Far Out – is there anybody there?

Lindsey Dawson

 

Altitude: 36,405 feet. Location: Overhead Ukraine. Speed: 594 miles per hour.

According to the in-flight data on the screen at my seat, I am aloft between Kiev and Odessa, about to overfly a spot on the map called Rostov-na-Dom. I’ve climbed away from France, bound for home in Auckland, via Singapore. It is dusk outside, almost dinner time – although ‘time’ seems a nonsense when you’re streaking eastwards at a speed not far short of Mach 11.

Below me are vast, flat, cultivated fields stretching to distant mountains. We are, of course, much too high to see the humans who’ve made those patterns on the land. What do they grow down there in Rostov-na-Dom, I wonder. What are the Rostovians having for dinner?

As we speed away from sunlight into night, a distant mountain chain throws spiky purple shadows across the plains. Is anyone looking up and wondering who we are, and what we’re having for dinner? Or is the constant creation of lofty contrails so routine that we are not worth even a glance? After all, we are just a few hundred more souls aboard a Boeing 777, flicking through the movie choices (yes, that one, I like Sandra Bullock), about to lower the blinds, eat, and then snooze our way to the fabled Far East.

This morning I’ve had croissants in Paris. In just half the span of a normal Earth day I will slip through night, heedless of the canopy of constellations stretching out into infinity around me. I’ll not give a thought to the likes of distant Carina, Cygnus or Camelopardis, Lupus, Lyra or Lynx2. Instead, I’ll wait for the next big moment in my tiny life, when, on the planet’s far side, I’ll walk into Asia’s steamy fug.

Extraordinary, but so ordinary. Thousands do it every day.

***

Our forbears began heading for fresh horizons a long, long time ago. Small, dark, nomadic tribes stopped living the same lives as their ancestors, turned their backs on familiarity and began a long, slow trek up through Africa some 60,000 years ago, thus beginning the enormous task of eventually populating the entire planet. The DNA records tell us this is so3.

Families trudged up through the Middle East towards the vast, deep steppes to the north and westwards around the Mediterranean Sea. Some of our ancestors hunkered down in caves round 20,000 years ago and painted startling art on walls in southern France and northern Spain – creating butting bison, herds of horses and strange geometric grids4.

Other pioneers gradually pushed north-east up through the lands currently named China and Russia and all the way to the Americas across the ‘bridge’ of a now long-gone landmass called Beringia. Further south, villagers set out in canoes from balmy Asian archipelagos to spread their genes throughout Pacific atolls and islands5.

Going global was an urge driving everyone, century after century, long before they had the faintest clue they were inhabiting a round rock that orbits a vibrating star whose core burns at more than 15 million degrees Kelvin6.

Fast forward to more ‘recent’ times and much newer explorers felt driven to set off from Europe to find fresh fields down in Africa, over in the Americas, far into the Pacific and out East. What an insular tag ‘the Far East’ was. As if Europe was the navel of the world and Asia had to be labelled that way because on the navigators’ maps it was way out to the right.

Kings and queens ordered their captains to find new treasure, seek and conquer. Whether British, Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch – adventurers sailed off under their vivid, impudent flags, obsessed, like the Romans before them, with notions of power, empire, trade7. But those Europeans were late out of the starting gate.

The Chinese had pushed out from home much earlier. In the third century AD, “the ambassador of the Han, Chang Chhien, won through across the Western Seas to reach Ta-Chhin,” (the Roman Empire) wrote a scribe named Chang Hua. Predictably, the Han rulers believed their homeland was the centre of everything and so for them, the distant seas were dubbed Western8.

Hardy Vikings sailed to Newfoundland about 1000 years ago and built villages made of turf and wood3. Half a millennium would drift by before Columbus set out in 1492 to succeed in stumbling upon the Americas. Magellan made it around the entire planet on a two-year odyssey some 30 years later. There was Meñdana and Drake and Torres and others5. Then James Cook took global voyaging to extremes in the 18th century9.

Humans could not resist expanding their universe. But all this travel, this conquering, this questing, happened pretty slowly.

Today’s pace of life would stun the likes of Francis Drake’s queen, Elizabeth the First, and Cook’s monarch, George the Third. We are speedsters now compared with how they dawdled, all of us modern-day kings and queens of air, land and sea. We’ve not yet ramped up to Star Trek’s whimsically tagged ‘warp speed’10, but we are high-velocity humans all the same. However, we are also uncomfortably aware that we occupy just a tiny dot in a vast, expanding universe.

