Eyes On The Prize

This year, this month, this week — they have all seen more than enough examples of how bad things can get when we refuse to work together, when we focus on our differences and our hatreds.

The government shutdown. Syria. Sexism, harassment, and discrimination in science, business, writing, fandom, and just about every facet of our lives. Maryville & Steubenville.

Let’s pause for a minute and remember what we can do as a people, as a country, as a planet, when we stop being petty, bickering, assholes long enough to communicate and work together.

©-NASA

We built this! For over eleven years, there have been multiple human beings living in space every single day, sometimes as many as thirteen of them at once! They’re doing unprecedented science in microgravity in medicine, materials science, biology, human physiology, and dozens of other fields. And they’re learning how to do the closed-system environmental engineering that can take us further out, to Mars and beyond.

©-NASA/JPL

We built this! We landed a nuclear-powered, laser-shooting, mobile laboratory the size of a freakin’ car on Mars by using a combination heat shield, parachute, and rocket-powered sky crane, and it’s been there driving around and working for over a year with more years ahead of it. (And Opportunity, which landed on Mars on January 24, 2004, is still working there almost ten years later!)

©-Phil Plait

We built this! We have had a robot spacecraft orbiting Saturn since July 1, 2004, taking thousand and thousand of pictures like this one. It’s going strong after over nine years, with another three or four years still ahead of it. It has discovered amazing things on Saturn and on many of Saturn’s moons. Lakes of methane on Titan! Incredible complexity in Saturn’s ring system! Massive thermal vents and plumes flying off into space from the south pole of Encelidus! (You can get the full-sized, high-resolution version of this picture here.)

©-NASA

We built this! There are those who will point to how the Hubble Space Telescope was built with a major flaw – I will point to how that flaw was corrected using a plan developed by thousands of experts on the ground and executed to perfection by spacewalking astronauts under circumstances that were never dreamed of when Hubble was designed. And then we went and upgraded it on orbit again twice and extended its capabilities and vision and lifetime by decades!

©-NASA

We built this! The Space Shuttle was the most complex flying machine ever conceived. That fact that we took three perfectly functional and capable spacecraft and put them in museums without a replacement ready to go is nothing short of criminal. But the accomplishments of the Space Shuttle fleet (launching satellites, capturing & repairing satellites, a platform for experiments and laboratory missions, a platform for radar mapping of the Earth, docking with Mir, building the ISS, launching and repairing Hubble, and so much more) will not be surpassed soon.

©-NASA/JPL

We built this! Voyagers I and II, the first human vessels sent beyond the solar system and into interstellar space, but only after giving us our first close-up looks at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

©-NASA

We built this! Forty-four years ago, humans walked on the moon. If that doesn’t just really & truly rock your world, you’re not paying attention.

My point is that we have the proven ability to walk like giants when we choose to.

Compare our everyday world to the everyday world of our grandparents. I’m not sure any of my grandparents ever in their life traveled more than fifty miles from where they were born. Today we go to Asia or Europe or Africa for a vacation, or take coast-to-coast road trips without a second thought. Our grandparents were born in a time when most homes didn’t have phones, electricity, or even indoor plumbing. Today we have grade school kids who carry around phones and computers that would be considered black magic by those same grandparents. (Of course, we use them for cat videos and Angry Birds, but that’s a different rant.) The comparisons go on and on and on.

We get to make a choice every day on how we want to spend the limited hours and limited breaths we have in this life. Fundamentally, it all boils down to a binary choice.

Do we want to destroy, hinder, obstruct, and hate?

Or do we want to build, enable, cooperate, and communicate?

C’mon folk, let’s start making better choices!