Looking Forward, Looking Back

Looking Forward, Looking Back

    The other day I happened to pick up an older book, one from 2010.  It was a collection of science and nature articles, one of those "best of" collections for that year.  The editor, Tim Folger, opened his forward this way: Remember the way the future was supposed to be?  The path to tomorrow once seemed so clear, its trajectory limned for the entire world to see in billowing plumes of rocket exhaust in the blue sky over Cape Canaveral...By the late 1960s, astronauts --and cosmonauts-- had walked in space; the first moon landing was at hand.  We had come so far so quickly...No doubt we'd make even greater leaps in the next sixty years.  By the year 2000?  A spinning, spoked space station staffed by hundreds was a given; travel to the moon routine; footprints on the red sands of Mars -- of course.  To my second-grade mind it all seemed closer and more imaginable than my own adulthood.  The space odyssey that once seemed so inevitable never came to pass.  Today, more than forty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, we're unable to follow him there.

    We all have those dreams, those thoughts of a grand future just ahead; why when we grow up, things will be so different, our imaginations again running wild with the possibilities.  This happens with those who are poor as well as those who are everyday workers, and possibly those who are rich.  Our lives will change, our world will change.  Just a few more years down the road...when we grow up.  Also the other day I happened to come across a dual mailing from The Great Courses (as with many such companies, you wonder how they make money with so many expensive mailings and ads in magazines; order one item and your catalogues never cease) and both mailings discussed their sale of history courses.  But look at the titles (and this is a company that specializes in college-level lectures): Conquest of the Americas; The Long 19th Century (this course description: Why did an era that began with the idealism of the French Revloution and the power of the Industrial Revolution culminate in the chaos of World War 1, considered by many historians to be the greatest tragedy of modern European history?); The Greek and Persian Wars; Great Battles of the Ancient World; War and World History; War, Peace, and Power; The Peloponnesian War; Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century; Why Evil Exists; Masters of War; History's Greatest Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach.  Of course, I would belittle this offering by saying there were only "war" courses for of course, many more lectures were and are available, from cooking to ancient wisdoms.  But I was struck at how many history professors had felt strongly enough to present both classes and extensive lectures on war.  And I wondered that if, despite all of our dreams of the future, the one constant seems to be that of war?

    This simplifies everything, of course.  But imagine a child of today, his or her dreams likely no different than yours when you were a child.  But this child (and perhaps yourself) has not grown up without war; perhaps not in his or her backyard, but it is there, somewhere.  What exactly was this need to fight, to claim more land, to own more whatever, to raid and conquer and raise a fist as if this told everyone that power was now yours...at least for this moment.  It was baffling to me...always has been.  But then I read a piece in that collection of articles, this one on the International Space Station.  At last, a symbol of change, a glimpse of what could be, all differences set aside and all cultures working peacefully together...except, it wasn't.

    Freeman Dyson, in an interview with the New York Times, found that: Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”  He is, of course, now retired having once been professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (physicist, mathematician, author, etc.).  Last year, he said this to The Register in England, the interviewer asking: You were being invited to help solve problems in an era when things looked pretty grim, and those problems looked insoluble, during the Cold War, and before Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution.  Now we've conquered a lot of these, but there seems to be an unquenchable thirst for apocalypse.  He replied: [Laughs] Yes.  I don't know why, it's a mood of the times.  I don't understand that better than anyone else.  It is true that there's a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don't think that's the full explanation...It's like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I.  People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life.  [There was] the feeling we'd gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all.   That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it's in the air today.

    So, there's that background.  But he was asked to help guest-edit this collection of articles I was reading, and talked about visiting the Russian town of Baikonur in Kazakhstan: Historic relics of Russian space activities are carefully preserved and displayed in museums...In a public square is a full-scale model of the Soyuz launcher...It is a simple, rugged design and...has the best safety record of all existing launchers for human passengers.  The Russian space culture says, "If it works, why change it?"...In Russia you do not go into space to do science.  You go into space because it is a part of human destiny...The Russian view of the International Space Station is also different from the American view.  The biggest museum in Baikonur contains a full-scale model of the ISS and also a full-scale model of the Mir space station, which the Russians had built twenty years earlier.  The Mir was the first space station built for long-duration human occupation.  When you look at the two space stations, you can see that the ISS is an enlarged version of the Mir.  The Russians are proud that they built the essential parts of the ISS as well as the Mir.  The ISS is part of their culture.  They welcome American passengers, who help to pay for it, but they still feel that they own it.  American scientists and space experts mostly consider the ISS to be an embarrassment, a costly enterprise with little scientific or commercial value.  They regret our involvement with the ISS and look forward to extricating ourselves as soon as our international commitments to it are fulfilled...American space culture thinks in decades...Russian space culture thinks in centuries.

    For some reason, these viewpoints somewhat haunted me as I moved my mother into a new place, her fall now causing her to need a bit more help and attention with walking and other functions (still yelling at me occasionally, which gives me a sense of relief that she is still her old self otherwise).  Watching her grow older to this point, I am reminded that my earlier days of "looking forward" are still there (do we ever really lose them, lose hope?) but realistically, vastly limited.  I can look back to those starry-eyed dreams that editor Tim Folger wrote about, dreams that black and white televisions brought with promises of happy-go-lucky families and friendly robots in space.  But I was a child...and I needed to grow up.  I wanted to believe that John Lennon asking to Give Peace A Chance was not that hard to accomplish, after all, he was now older and no longer a child.  Just like me.  Then he was killed, and war continued.

    Without being maudlin, I realize that despite our history, despite our disappointments, we shouldn't give up, maybe even shouldn't grow up.  Our child-like dreams are good ones, innocent ones, and there's nothing wrong with happy-go-lucky families and robots in space.  My mother may not like her physical state, but she's comfortable and still loving the outings to tulip festivals and other social gatherings, and yes, still looking forward to her 91st birthday now just half a year away.  So perhaps while I read about people not getting along and the topic of war filling lecture rooms, I should also be reminded that while I may not like such things, they exist.  As do my dreams and my looking forward...just as they do for you.  And there's nothing wrong with that.