Pale Blue Dot ( PDFDrive.com ) (1)

problems, NASA was rated as doing a good-to-excellent job by 63 percent of Americans. With no
reference to cost, 75 percent of Americans (according to a CBS News poll) favored "the United
States sending astronauts to explore Mars.' For young adults, the figure was 68 percent. I think
"explore" is the operative word.
It is no accident that, whatever their human flaws, and how ever moribund the human space
program has become (a trend that the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission may have helped to
reverse), astronauts and cosmonauts are still widely regarded as heroes of our species. A scientific
colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age
culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and
frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They
knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the
Moon these days.
Projects that are future-oriented, that, despite their political difficulties, can be completed only in
some distant decade are continuing reminders that there will be a future. Winning a foothold on other
worlds whispers in our ears that we're more than Picts or Serbs or Tongans: We're humans.
Exploratory spaceflight puts scientific ideas, scientific thinking, and scientific vocabulary in the
public eye. It elevates the general level of intellectual inquiry. The idea that we've now understood
something never grasped by anyone who ever lived before—that exhilaration, especially intense for
the scientists involved, but perceptible to nearly everyone—propagates through the society, bounces
off walls, and comes back at us. It encourages us to address problems in other fields that have also
never before been solved. It increases the general sense of optimism in the society. It gives currency
to critical thinking of the sort urgently needed if we are to solve hitherto intractable social issues. It
helps stimulate a new generation of scientists. The more science in the media-especially if methods
are described, as well as conclusions and implications-the healthier, I believe, the society is. People
everywhere hunger to understand.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD , my most exultant dreams were about flying—not in some machine, but all by
myself. I would be skipping or hopping, and slowly I could pull my trajectory higher. It would take
longer to fall back to the ground. Soon I would be on such a high arc that I wouldn't come down at all.
I would alight like a gargoyle in a niche near the pinnacle of a skyscraper, or gently settle down on a
cloud. In the dream—which I must have had in its many variations at least a hundred times—
achieving flight required a certain cast of mind. It's impossible to describe it in words, but I can
remember what it was like to this day. You did something inside your head and at the pit of your
stomach, and then you could lift yourself up by an effort of will alone, your limbs hanging limply. Off
you'd soar.
I know many people have had similar dreams. Maybe most people. Maybe everyone. Perhaps it
goes back 10 million years or more, when our ancestors were gracefully flinging themselves from
branch to branch in the primeval forest. A wish to soar like the birds motivated many of the pioneers
of flight, including Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers. Maybe that's part of the appeal of
spaceflight, too.