WHY WE EXPLORE STARRY SKIES
NASA’s goals to go to Mars and an asteroid reflect our curiosity, our wanderlust
NASA’s Kepler space telescope hit the jackpot recently with the discovery of 715 planets orbiting other stars. It’s the largest haul yet, nearly doubling the number of known planets. “We’ve hit the motherlode,” said Kepler co-leader Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Many of these new worlds reside in solar systems with multiple planets, like our own. And although all are bigger than our planet, it’s only a matter of time until astronomers find that holiest of grails, Earth’s twin, somewhere in our galaxy. And then what? The problem, of course, is that space is unimaginably vast. If you could drive to the Sun at 60 miles per hour it, would take 177 years to get there. To reach the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would take nearly 50 million years.
Wanderlust has always been part of what makes us human. Our ancestors’ curiosity to find what lies beyond the horizon led them to migrate out of Africa, to traverse the Bering Strait and to set sail for new lands. Today, that same curiosity inspires us to explore the cosmic ocean. President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget released this month includes funds for NASA’s goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars the following decade.
SEEKING OTHER WORLDS
But traveling to the stars is another matter. We’re unlikely to get beyond our own solar system anytime soon, if ever. What is it, then, that drives our quest to find other worlds? Perhaps the answer is woven into our very fabric. Deep inside, we all yearn for someplace. It might be a place we already know, or perhaps somewhere we’ve never been.
“Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary,” wrote Edward Abbey.
C.S. Lewis called it “the inconsolable longing ” and spent much of his life trying to understand its source. In his memoir, Surprised
by Joy, Lewis described how, as a child, he often experienced flashes of lucidity in which he glimpsed something other worldly yet beautiful, as if seeing through a veil separating ordinary life from a mystical realm.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” he said, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Lewis concluded that this intense yearning, which he believed everyone experiences, is the soul’s homesickness for heaven.
AN UNFULFILLED DREAM?
But I wonder whether it might be something else. There’s a word for it in Portuguese: saudades. It’s a strangely sweet melancholy, a longing in the heart for something once cherished that’s lost but not forgotten. An aching feeling of incompleteness, as if something essential is missing or a dream unfulfilled.
One of astronomy’s most profound discoveries is that we hu- mans are made from the ashes of stars whose fires burned out billions of years ago. Maybe that’s why we feel compelled to explore the starry skies, as if driven by an innate yearning to know our true ancestral home. Psychologist Carl Jung believed that we share a universal memory, passed from generation to generation, which he called the collective unconscious. Could it be that remembrances of a distant place and time are indelibly ingrained in our psyche?
Like salmon swimming thousands of miles to spawn in the streams of their birth, perhaps we carry an instinctive drive to return someday to our celestial home, guided by only a faint, primal memory that we can’t articulate or even fully comprehend. Atoms trapped temporarily in bodies, longing to be freed to return to their birthplace. Saudades for the stars.