Bookends
Tri (three), dva (two), adeen (one), nol (zero). Countdown to nostalgia in space history began at least a week ago, leading to this day when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Russian spacecraft Sputnik on
Reading all the articles particularly in
My parents were barely teenagers yet in 1957 on that first attempt to launch a spacecraft. I do not remember them talking about what they were doing when Sputnik launched. But the race to space that followed between the Russians and the Americans which led to the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969 inspired my Dad enough to make him write my nursery graduation speech using that launch as a metaphor to launch my own growth to learn beyond the confines of our own home. I used to think that Dad did that to show off — which I think was lost in the audience then since our neighborhood then was not exactly the center of intellectual sophistication. But when I asked him recently why he wrote it that way, he laughed and said it was for me and not for anyone else. He said he wanted the Apollo landing to lend me the feeling of confidence — of being able to raise my sights beyond the fanfare of nursery ceremonies. I thought that was really sweet of Dad but I was only four years old then and though I enjoyed delivering the speech and felt special, I was overwhelmed with itch courtesy of the pretty but uncomfortable clothes that my mother got for me.
Oddly enough, that sense of ambiguity about the human reach for space, 37 years later, still inhabits me. I have read enough about the universe since I was four to know that Sputnik is a teardrop in an oceanic universe in terms of conquering it. It is a 13.8 billion-year-old universe that grows at an accelerated rate so “conquest” as a goal in space seems like something you will only aim for if you are on some illegal substance or a politician who really does not think carefully about what he or she says as long as it sounds grand.
But in terms of our own measure as a species, the impact of Sputnik is deep. From our evolution from common ancestors we shared with other creatures, we have come to be the species that we are, from babies who start out crawling and then walking upright, climbing on to our parents’ arms, then scaling staircases, stages, mountains and pedestals, constructing totem poles and altars, edifices that vertically aim for the skies, we constantly reach upward. And when the human mind was able to work out the physical laws necessary to propel human tools to scribble the human signature onto the once unreachable heavens, that spoke of the unquenchable and determined character of the human spirit.
Sputnik hovered the Earth in orbit for 22 days sending radio signals until it was afflicted by a common technological condition we are all familiar with known as “low batt” and fell back to Earth. But it spawned the space race, including technologies like satellites we now rely on for many things, particularly communications and information-gathering.
I think it is beautifully ironic that it was in looking at the universe — which meant that we were looking at our past — that we were propelled into looking at the technological possibilities for our future as humans. Seeing anything out there in space requires light and that requires time to travel so that by the time you see something, it is only a picture of the past. The universe is never on “real time” for our viewing. In fact, in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, Chapter 4 is entitled “Let There Be Dark” to describe the unfathomable expanse of dark spaces in between the sparse lighted ones.
I am a seesaw of thoughts, with Blaise Pascal seated on one end and an ancient named Enuma Elish (2500 BC) whose words I found in Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos, on the other end. I understand what Blaise Pascal meant when he wrote: “It is not from space that I must seek my dignity but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.” But I also have Enuma Elish on the other end to check on my human hubris. He wrote it best when he speculated that maybe humans just think they are in a special place like no other in the universe but that in reality, “In the orchards of the gods, he watches the canals...” I think that you need to know and feel that vastness of the universe because the humility it brings gives a balanced perspective on the universe which holds us all — humans, stars and galaxies alike. Otherwise, we will end up like the cartoon character that Tyson described in his book Origins where the character was looking at the stars and told his companion how insignificant the stars were.
You cannot let your own inner universe hold you hostage. But even if you are a tiny butterfly in an Amazonian forest as big as the universe, you still are alive to taste and participate in the quest on what it means to be alive! Sputnik celebrates its 50th anniversary today. Since it was launched, the universe has expanded even more. Sputnik has indeed spawned space generations of technology but even if we rage with our fiercest passions in space, we can never reach the edge because in an expanding universe, there is no edge. But we have the bookends of each of our lifetimes to make our instance in the universe more than just a passing of our individual genomes, at least for ourselves and for the ones to whom we matter. Launch a countdown to your own Sputnik of a life and make it matter to you.
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