January 1, 2019, by Brigitte Nerlich
When space becomes the last refuge for the soul
The last few years have been bad, in terms of climate, politics, humanity. I don’t expect this new year to be much better, unless we all pull our socks up, so to speak.
Where once we were forward looking and outward looking, embracing the new, engaging with others, many are now more and more inward looking, afraid of the new and of others, and our horizons of expectations are shrinking.
But while our everyday horizons are shrinking, we still have ‘new horizons’ in space (I know, bad pun). And that is something to be grateful for.
Today is the day that NASA’s space probe New Horizons flies by the farthest and possibly oldest cosmic body ever explored by humans. With this probe NASA is going almost literally to the edges of the world to take pictures and more of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
People had speculated about the existence of the Kuiper Belt, a belt of icy space objects, for a while but evidence for it was only found in 1992! New Horizons started its journey towards it in 2006, reaching Pluto in 2015 and sending back the most amazing pictures. Ultima Thule is one million miles past Pluto.
New Horizons is supposed to beam back first scientific data on Ultima Thule’s geology, composition, atmosphere and more today – and pictures of course! And so far things are looking good. These data and images might give us insights into how planets, including our own dear little earth, were formed. [Added on 6 January: We now know that Ultima Thule looks like a snowman, which, of course, reminded many of 67P, the rubber duck; a nice blog post on the snowman by Ian Sheard can be found here; an older post on the rubber duck here]
If you want to know why and how the new icy object of interest was chosen to be ‘scienced’, you can read this interesting thread by Alex Parker; and for updates follow NASA’s New Horizon twitter account.
(Ultra high res image now, 25th January, 2019, available here)
Beyond borders
The name Ultima Thule is based on a mixture of Latin and Greek and mythology of the far north. As Wikipedia points out: “Thule (/ˈθjuːliː/ THEW-leeGreek: Θούλη Thoúlē, Latin: Thūlē) was the place located furthest north, which was mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature and cartography. In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin ‘furthermost Thule’) acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the ‘borders of the known world’.”
I have used an image of ‘Thule’ as represented on a medieval map by Olaus Magnus (1539) as the featured image for this post.
But there is also music! When trawling the internet, I found that in 1971 a German band called Tangerine Dream included a song entitled “Ultima Thule” in their rock album “Alpha Centauri”!
It is always nice to find these intersections between science, engineering, technology and culture!* We are all connected by space, time and culture. We should not let people draw us apart or erect real or metaphorical borders between us!
Collaboration and togetherness
While I started writing this post on the morning of 1 January, 2019, I switched on the radio and discovered that the Radio 4 Today programme was devoted to space. My ears pricked up especially at 8.36 or so when Jason Crusan of NASA said: “If you want to go quick go alone. If you want to stay go together.” Another version of this saying goes: “If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together.” Togetherness is key.
If you want to broaden your horizons, go together; don’t withdraw into splendid isolation. This could be a motto for the new year, couldn’t it?
This made me think about what has happened since the beginning of 2016, when our horizons began to narrow, while, at the same time, our space horizons started to expand. I only list a few events that caught my eye.
All these missions are based on international collaborations, on people working together, not apart.
In 2016 the NASA’s spacecraft Juno reached Jupiter; the Kepler mission continued to verify more than a thousand newfound alien planets; the Hubble Space Telescope sent pictures back of water vapour plumes erupting from Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. 2016 was also the year that ESA’s historic Rosetta mission concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet 67P it had been investigating since 2014.
In 2017, NASA’s Cassini probe, which had been orbiting Saturn since 2004, plunged to its death. In 2018, NASA sent a new lander to Mars; it sent the Parker Solar Probe to the sun; it sent a spacecraft to an asteroid called Bennu, and he European and Japanese space agencies launched BepiColombo, a mission to explore the planet Mercury. And so on…..
Between 2016 and 2018, when our world was shrinking, space was there as a solace for the collective soul.
A moral imperative
I have quoted him before, but I’ll do so again now, as we enter a new year where we need all the moral guidance we can get.
Immanuel Kant said in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”
Let’s do that, all of us!
