Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ~ Arthur C. Clarke
When I was a little girl, I used to explore my grandparent's basement.
It was a treasure trove to a child with an overactive imagination, and everything in it was ripe for discovery. My grandfather's workbench was a high tech mystery. Mechanical odds and ends warring with pieces of old radios and televisions, surrounded by tools that I knew none of their purposes. There were black and white family photos filling an entire antique suitcase. The frames whispered of undiscovered family stories, the players mere shadows in sepia tones. Odd geometric paintings my mother painted in high school that I used to puzzle over, trying to decipher the meaning. And then there was, to me, the pinnacle of the collection: my grandfather's National Geographics.
He had been collecting them since the late 60's. Lined up in a bookcase, a chronological archive of the last 30 years of scientific achievement and discovery. I used to browse them, and I remember the day I found the December 1969 issue.
Man Walks on Another World proclaimed the title. I sat there on the basement floor, unaware of the cold tile and the dim light, and poured over the old magazine. Interspersed between retro ads, I read the details of the first lunar landing, written when they were still fresh, exciting, and new. I marveled at the photos of the astronauts, the lander, the things they collected. I carefully read the transcript of the entire mission, the words that first traveled back from the surface of the moon.
And in the back of the issue, still untouched almost 30 years later, was an old 45. I found a record player, and listened to the bumps and beeps that emitted from the small record. Eyes closed and mouth open, huge retro earphones encasing my small head, I listened in awed silence to the recordings picked up from the first lunar landing. I was sitting down in a cramped basement, but surrounded by the the infinite sounds of space.
From very early on, I have been fascinated with the idea of space and space travel. Influenced, no doubt, by a father with a penchant for science fiction, I dreamed of space exploration. I was enamored by the idea of it; living and working in space, seeking out dangerous and unknown locations, exploring the very limits of what we already know. An adolescent fascination that grew into a mature love of the same subject matter.
I believe its my wanderlust that had fuelled my continued interest in space and planets. Or perhaps it was my childish fascination with the infinite of space that grew into a love for travel. But whatever the case, interest in space is, I believe, a natural consequence of a desire to travel.
Compared to even a mere 300 years ago, our world is small and constantly shrinking. The result of civilization and advanced technology. Categorization of the world means the limiting of uncharted territories and unexplored plains.
But in space travel, we can rediscover that excitement. When we do finally make our way into space (and I have no illusions of it being anytime soon) it will be as explorers. Like men who boarded billowing ships to sail to distant parts unknown 400 years ago. But we will replace the endless sea with the vaccuum of space.
Perhaps this is the child in me speaking again. An idealistic viewpoint at best. We are hardly anywhere near the technology for light speed travel, a necesity for realistic space travel, and our nearest star systems are light years away. Internal stability would also be necessary for organized space exploration, and there are too many problems on our own planet to worry about looking to others.
But perhaps that's the very reason why we should. With most news devoted to the usual round of economic troubles, political dissonance, and impending disasters, there was a story that flew under the radar a few weeks ago that brought out that little girl again. The one who used to watch Star Trek on her father's knee, and hide away in her grandparent's basement listening to recordings of space.
A mere twenty light years away, astrophysicists have discovered the first habitable planet outside our solar system.
Orbiting a nearby red dwarf star called Gliese 581, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institute of Washington have discovered the planet Gliese 581g, nicknamed Zarmina. A rocky planet about 4 to 5 times the size of earth, it orbits within the "habitable zone" around the star. In other words, a place where there is liquid water, temperatures friendly to life, and enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere.
Not that life there is identical to Earth. Gliese 581g is tidally locked with its star. This means that, not unlike our moon, during its 37 day orbit one side of the planet would always face the sun, while the other side would be locked in darkness. Neither is ideal, but there would be a terminator zone; an area of eternal twilight where night and day meet.
There, bathed in the reddish gold of dusk, would be the ideal conditions for life to thrive. Atmosphere enough to keep water liquid, gravity not too heavy, and a temperature we would neither freeze nor boil in.
But the ifs, whats, and hows pales in comparison to the significance of such a discovery. Definitive proof that planets that can support life, at least as we define it, exist elsewhere in the galaxy. And since there is one practically in our intergalactic backyard, it must mean that such a thing is fairly common.
And that is the seed of excitement, the core of the inspiration such an idea can produce. Since then, I have seen an outpouring from people about this new planet. An article in which a physicist proposed developing a type of engine that could get us there in about 6 years. People imagining colonies and human life aboard this planet. Every day people postulating and dreaming once again of space, and our future as an infinitesimal part of the awe-inspiring whole.
I am part of a time, and a generation, that looks to the next hour instead of the future. We live in the day to day. We save, selfishly worrying only about our own immediate future and comfort, and not what can lay beyond. Concerned only about the self, we are blinded to what we can achieve as a whole.
And something about that is a colossal shame. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be a child in 1969, and feel like all of space and time was out there before me. To steal from an eminent writer, that is such stuff as dreams are made on.
Steve Vogt, the UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist who discovered the planet, gave an interview to the website io9. In it, he talked of the amazing odds against a planet like Gliese 581g even existing. I believe it also sums up why it is so awe-inpsiring:
It's hard to make this obvious in a soundbite but the universe is a vast place and most of it is totally unavailable for life as we know it. There are two things in the universe you can't get around: Temperature and gravity. So if you are in interstellar space you're at 2.7 degrees kelvin. Your atoms are hardly vibrating and you're not going to be alive. Life as we know it can't survive. So you have to be near a star. That's good, but stars have gravity and you can fall into them. Your only hope is to be near a star but not falling into it – you need an orbit. And that's magical.
And that is magical. Not only in its very existence, but also in what it can inspire in a generation that no longer thinks of space.
Hopefully it's enough for us to once again look to the stars, and dream of a future out there amongst them.
