just yesterday's dream

Here's NASA's image of the day for On September 18, 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft paused in its mission to the stars to take this composite photograph. It was the first photograph in human history that pictured both the Earth and the Moon together but outside the orbit of either. It represented the triumph of human creativity, humility before the breathtaking limitlessness of creation, and the open horizons that lay before us.

Voyager 1 photograph, courtesy NASA.gov's "Image of the Day."

Voyager 1 is still going, and still sending back data. It's taken almost 35 years, but NASA scientists expect that it will pass the border of the solar system into interstellar space at any time this year. At that point, humanity can say that we have extended something of ourselves into the vastness of the universe, that we have made the first tiny steps toward understanding God's infinite grandeur. I suspect, however, that the majority of Americans might not see it that way. Space is boring, I guess, or at least a whole lot less pressing than the daily troubles our government makes for itself.  

But think about what's actually out there!  Think about it: we can have an experience something like Abraham's supreme vision of God's creation!

And [God] said unto me: My son, my son (and his hand was stretched out), behold I will show you all these.  And he put his hand upon mine eyes, and I saw those things which his hands had made, which were many; and they multiplied before mine eyes, and I could not see the end thereof. (Abraham 3:12)

Light and Shadow in the Carina Nebula.  Hubble Space Telescope.

Quintuplet Cluster.  (Those are all galaxies, by the way.)  Hubble Space Telescope.

My thoughts bubbled up on this subject thanks to astronomer and Nova ScienceNow anchor Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this clip from a recent appearance on a talk show, Tyson expresses the same frustration that I (and I think a lot of people) feel at the threat of Congress's attempt to eliminate the James Webb Space Telescope. The whole program is practically insignificant fiscally, but to certain legislators, every cut is a good cut, even if it has no impact on the deficit. (This is not a post where I intend to get deeply into that philosophy, so I'll try to let it stand for itself without further commentary.) 

For context, keep in mind that the entire Webb Telescope program program costs in total as much as a month in Afghanistan, and that (in unadjusted dollars) the entire 50-year NASA budget is less than the funds made available for TARP.

The most salient point of Tyson's speech, for me, was this: “[In] the 60s and 70s, you didn't have to go more than a week before there was an article in LIFE Magazine: the home of tomorrow, the city of tomorrow, transportation of tomorrow. . . . We stopped dreaming. . . . [Congress is] playing for the quarterly report, they're playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation. The rest of the world will pass us by.” (The whole clip is only about three minutes long, worth a watch. Alternatively, I've included the transcript below as an exercise that's come up in more than one job application I've submitted.)

So if certain legislators have their way, when Hubble inevitably goes offline in a few years, the scientific work that produced those photographs (and, by the way, is discovering all sorts of planets outside of our solar system),will grind to a stop. Something inside of me knows instinctively that this vision of our place in the universe has got to be more important than crushing political opponents.

I wonder what it was about the decades since we last landed on the Moon that made Americans turn inward. Our journeys outward created a whole image of the future that was bright; the future seemed limitless, as long as we could stave off a nuclear war that long. Sure, it was overly optimistic, but a little extra optimism certainly doesn't hurt when you're dreaming, and when those dreams can take you forward to new and better ways of living. Certainly not everyone, but many people, could look up at the sky and dream because the “space age” promised us a better tomorrow. It inspired a generation of scientists and a half-century of innovation that transformed our lives for the better.

The press toward tomorrow seems to have slacked. In some ways, it seems like there is no sense of tomorrow in our public consciousness at all. Try it yourself: where do you see the world in five years? Of course we can't guess what will happen, but if the world were to become better in some way, how would it be different in five years? What about in ten, or twenty, or fifty? It might have nothing to do with science or the universe, and it doesn't have to be spelled out. This is a dream, of course. What kind of world do you want to enjoy tomorrow, or to pass on to the next generation?

I don't know about you, but I find it kind of hard to do that, particularly if I'm trying to think of a dream that all of America could believe in. But if we don't dream it, it will never happen. I think the long, slow decline of the space program is just one more casualty to a more general sense of aimlessness in American society. I think that aimlessness was looking for an outlet in both “Change and Hope” and “Taxed Enough Already.” We don't know, as a people, what we want or what we want to be—not even in a vague sense.

What do you think? What dream would you see America pursue in the next century?

Both the Voyager 1 photo and the Neil deGrasse Tyson clip were pointed out to me by NPR's excellent science blog, 13.7 (as in billion years, the age of the universe as far as we can tell.)  All photos are non-copyrighted, courtesy of NASA.

Transcript of the Tyson clip:

Bill Maher: Congress is considering pulling the plug on the, uh, James Webb Space Telescope—

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Don't get me started!

M: No, I want to get you started! This is the successor to the Hubble, and they say it can peer into the universe and maybe see the moment when the universe was born. I don't even know how that can happen. But it costs 6.8 billion dollars, which, by the way, is the same amount that it costs to be in Afghanistan for one month. So, either way, we're sinking money into a black hole. But they're thinking of pulling the plug on this, and it just says to me—you know—why can't we—and I'm not usually a big supporter for these kinds of things,

T: I know.

M: . . . but compared to Afghanistan, compared to the tax cuts for the billionaires,

T: Compared to anything.

M: . . . it seems we won't do anything for the public good.

T: Well, first of all, let's clarify what the NASA's budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion uh... with the banks...

Woman: TARP.

M: The bailout.

T: Yes. The bailout. The bank bailout. That sum of money—

M: Could reach Venus.

(laughter)

T: That sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA. And so when someone says we don't have enough money for this space probe, I ask, no, it's not that you don't have enough money, its that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow. Do you remember—do you remember the '60s—do you remember the 60s and 70s, you didn't have to go more than a week before there's an article in LIFE Magazine: the home of tomorrow, the city of tomorrow, transportation of tomorrow. All that ended in the 1970s. After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming. And so I worry that decisions that congress makes doesn't factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow's gone.

M: You know what, we're—

T: They're playing for—tomorrow, metaphorically tomorrow, not the literal tomorrow—they're playing for the quarterly report, they're playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation. The rest of the countr—the rest of the world will pass us by.