Hope and Exploration: Musings on the Movie "Interstellar"

LEM, Cradle of Aviation Museum Photo: Cindy Hill

As a kid, my dad -- an engineer at Grumman Aerospace - would wake me up to watch the moon launches. I remember putting together those plastic models of the LEM like the one that featured prominently in the movie Interstellar. Not too long ago, I visited one of the two remaining intact LEMs with my dad at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island. So seeing that model break in the movie hit a chord with me.

But it didn't hit me quite as hard as the scene where a teacher explains that the elementary school textbooks have been revised to explain that we never really did go to the moon, and the space program was really a propaganda effort designed to make Russia waste its money. You see, with the planet dying, the government had decided that people should not hold out hope that there was something in the universe beyond our own world.

For years I've been chanting the mantra "Fund NASA". Friends mostly think I'm nuts, and say we don't need to waste money finding water on Mars when there are people starving here on earth.  But isn't that the point -- if we can put a man on the moon, as the saying goes, then we can do just about anything. If we can get a ship to mars, surely we can balance national budgets, develop cleaner energy, end child abuse and animal exploitation. Isn't funding NASA all about funding hope, engineering a positive can-do attitude, demonstrating leadership and goal-setting and the power of accomplishment?

So that's my perspective from the light side of my mental moon. The dark side of my brain, however, has, appropriately, darker thoughts.  Humans aspire to exploration, sure. Yet when has human exploration ever proceeded without genocide, war, and ecological destruction? Those great Brits and Scots who mapped Africa did so to lay in railroads, mine the gems and minerals and later drill for oil, pausing along the way to engage in the slave trade, create colonies, and muddle through the ongoing wars of post-colonialism. The Spaniards and later the British landing in the Americas killed off the better part of a hemisphere's worth of humans, first through disease, then enslavement, war, and forced exclusion from their homelands. Our ocean explorations led to offshore garbage bights and oil drilling.

We explore to conquer; we conquer to control; by controlling we kill. As Oscar Wilde framed it, Each man kills the thing he loves. Until we can control the strength of our conquering grip, might we be better off NOT going to the moon, or Mars, or anywhere else we are bound to exploit and destroy? The LEM, after all, is the ultimate symbol of hope, NOT because it carried explorers far away -- but rather because on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission,  it served as a lifeboat, and brought those courageous explorers safely back home. And that was an extraordinary example of human accomplishment.

Governments create hope and set the tone for optimism and progress in society through funding forward-looking programs. When the theme of governmental action runs heavily towards the negative -- the war on drugs, the war on terror, an assault on immigration, an assault on leaks of governmental information--rather than the positive, there is no inspiration for innovation other than building better prison walls. But before I built that wall, I'd want to know what I was walling in, and walling out, and why. And then I'd want to climb over that wall, and go out to explore.

I've come to realize that funding the space program is not the only way to engineer hope and instill optimism in the hearts and minds of young people across the country and around the world. But we do need to fund those things we want to see growing around us, and not just fund the fight against those things we want to stop. That means our legislatures and Congress putting their money into schools and colleges, health and mental heath care, alternative energy development, agriculture, pollution control, climate resiliency.

If you fund the war on drugs you'll get a drug war. If you fund the war on terror, you'll get a terrorism war. Fund a positive future and you'll get a positive future.  And that -- like the space program -- is worth exploring.