The bleakness of space
William Shatner’s essay about going to space on a Blue Origin flight has been bouncing around my internet for the past few weeks, and it’s as good as everyone says:
I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
Look, I like space. I support studying it. I’ve watched many rover landings, and I would be thrilled to watch a 21st-century human moon landing. I’m pretty sure the existence of aliens will be discovered in my lifetime (via biosignatures, not contact). I consider myself the kind of person who could thrive on Mars1, if NASA wanted to send me. And yet, the more I think and learn about human space travel, the worse of an idea it seems.
That was my main takeaway from the book Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, which explores just how hard it is to keep humans alive and flourishing in space, and all the ingenious science that makes it somewhat possible. I was duly impressed by NASA’s past and ongoing efforts, but what I really appreciated by the end of the book was just how well-adapted humans are to Earth. I mean, duh. We evolved on Earth, for Earth. Gravity, seasons, the day-night cycle, plants, animals—these are not just things we live with. They are the things that made us. Thinking we could ever exist without them—that we would ever want to exist without them—is more than ridiculous. It’s dangerous.
There’s something deliciously ironic in the fact that billionaires are now paying inconceivable sums to one day be able to escape the planet they’re destroying, only to have the people they send in their first experiments come back with a profound sense of belonging to Earth and a renewed commitment to its wellbeing. But of course this feeling is not new; astronauts have been talking about it for as long as there have been astronauts. Earthrise, the Blue Marble, the Overview Effect…again and again, it’s not space that fills them with wonder, it’s Earth. We’ve sent people to see what’s out there, and it’s time to listen to their answer: Nothing. We are made in Earth’s image, and we already have everything, right where we are.
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Specifically, low on extroversion, high on openness to experience, according to the Big Five personality traits.