SO LONG AS WE HAVE STARS
Our fascination with space travel will be in us so long as we have all those stars in our sky beckoning. Like travelers who followed them on the waves of our oceans – so long as they are there, we are called back to our roots from another time, called time travel – before earth became home.
Nobody said it better than our recent great astronomer, Dr. Carl Sagan. He had vision many never give thought to; giving rise to these words in his 1970’s TV’s COSMOS Documentary Series.
(Quote) ‘Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth, each of those worlds are as real as ours. In every one of them them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds; numberless moments, an immensity of space and time.
And on our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch-point in history. What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well.
If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of the Classical Civilization and the time of the Italian Renaissance; but we’re also capable of using our compassion and our intelligent; our technology and our wealth, to make abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant on this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the universe, and carry us to the stars.’ (Unquote.)
We lost a great man too early in 1996, who today must be well and truly no longer in his ‘Ship of the Imagination,’ – as he called it – but reality. Where he looks over earth, waiting for others to join his dream. So long as we have been on earth, ancient stories have never died, of those of a time gone by when our ancestors ‘came from the sky’.
All indigenous folk who still live on a Planet called Earth, in the Space it belongs in; have not disconnected themselves form other worlds they know exist beyond their own. Despite all the seeming disbelief by many who would prefer to hold onto the Earth as being the only inhabited place in such an Infinite Space; it will not – and as yet has not – prevented any explorers trying.
The paradox of this subject is governments deny so much; yet continue to follow the leaders of the past – despite all the accidental set-backs and costs – to sooner or later ‘with hope’, find what they already know. Their archives black-outs are their top secret give aways; and their expeditions proof it is more than a fascination.
While they and we still wait for the golden disks of earthlings, ‘Greetings from the Children of Planet Earth’ to be discovered, as further and further Voyager 1 goes into deeper Space. But we have not even been out of our own Solar System, let alone our Galaxy.
Everything adds up to more than a fascination; and the cost of lives and money are no different to when the Voyagers of the Oceans, set out to find new lands. It is an ‘automatic inbuilt’ within humans, as much as it is to breath our air to live.
So long as we keep looking up, Space is all we have to see, plus at night, so long as we have stars. And so long as there are inventors for the good of mankind, rather than destruction; there is hope we can grow beyond such an outdated shuttle, called a piggy-back on a rocket to the moon.
Too many books and their pages – classed as SciFi, or fiction – are still waiting to be understood. While others wait like the pieces of a jig-saw, to be placed together so that the Space-ship of the Imagination is a reality we have conquered, once we have proven we can live in Peace first, on Planet Earth.
