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LOOKING OUT AND BACK

24/02/2021 23:59:00 By Chris Morgan

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WE are hugely encouraged by the reduction in the number of recorded deaths and infections linked to COVID-19, and thank the leadership and the gallant and indefatigable (I’ve always wanted to use that word) health workers for their skills and commitment. One mustn’t prejudge the outcome but we can’t be holding our breath forever; very lucky to have any at all. During times of great challenge – we are in one now – some diversion, whether mental or physical, is invigorating for us. So let’s take a break today from writing about all that tragedy and trauma.

Wealthy

We learn that a number of extremely wealthy people have paid to travel on an exotic journey to a space station in outer space in a year’s time. Some would have preferred that they divert that cash (nearly one billion Emalangeni each) to providing assistance to the less well off in the world. But they are, of course, entitled to spend their money as they wish. And we will presumably be able to share some of their experience while they are in space, especially checking whether they have their toes crossed, as well as their fingers.

Long before the birth of Christ, almost everyone in the neighbourhood – you didn’t go further in those days – worshipped the sun. It’s hardly surprising because it brought light, warmth and plant growth; and unknown to most, if not all of them, it also created power; and told people in the pre-Neolithic age when to get up in the morning, when to go to bed at night and when to look for a bit of shade. Little did they know that the sun would much later rank as yet another star – a big and powerful one – and one of billions in what would become known as our Milky Way galaxy. But, hang on, that’s just one galaxy. We now know the universe has billions of galaxies. Whaaat? The ‘a’ on my keyboard stopped functioning otherwise I would have continued pressing. Even today, with the knowledge that mankind has, we are unable to put all that in perspective.

Step

Those of us enjoying what I will euphemistically call ‘the later years’ – I refuse to use the words ‘twilight’ and ‘denial’ – will remember the day Yuri Gagarin from the Union of Soviet and Socialist Republics (where’s that?) circled the Earth in Vostik 1 and all in outer space; sensational! We can all remember his name even though we’ve long forgotten the name of the road we lived in, 60 years ago. And then eight years later, the United States, through the Apollo 11 spacecraft, dropped astronaut Neil Armstrong on the moon; unbelievable! He then proceeded to utter the famous words as he took ‘one small step for Man, but one giant step for Mankind’. Except he later claimed that he had actually said ‘… one small step for a man ...’; not a big deal but it did make more sense. What seemed to intrigue people, apart from visualising what it would feel like if the landing craft then left without you, was the sensation that Armstrong must have had when looking out from the moon and seeing earth in exactly the same setting as we normally see it the other way round. I suspect astronauts were ruthlessly trained to prevent having the terrifying thought – ‘will we now manage to get back home’?

Imagination

And this week there are videos and photographs of a space vehicle landing on Mars. That is just incredible, not in any small way because Mars has had a special place in our imagination as we grow up. The ‘martian’ is the being that lives on Mars and may or may not be friendly, and may or may not be planning a visit next week to planet Earth. How many films have enthralled massive audiences across the world by the odd-looking ‘aliens’, not necessarily with Martian passports, either entering our planet, whizzing by or just hovering above. Even in an online learning app for schools they have a little boy and girl encountering an alien on the playground slide. He or she, or it, left a ‘slippery substance’ on the slide. One imagines the children told the visitor not to come back. Well, I’m afraid those photos of Mars this week didn’t give the impression there was anyone there, ready and able to send the landing craft back where it came from; surely not disappointing?

And it is truly awe-inspiring that we have people in our world able to send a space vehicle 60 million kilometres away from us with that degree of precision. The cynic might say – couldn’t we instead have spent those vast resources working on the threat of viruses, and then sending vaccines to poorer countries so they didn’t have to carry on wearing masks long after people in the rich countries? No, Man is an explorer. He isn’t going to change.