*I have just (2nd January) become aware of some controversy surrounding this name; for more info see here and here
–“The last few years have been bad, in terms of climate, politics, humanity.”–
Have they? By what means were these years measured and compared with their previous?
No doubt events may have not unfolded the way you wanted them to. But your preferences are not obviously equivalent to ‘climate, politics, humanity’.
Kant’s categorical imperative requires humans to be treated as ends-in-themselves. Guessing at what motivates your bleak view of the past few years, their events were the consequence of that principle having been abandoned long ago, and the Universal presupposed by the populations of remote institutions, rather than assented to by autonomous, rational ends-in-themselves. The re-assertion of *sovereignty*, per Kant, may make it harder to assert your own understanding of ‘climate politics, humanity’, and perhaps the lofty understanding of the same prevails where there is a preoccupation with them as universals in spite of what others, away from such heights think… But that is to say that what you believed was universal perhaps was not. It certainly was not tested. And it does seem to have been taken for granted. From another — Kantian — perspective, it might have been a great three years for politics and humanity, and perhaps even for ‘climate’. Uncomfortable, perhaps. But who says such things must be always be comfortable? Every meaningful political assertion of humanity over its constraints has been traumatic. To be blind to the possibility of having been on the wrong side of that disjuncture is to be blind to the fact that it was there all along. Or perhaps simply indifferent to its existence screaming at you, so much for Kant. It wouldn’t be more obvious if it wore a hi-vis yellow vest.
— “Between 2016 and 2018, when our world was shrinking, space was there as a solace for the collective soul.” —
I can see why you might want to escape there. But you ought to be more cautious about paying for your ticket with a claim to speak for a ‘collective soul’ — you having misread the universal once already. Your return journey to Earth is not going to be any more pleasant for missing the lesson the second time.
Not everybody is as pessimistic as I am, for sure. I am not sure, however, that what has been happening has been a ‘meaningful political assertion of humanity over its constraints’ and I also believe that for many what has been happening has indeed been deeply ‘traumatic’. Should one not strive to minimise trauma in politics and social life, by treating people with respect and dignity, something that might go out of the window when striving to free humanity form constraints (what constraints are these?)? But yes, I should have idolised Kant less and left the word collective out before soul. My soul, whatever that may, is not everybody’s soul.
Of course you’re not sure. But as was suggested, that’s possibly because you misjudged the world prior to its reality being revealed to you. That was a world that was no less traumatic for many who felt they had been denied the respect and dignity they deserved, and who were ultimately offered a way to change it and took it. Limited though those choices may have been, they are first steps to the possibility of un-limiting them that was not possible before them, even if they also create the possibilities of things we don’t like.
The time to anticipate or mitigate trauma was, as suggested, as the Universal was being taken for granted, presupposed, while others were treated as means to those projects, not as ends-in-themselves. It is an intransigence, characteristic of many contemporary institutions, which built up the energy of the current trauma, in spite of a number of them being charged with understanding what is going on in society. They misjudged the world — which is to say they caused their own trauma, I guess, as any mis-step can lead to a tumble, in which the world seems to turn upside down to the perspective of the observer as he or she finds a new accommodation with reality. Or, as Kant might say,
“Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, [Copernicus] tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects.”
— what constraints are these? —
I think the best test of whether or not people are being treated as ends in themselves, and what is or is not universal are democratic tests. I think the last three years have given much evidence that belief is sound. I do not have to like particular democratic choices to prefer democratic choice. It is very likely that I wont like particular choices, but I agree to suffer them for the form of the process, which recognises differences of perspective and claims to universality as such.
What remains to be seen is whether better politics… and better research… do emerge from it. I believe that they can, and I hope that they will. The biggest obstacle to them now seems to be those who resent and regret those events, as though they had no part of them, and who do not want to let go of what undemocratic compacts gave them. They will prolong and deepen any trauma.
Agree, existing trauma precipitated beliefs and events that are now being framed as a way of liberating people from those traumas. However, the ‘remedies’ might be worse than than the cause, adding insult to injury, and injuring more people than before. But I suppose we have to disagree about how we see this process and its eventual (democratic) outcome. This post was more a cri de coeur than a really deeply thought-through treatise 🙂