Hats off to you, Messrs Magellan, Columbus and Cook et al. You led us to this new awareness. You and the astronomers, such as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Halley – and the brilliant, eccentric Edwin P. Hubble11, in whose name has been built an extraordinary orbiting telescope that today gifts us stunning images of far-distant galaxies. We never even knew they were there until Hubble told us, in 1925, that there was more to the Universe than our own Milky Way.

***

Before we looked out to other worlds, we had to get to grips with our own. Our own recent ancestors played a part. How easily we forget the grit of those who went global before us. How dangerous it was to travel around Earth just one or two centuries ago. What courage it took for 19th century pioneers to board achingly small ships to sail to New Zealand.

The first of my family set out in 1839. And they came for keeps. They would have waved, tears streaming as the Triton eased away from the dock at Liverpool, knowing they were saying goodbye to faces and places they would never see again12.

If being at sea wasn’t strange enough, their sense of alienation would have been increased by the changing night sky. As they sailed ever further south familiar constellations would have slowly turned topsy-turvy. And the North Star? Gone. No more Polaris: here instead, ladies and gentlemen, is your new pointer to a different pole – the alien shape of the Southern Cross!

If settlers made it here safe and sound, then, mostly, they stayed. If your mum or dad died back in the old country, the dark news could take three or four months to make the slow passage from ‘home’. The sad response would take yet more weeks on the return journey (assuming no ships sank along the way). No phone calls, not a word by telegraph – at least not until 1876 when the first international cable was laid from Sydney to Wakapuaka in Nelson by the Australasia and China Telegraph Company13.

Of course, ships did sink, quite often. One of the worst colonial-era disasters was the 1874 loss of the Cospatrick, en route London to Auckland with 429 emigrants on board. It caught fire south-west of the Cape of Good Hope. People screamed, fought, burned and drowned. Survivors rescued from a drifting lifeboat: three14. How horrible such news must have been for people who had only recently made perilous voyages themselves, or who had other loved ones on the high seas. Victorians became paranoid about sea safety. In fact so eagerly did readers scan the Disasters at Sea column in London’s Times newspaper, that a new genre of shipwreck fiction was spawned15.

Though we can now hear of disasters within seconds, our hearts have not changed. It’s our emotions that are most affected when heartbreaking news ricochets around the world.

It has always been so, even when the passage of grave tidings once moved no faster than early steam ships could push through the slack seas of the Doldrums16. I am keeping safe a letter from 1886, telling of the grief felt by my great-grandmother Minnie in Tauranga when told of the distant death of her brother, James Hewitt. He’d died at sea of a recurring fever on a voyage from Burmah [sic] to England17. “It was a dreadfully severe blow to her,” wrote her doting husband Joe in his graceful copperplate to another brother in India.

Today, the loss of travellers’ lives still shocks, whether it’s 93 island hoppers on a capsized Tongan ferry18 or seven astronauts lost aboard Columbia during the searing 2003 re-entry accident19.

Of course, deaths at sea have happened since man made the first coracles and canoes. But the moment will surely come when, making another flea-like leap out of our flimsy atmosphere, we’ll lose more people in space. Our distress will be keen, for it will bring home, once again, the vulnerability of human flesh. Discovering new universes can be painful.

***

‘Where did the universe come from? Where is it going? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end?’ Posing these head-scratchers at the start of his 2005 book, A Briefer History of Time20, Stephen Hawking echoes the questions that most of us ask at some stage. Most of us then ignore them because they’re just too hard. But at least, in the last 150 years, we’ve begun to succeed at making time appear to shrink.

When the first undersea cable was laid across the Atlantic21, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson knew how it would change the world. He was out with some friends rowing on Big Tupper Lake in 1858, enjoying a golden summer afternoon in the Adirondacks, when around the corner sped another boat “on swift oars”, one of its passengers waving a newspaper and yelling amazing tidings. A cable had been run from Ireland to Newfoundland – a line nearly 2000 miles long, in waters two miles deep!

News that usually took 12 days to cross the Atlantic by ship could now be Morse-coded in minutes. Emerson was overjoyed that messages could be “shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea” through a wire cable “pulsating with ductile fire”22. That wire would fail, sadly, and would have to be replaced by another in 1866. But delirious Ralph didn’t know that then. And oh, Ralph, you should see us now.

If only you could have known that today people can connect to a wondrous ‘engine’ named Google23 and access, in a second, some 3,140,000 references to your name. Every word you ever scratched with a nib on parchment now hangs in cyberspace. Not just your words, Ralph, but everyone’s, from Shakespeare’s and Cicero’s to Pooh Bear’s and Beyonce’s.

