Jaquandor points us today to an opinion piece by comic-book writer and novelist Warren Ellis on the public’s waning enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. Ellis is a bit more curmudgeonly than myself — I know, difficult to believe, but as misanthropic as I sometimes get, I can’t quite bring myself to suggest that Twilight fans “could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser.” The woman I love reads those books, you know, and I’d rather not see her turned into Gro-Mor. Go figure.

I also don’t share Ellis’ concern with getting people into space as a hedge against extinction. This is a good reason for colonizing other worlds, to be sure, and it’s one many people believe ought to be paramount, but I myself have never been able to warm to this particular line of thinking. I’m just not enough of a doomsday-ist, I guess; I am less inspired by fear than by nobler sentiments.

Which is why Ellis’ rant doesn’t start to echo my own thinking until right about here:

Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it’s in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.

 

We’re almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We’re just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.
In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.

Here, here. I have a lot of respect and affection for those Mars rovers that Ellis sneeringly dismisses as “skateboards” (actually, I think I’m guilty of calling them that myself), but it’s the idea of human eyes looking out on those fantastic, literally unearthly landscapes that fires me up. Being human means you do some things simply because no one else has ever done them before, and somewhere along the line, I think we’ve lost touch with that aspect of our nature. I couldn’t care less about the latest cell phone, myself. Buttons, touchscreen, telepathic interface… who cares? It’s a phone. But crossing the horizon, just to find out what’s over there? Now that‘s exciting!

My friend Mike Gillilan sent this to me last night, and I thought it warranted sharing:

That’s the space shuttle Discovery (obviously) arriving at the International Space Station. I believe the structure in the upper part of the photo is one of several Russian spacecraft currently docked there; the Soyuz and Progress capsules serve as taxis, resupply ships, garbage disposal units, and, in an emergency, escape pods for the station crew.

Sorry the thumbnail is so small, but this is apparently how Twitter codes images for embedding on other websites. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to the full-size Twitpic version. It’s worth a click, believe me; the sharpness of the original is breathtaking.

After you look at this picture, be sure to check out the entire feed. It’s the personal Twitter account (or whatever the hell you call it) of a Japanese astronaut named Soichi Noguchi, and he posts at least a couple new photos every day. Here are a couple of my recent favorites:

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That’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the day Discovery launched. The two roundish features to the right are the launch pads, one of which would’ve been occupied by the shuttle when this was taken. And here’s one that’s not so great, technically speaking — there’s quite a bit of “noise” in the image — but is beautiful and awesome — in the original, pre-1980s sense of that word — nonetheless:

The green glow that looks like classic Star Trek phaserfire is in fact the aurora borealis, the famed northern lights; a pair of Soyuz capsules are in the foreground.

As much as I gripe about the way the 21st century has turned out (as opposed to the way we all imagined it), how incredible is it that we have people living in space, taking photographs of what they’re seeing, and sending back to us via the Internet?