Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [101]
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my most exultant dreams were about flying—not in some machine, but all by myself. I would be skipping or hopping, and slowly I could pull my trajectory higher. It would take longer to fall back to the ground. Soon I would be on such a high arc that I wouldn’t come down at all. I would alight like a gargoyle in a niche near the pinnacle of a skyscraper, or gently settle down on a cloud. In the dream—which I must have had in its many variations at least a hundred times—achieving flight required a certain cast of mind. It’s impossible to describe it in words, but I can remember what it was like to this day. You did something inside your head and at the pit of your stomach, and then you could lift yourself up by an effort of will alone, your limbs hanging limply. Off you’d soar.
I know many people have had similar dreams. Maybe most people. Maybe everyone. Perhaps it goes back 10 million years or more, when our ancestors were gracefully flinging themselves from branch to branch in the primeval forest. A wish to soar like the birds motivated many of the pioneers of flight, including Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of spaceflight, too.
In orbit about any world, or in interplanetary flight, you are literally weightless. You can propel yourself to the spacecraft ceiling with a slight push off the floor. You can go tumbling through the air down the long axis of the spacecraft. Humans experience weightlessness as joy; this has been reported by almost every astronaut and cosmonaut. But because spacecraft are still so small, and because space “walks” have been done with extreme caution, no human has yet enjoyed this wonder and glory: propelling yourself by an almost imperceptible push, with no machinery driving you, untethered, high up into the sky, into the blackness of interplanetary space. You become a living satellite of the Earth, or a human planet of the Sun.
Planetary exploration satisfies our inclination for great enterprises and wanderings and quests that has been with us since our days as hunters and gatherers on the East African savannahs a million years ago. By chance—it is possible, I say, to imagine many skeins of historical causality in which this would not have transpired—in our age we are able to begin again.
Exploring other worlds employs precisely the same qualities of daring, planning, cooperative enterprise, and valor that mark the finest in the military tradition. Never mind the night launch of an Apollo spacecraft bound for another world. That makes the conclusion foregone. Witness mere F-14s taking off from adjacent flight decks, gracefully canting left and right, afterburners flaming, and there’s something that sweeps you away—or at least it does me. And no amount of knowledge of the potential abuses of carrier task forces can affect the depth of that feeling. It simply speaks to another part of me. It doesn’t want recriminations or politics. It just wants to fly.
“I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go.” Two centuries later, Yuri Romanenko, on returning to Earth after what was then the longest space flight in history, said “The Cosmos is a magnet … Once you’ve been there, all you can think of is how to get back.”
Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no enthusiast of technology, felt it:
The stars are far above us; we need preliminary instruction, instruments and machines, which are like so many immense ladders enabling us to approach them and bring them within our grasp.
“The future possibilities of space-travel,” wrote the philosopher Bertrand