Blogs, gossip, recipes, spreadsheets, song lyrics, lawsuits, jokes, insults and calculations – our minds throb with so much text, so much music and so many moving pictures that sometimes it feels as if we’re being scorched by your ductile fire.

A few of us (just 505 as at end-August 200924) now know what it’s like to circle the Earth in the vacuum of space. Speeding silently over our heads, the International Space Station is staffed by humans flying at 17,500 miles per hour and seeing 16 sunrises and sunsets every day25.

Meanwhile, two small, doughty robots named Spirit and Opportunity are trundling around on Mars taking holiday snaps and sampling soil26. Humanity’s focus is slowly growing more inter-planetary.

So ardent is our push out into space that we’re even littering the neighbourhood 700 kilometres out. That orbit zone is so crowded that two satellites collided last February27, spreading a cloud of debris to join the other 17,000 bits of junk that NASA estimates are streaming around Earth. Those are just the pieces as big as a TV remote, or larger. Add all the smaller scraps of garbage and the count goes up to billions.

We’ll keep on sending up those satellites, however, for they are so essential to business, commerce – and entertainment. We’re addicted now to being able to see, in real time, great moments like Usain Bolt’s freakish record-setting sprints, Valerie Vili’s world-title-winning shot puts, and the triumphant smile on actors’ faces as they brandish shiny Oscars.

And while many families are more scattered than ever, technology can bring us close no matter how distant their actual address.

‘My daughter’s still in Paris,’ a friend told me as we talked over the hiss and spit of a café espresso machine. ‘You know, she’s been gone four years now.’

“You must miss her,” I said.

She was wistful for only a moment and then smiled. “It’s not so bad. Skype has changed our lives28. We can talk face to face and I can see how the baby’s doing almost every day. And it’s free! Remember how expensive it used to be and how there was that maddening echo on the line when you called overseas? Now there is no line! Our words and pictures and faces are zooming around out there in space,’ and she waved an expansive hand. ‘Don’t you love how instant everything is now?”

‘I sure do,’ I said.

And yet for all our cleverness, we’re still tethered to our watery blue ball. Having thoroughly explored and strained the resources of our planet we yearn to explore elsewhere. But how?

We find ourselves in an odd sort of relationship with the universe. Overwhelmed, still, by its majesty and mystery, we know we are both part of it and wrought from it – and yet it remains utterly remote.

The day I write this, in September 2009, an American panel of experts has announced that future adventures in space by the United States are unlikely, unless billions more dollars for NASA can be found: “The spaceship and rocket programmes being developed to replace the shuttle are not presently viable,” reported BBC science writer Jonathan Amos.29

There are other nations in the space game, of course. Forty years after our first tentative spring up to the Moon, maybe we’re not done yet. But our steps out into space are baby ones. For as far ahead as we can contemplate, the universe will remain a realm we can only gaze at, ponder on, and study from our miniscule vantage point.

Just as from a cruising 777 we are too high to see humans, we are at the same time still so Earth-bound that we strain to see much of the universe at all.

On my book shelf lies a copy of the late Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot30 – 15 years old now, but still acutely relevant to how we view our place in space. I browsed it again recently, still thrilled by that classic view of Earth as an aqua-tinted pinprick in a vast black canvas. It was sent from the Voyager 1 spacecraft31 in 1990 when it was 3.7 billion miles away from us. Nearly 20 years later, it remains on task, now more than twice as distant from us as Pluto, trundling out into the void at 17 kilometres per second and still phoning home to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

It seems a bit crazy and sad and yet oddly, sweetly satisfying that before those now-ancient mariners, Voyagers 1 and 2, were sent into space in 1977, a committee led by Sagan arranged for messages to be stowed on board. Gold-plated copper discs hold whale song, bird calls, images, music, and messages in 55 languages, just in case some intelligent alien might stumble over them. Helpfully, Sagan and his crew included a cartridge and needle.

Imagine that: phonograph records able to be played by aliens when, already, humans have thrown such obsolete audio gear into the trash.

We keep listening out for signs of other life, courtesy the SETI Institute32, but no extra-terrestrials have yet sent a friendly e-greeting. ‘No letters conveyed by recent émigrés help us to understand the new land – only digital data transmitted at the speed of light by unfeeling, precise robot emissaries,’ Sagan wrote. ‘They tell us that these new worlds are not much like home. But we continue to search for inhabitants. We can’t help it. Life looks for life.’

So… hello? Is there anybody out there?

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