The beauty and glory of the universe has
painted itself into every aspect of our lives, and our folk lore proves it. We
as a species have a love affair with words; every culture has painted vistas of
creation that mark our place out as special, as unique, as divinely created. We
have married our eloquence to our imaginations and birthed gods.
From being built from the bones of the
first giant, to being formed from forge fired steel, humanity has wondered at
our vistas. We have looked at majestic mountains and seen them as the homes of
divine beings, we have looked at oceans and seen the wombs from which goddesses
rose. The majesty is all around us and we have struggled to quantify it since
we developed language. If the awe we feel whilst standing at the edge of a vast
expanse of living water is a gauge, how much more awe will we feel when we
stand at the gateway to our galaxy? Is the wonder we feel at reaching a summit
going to compare the elation we will feel as we move past our galactic neighborhood?
Will we look upon new vistas and see the hands of gods? Will we revel in the
beauty and wonder of our new and ever expanding horizon?
What is on that new horizon? Everything,
that isn’t hyperbole everything is on that horizon. Humans change with their
environment, what a wondrous avenue of change a whole galaxy of new venues and
change. There are billions of stars and planets, and human ingenuity is
limitless and the best way to push that ingenuity is to push our horizons. Let
us find out what we need to survive on mars, or to mine the water from titan,
let us develop interstellar ships that can support the multigenerational travel
from here to our nearest neighbors, let’s go! We aren’t stuck here, we have
minds that are unhindered, and we have opposable thumbs, let’s get the hell out
of dodge! I want to summer on mars, and winter on Io. I want to go on safari on
the distant moons of some unnamed planet forty million light years away, and so
do you.
I have a friend, let’s call her
Cheesey(she gets it and she just laughed so fuck you), she is one of my
favorite people. Cheesey is a biologist and an exuberant one. To see her face
as she is cataloging alien plants would be the next greatest thing to being on
the alien planet next to her. My mother, HI MOM!, is a Christian and to see her
attempting to evangelize an alien species would be the highlight of my year. I
could go on, with each of my friends and family members, but there is one thing
I want to see more than any of these things, something I want more than to be
the man to step foot on the red planet. I want to read the words of that man; I
want to listen as his heart bursts with awe as the sun rises over the rust
colored mountains. I want to watch as his soul is reformed with each new day in
a new land. To witness a man’s evolution through his own words when he is
confronted with terrifying glory of space would be the grandest of privileges. I
do want to clarify; I want to be the man that writes those words, I want to
have my mettle tested by a month’s long journey to a barren rock, I want to be
the first man to die struggling for breath on Martian soil, and most of all I
want my words to be the ones that inspire your children to brave the void. I,
however, have to live in the real world and thus I want to live long enough to
read the words of that lucky bastard who will leave his or her bones out there.
I had completely intended for this to be
a love letter to the galaxy, just ask my mother I told her all about it last
night, but it turned out to be a love letter to words. I truly do love words,
they have a power that is unparalleled, but it isn’t the word itself that has
power it is eloquence. Eloquence is power; it is the eloquence of people like Neil
DeGrasse Tyson that are inspiring us to look to the stars again. It was due to
eloquence that I fell in love with a woman who was no more than words on paper,
that is magic, it is power, it is something that transcends reality. I cannot
express this enough.
We live in a galaxy of chaotic balls of
burning gas that all press on each other pushing planets into order and imparting
energy onto marbles of stone and water that may support organisms that
constantly challenge one another to be better, stronger, sneakier, fitter,
which leads to a species that has the ability to write an ode to very star that
birthed them. We are a species that feels not only a drive to propagate, to
hunt, and survive, but we feel… everything. We feel heartbreak, we feel relief,
we feel love; but all of that pales in comparison the fact that we share these
feelings with scribbles on parchment.
The universe is ours to discover, I only
hope that those who discover it have the language, the power, the eloquence to
make us fall in love with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment