Connection between real life love of space program and love of sci-fi

   

Once, without plan & by chance, I saw a space shuttle landing on TV. It was profoundly thrilling. As the machine came to a stop and stood on the runway, I thought, "That thing has been in outer space. It was JUST THERE and now it's back." I realized I have feelings about space travel that are not subject to rational thought. That is, politics, opinions about the value of space travel and space exploration, don't matter. It's an absolute. We must go into space.

How much does having watched Star Trek since I was six years old have to do with this?

Well, my introduction to the fantasy and the reality of space travel pretty much happened at the same time.

I was six when I first heard these words:
"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Then, two days after my eighth birthday, the people who ran the Hollywood Los Feliz Jewish Center wheeled a TV into the gym and herded us campers in to watch the moon landing.

I knew since then that imagining going into "Space, the Final Frontier" was an indelible part of my reality, as was actually going into space, as in "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".

The confluence of these two experiences left me not only with the imperative that we must go into space, but my own answer to the question "Why must we go into space?"

Glued to NASA TV on my computer screen watching the space shuttle program's final mission to the International Space Station now, in July 2011, I think of the role science fiction has played in shaping this answer:

I think of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. It confronts us with the possibility that an alien intelligence, vastly greater than our own, will judge the merit of our species, and have the power to destroy us based on the outcome of that judgment.

The alien visitor Klaatu, who has landed in Washington DC, explains to a representative of the President of the United States that he must deliver a critical message to all the leaders of the world. The representative says that’s impossible.

The scene demonstrating this impossibility shows attempts to arrange the meeting failing as each possible location is rejected on grounds that seem perfectly reasonable by the standards of 1951.

Now in 2011 the space shuttle Atlantis is docked with an International Space Station made possible by cooperation of leaders of the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Klaatu would be proud. So would Gene Roddenberry.

To see the U.S. and Russia cooperating in space seems like something out of Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future: the Starship Enterprise staffed with officers from the U.S., Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of Africa, and an alien from the planet Vulcan.

I am also thinking of the novelette "Dinosaur Blood" by Richard A. Lovett, published in the January/February 2006 issue of Analog, in which an artificial intelligence probe placed by a loose confederation of aliens monitors the Earth to see whether its current dominant species is worthy of continued existence & possible future membership, or should be considered an evolutionary dead end and destroyed, like its predecessor the dinosaurs.

What, in this story, is the turning point that decides humanity's fate?

When humanity's representative in the eyes of the AI, a young heiress named Trista, brought to its attention by the carbon signature of the burning of the world's last gallon of gasoline, a human with the material resources to make her vision count once her vision is awakened, "had found something that had always been rare and was now nearly nonexistent. She had found the soul of an explorer."

We must come together and cooperate as one planet, and we must explore. Our very survival depends on it.

That's the message of science fiction about space travel, corroborated by the reality of space travel during my lifetime.

Source for my comments about the film The Day The Earth Stood Still: http://www.moviefanfare.com/the-day-the-earth-stood-still/


A timeline of space travel around my lifetime:

October 4, 1957

Sputnik I the first human-made object to orbit the Earth


May 25, 1961

President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.


April 12, 196

Yuri Gagarin, 1st human in space, orbited earth


July 18, 1961

I am born


August 14, 1961

The current president of the United States, Barack Obama, is born


20 July 1969

United States's Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon


12 April 1981

STS-1 First launch of Space Shuttle Columbia


1998

Beginning of construction of the International Space Station


July 8 2011

STS-135 launch final mission space shuttle Atlantis


2011

Completion of US part of ISS


2012

Completion of Russian part of ISS

~ Linda Talisman