I walked outside this morning and looked up into the sky. There was a scattering of thin clouds to create a slightly overcast day, otherwise it was the same brilliant blue sky I expect to see everyday I walk outside here in Arizona. Today though, what I saw was different.
The vastness of that blue sky not withstanding, I did not see an infinite sea full of possibilities. What I saw was a shell, like the inside of an eggshell had been painted with a sky. It felt so close, so confining, as though I could simply reach out and touch it, reach through it to the wide open space on the other side. Yet, it was obviously not to be.
All around us lies an infinite space, reaching further than any of us could possibly hold at once in our finite imaginations. Possibility, knowledge, wonder, new places and new homes, all there so disgustingly close and yet so dishearteningly far away. What could I do, I realized, there is no longer any recognizable space program. The fires of exploration have dimmed, we no longer desire to leave the safety of home, to set forth into the unknown and possibly unknowable for no better reason than we could and it was there.
“But there are troubles here!” I have heard. Over and over, a weak minded refrain, it is not convenient, it is not easy, there is so much to worry about near at hand… There will always be troubles here. We exist for only a moment in this universe, both as individuals and as civilizations and species. When our time comes we cannot ask a respite, that our execution be stayed till we have seen all there was to see. A perfect moment does not exist, times without troubles are simply a mirage on the horizon. The key is to be aware of trouble and to press onwards in any case. Once you surrender your momentum and allow yourself to stall in life it is all to easy to find yourself falling beyond any hope of control.
*sigh*
It is a terrible gift to see what needs to be done, and have no means to do it with.
I agree, and from everything I was told and watched in sci-fi as a kid in the 70′s we should be flying around in cars dodging traffic jams at different levels across megalopolis city scapes. We should already have a moon base and doing mars exploration. using technology like the rovers on mars has actually helped quite a bit I think but the government just sucks when it comes to this stuff so i agree with you there. we need the privatization of space because unless there’s money to be made in it then there’s no reason for “america” to go up there. we give them that incentive and can show it can make a buck then we’ll see HUGE improvements in the programs.