I’ll preface this by saying that I might not be the most qualified person to talk about tonight’s topic of space. I haven’t seen the stars since I arrived here in smog city. I was never much of a stargazer–I didn’t have those little glow-in-the-dark sticker stars you put on your bedroom ceiling–but even I miss our not-quite-next-door neighbours once in a while. It got me thinking about how little value we place in the galaxy beyond our fragile atmosphere. We’re no more than a biodome (or biosphere, rather) among the other planets all around; and yet never do we get the claustrophobic feeling of isolation that should reasonably come with the property. You might say it’s relative size–we’re teensy, so the Earth is pretty roomy by our standards. Yet if you were to take all the spaces that you occupy in an average day–every room and enclosed space–and added up the volume, it’d be pretty darn small. Each building and room and hallway we inhabit is even more limiting than a biodome would be; yet we’d feel more uncomfortable inside the latter than the former.
Why? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that despite the amount of time we spend indoors, the outdoors is always right there, through the window or door. It’s so close, so comfortable, so reachable, that we simply take it for granted. At the same time, it’s full of alien things; our personal contact with the world’s content is extremely limited. It was for this reason that we sought to learn about our surroundings, to discover what’s out there and integrate it into our schematic of what our world is. It’s the focus of political thought today, with people calling for others to act as the world’s citizens, not a nation’s: develop a more complete, global conception of who you are.
However, as much progress as we may or may not be making on our own planet Earth, the heavens above us seem as distant as ever. The more inclusive we are of our planet, the more exclusive the collective conscious seems to focus on outer space.
Doesn’t anyone else here feel claustrophobic?
It seems to me that just as a person isolated to his home would have the Earth to impress upon him his relative size, so should a person ‘isolated’ to the Earth have something within reach to put the Earth in its place. But space is not within reach. Sure we have the technology to send things up there, but an insignificant portion of people have experienced it, have explored and learned it, have taken it back home where it can be absorbed into the earthly schematic. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to those in the communications business–what with satellite technology behind cell phones and other apparatuses. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to those in the military, or the military industry, or the military-industrial complex; it’s the next frontier of warfare that nations are using to dominate others. Space is ‘familiar’ in some ways to astrophysicists and all those other scientists with complicated labels, with such detailed and obscure knowledge that any average Joe would be baffled by hearing a fraction of it. Yet the ignorance of the average Joe is exactly what should be changed.
Art, I think, has always been able to familiarize people with ideas. Whether it symbolically represents an idea in a sympathetic figure; or it depicts the foreign in the universal language of sight, or music; or it could simply be a representation of a thing beyond an ordinary person’s reach, putting it somewhere available for scrutiny. Through these and a multitude of different communicative mediums, art brings things closer. It’s depressing to think of the prohibitive restrictions that prevent art from reaching outer space and how many potential connections were preemptively severed. Practicality in mind, there are warrants as to why it’s so difficult–my random idea of ‘cosmic painting’, for example, which started this whole train of thought, would involve scattering different magnetic or mechanical particles across a huge portion of space and leaving them in orbit, whereupon the sunlight’s altered reflections would create a grand image against the night sky for those observing from the earth (and even better, if the particles could be moved and rotated to create new images from time to time). The impossibility of this working is clear when you factor the costs involved, the damage it would do to current orbiting satellites, the difficulty it would create for launching further projects into space, etc., but I still feel a loss at the thought that an artistic endeavor such as that one will never come to fruition. We’ve managed to create art out of everything here on Earth, place it everywhere. I’m sure one day art will access the cosmos as well, in a way that is accessible and appreciable by just plain old people like me.
After all, ‘vacuum’ is just another way to say ‘blank canvas’. Let’s paint.
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