasted of alien-ness, and they drove home the emotional certainty of Earth's
true status.
Persuaded by such insights, we
realize in our guts and not merely in our brains that we as humans are actors,
bound to a closed stage that is not the entire universe but only a corner of
it. Our world is small enough that our presence on it has impact, so far
usually inadvertent effects but potentially deliberate effects as well. This reality-based sense of proportion comes none too soon.
So now, thanks to the Space Age, we
are equipped with this concept of our world as a neighborhood, and we are
persuaded by the truth of this concept through 50
years of space exploration. I am persuaded that the cultural influence of
the Space Age has also provided us with the beginnings of the technologies, the
outlines of the adequate understandings and the glimmerings of the required
wisdom needed to take on the challenges (and opportunities) that will confront
humanity. These will include cultural clashes, political and philosophical
squabbles, environmental causes and effects, climate shifts and biosphere
repercussions, "classic" natural catastrophes and some unpleasant surprises as
well.
That's OK, I can now tell my
grandchildren. As a child, I had only hoped for miraculous gadgets—now I can
anticipate a civilization worthy of them.
Jim Oberg is a 22-year veteran of
NASA Mission Control in Houston and now a
freelance spaceflight consultant and author (www.jamesoberg.com).
NOTE: The views of this article are
the author's and do not reflect the policies of the National Space Society.
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