Let's keep flying
The Space Shuttle disaster has overshadowed everything, including the pending war with Iraq. That will change, probably tomorrow, but today I'd like to stop for a minute and focus completely on what has just taken place.
People like to talk about priorities. There are personal priorities -- work versus family, love versus devotion, reading versus shoveling the driveway -- mostly boring stuff. It is much more engaging to think about universal priorities -- a list that can be pinned on humanity's forehead. Naturally, every person, country and culture has such a list. To a degree, much of the conflict that we see emanates from differences among lists, and the unwillingness of one country/culture to accept another's list.
For those of us who were born after the launching of Sputnik, and especially after the Mercury and Apollo missions, space exploration, and our presence in space are natural phenomena, something to be expected. For those of us who also happened to have grown up on Star Trek, and its brighter and positive vision of the future, space travel was not only part of the natural order of things, it was also a central theme -- a necessary component of the view of the future.
Saturday's tragedy brought several things to the fore, at least for me. Humanity, by its very nature, abhors stasis. Some sort of expansion and movement is necessary to keep things going; I am not sure why this is the case, but it appears we were just drawn that way. While throughout history war was often the mechanism of expansion (hence the origin of the aristocracy was always in the warrior class), today war could only serve economic, not territorial needs (it mostly serves death, in multiple courses and infinite variety). Consequently soldiering is no longer considered to be a gentleman's occupation, as it were. So, it is not a soldier who stands at the vanguard of humanity, but an explorer; and unlike the explorers of old, today's explorer is more likely to be a scientist than a cut throat (I am sure there are exceptions).
The people who died on the shuttle on Saturday were engaged in a crucial business. All of our scurrying means nothing if we are forever tied to this particular planet -- we breed too quickly, and eventually we will suffocate on our own poisons. The tragedy brought home the importance of the process in which we are engaged -- the endeavor to expand humanity's territorial horizons, to elevate our current scurrying to truly cosmic proportions.
6:12:46 AM 
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