What I REALLY think about Space

Happy St. Earth's Day!

(Africa actually much bigger in real life. How many more mistakes can you spot?)

Below is a terribly on-brand TED talk (painful intro, but good meat) delivering a potted literary history of some of the lunar fantasies which might have inspired space flight, and namechecking Cyrano De Bergerac and the Baltimore Gun Club both of whom can be seen above toasting a cosmonaut alongside Baron Munchausen in one of my favourite films of all time. I'm a sucker for this kind of cataloguing - I love finding out where ideas come from, especially if the results involve illustrations of Jacobeans borne over a pointy island by a rig of geese - and as long term readers of this blog will know, this historical symbiosis of stark pottiness and scientific innovation was a big influence on me finally rolling up my sleeves and writing a whole two episodes of "Time Spanner".

But. There must have been a reason I made the narrator of that show a dead dog, and located its traditional scifi tropes not in outer space but in "Heaven", a dimension of things that don't exist, and with Extinction Rebellion taking so well to the streets I've been growing more honest with myself about exactly what it is I expect humanity to be able to pull off, and reconsidering just how very big space is, and I reckon Alex McDonald's talk misses something very big - that Carl Sagan, who was right about so much, might not have been right about this. Guys... I don't think we're going into Space. Sorry, but even if we survive for another million years I just don't think there's anything out there worth the intergalactic faff. I mean it's really far away, and those tales we told ourselves of other worlds were hangovers from sea-faring days, the hopes of encountering higher intelligences a hangover from angels, and so the idea that these exciting space adventures might have inspired billions upon billions' worth of scientific research seems more hilarious to me now than wonderful. Wasn't "flight" once synonymous with fleeing - hence "fight or flight"?* But we're never leaving home, not really. Because what's out there isn't Heaven, it's at best a well. And however much we lower into it, if there is such a thing as human destiny I'm pretty convinced now that it will be played out on this pale blue dot. We need something else to explore then, which is good news, I think. I don't know what NASA should be doing in the meantime though, apart from splashing out on a few more lady space suits. Drugs?

You're welcome.

Actual size of Africa (from back when BBC1 was the whole world.)

* I also found out recently that "cope" comes from the French "coup", so it's not a synonym for bearing at all in fact, but for fighting. Like I say, I love finding out where ideas come from.