Out in Space, Out of Place

(I Dreamed that Google Said “Godspeed to Atlantis!”)

For those who think browsing the Internet has become one boring past-time, consider this: It now allows you to monitor space exploration in real-time via NASA TV. (Visit www.tvunetworks.com and download the TV player to access it and other channels for free.)

As a kid, I remember the excitement of listening to the transistor radio – an amazing portable and personal portal to global programs and music. Today, the PC has become a virtual, personal window with a much wider and higher scope. The landscape, no, the land-sea-space-scape (whichever direction the camera points) is breathtaking. You swing silently around the globe inside the space-shuttle Atlantis hundreds of kilometers above the Earth, dwell with astronauts inside the gravity-free International Space-Station and lose all earthly sense of burdensome concerns as you float along. Unlike birds who must feel the rush of the wind or the sting of the cold wind on there faces, you fly in total security and comfort. Everything moves in slow-mo. This is the ultimate stress-free environment! It’s so hypnotic you wish you could just enjoy the ride all day long. But then Houston and its horde of scientists crackle in the speakers and put you in your place. It is after all just reality TV plus a lot of science.

The virtual experience, however, can be surreal. Up there, the world visually becomes smaller and smaller. And awkwardly out of place. And why not? If flying were all that liberating and exciting, why go back to Earth and be again limited or finite? Why suffer if you can have joy beyond imagination. Yet, the induced dream is fleeting. Afterward, you find your butt numb from all that sitting motionless (except for your agile mouse-friendly finger) before the PC.

And if that did not give you enough divine-prerogatives or powers to literally control what to see and where to go, there is GoogleEarth (www.GoogleEarth.com) to give you exactly that. Whereas NASA only shows you misty views of Africa or the silver-lined, blue atmosphere that cloaks the Earth, GoogleEarth lets you hover to a hundred meters above the tip of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and clearly see people and their shadows as if they were lifeless, immobile ants. Move the mouse and the monitor takes you across the Atlantic as you fly over the Statue of Liberty and down to Washington DC, where you see US government buildings masked in 3D graphics to hide structural details. What for? Who knows? Even before they put out those maps, the terrorists already knew where and how to land those deadly suicide planes. Besides, all you need are the coordinates to target any place you want on the map.

This awesome power to conjure for our minds once improbable acts could be the newest level in human achievement that will either bring us to glorious heights or to ignominious depths. For how can such contrasting ideas as boundless freedom and global destruction emanate from these two parallel activities which auspiciously remind us of those innocent games we did on the globe as kids? We would never have dared throw a dart on the library globe or map or felt ecstatic being able to see where we were located on the map. Abstraction (such is a map) did not really help our imagination that much as kids. But the Internet has given imagination a giant leap. No, it seems it has provided us with an almost divine ability to see the world as God sees it. And as with all good things put to bad use, also the unnerving capacity to encroach or impose ourselves upon the lives of others.

Today, we no longer consider the world as the infinitely inscrutable environment that ancient peoples used to do. We no longer fear the terrifying forces that appeared to bring diverse judgments upon human civilizations – the floods, the storms, the plagues and the cataclysms. We no longer worry about what we will be and what we are able to accomplish for ourselves. Superstition has given way to super-VISION. We know more and we can see farther than ever before. In short, we have become like God. For better of for worse, we have removed – if not totally and effectively, at least conceivably and potentially -- the limits to what we can do. Alas, like the people of Babel, nothing can stop us from reaching higher and higher! So it seems.

As so, like God Who dwells not on the Earth, we no longer feel really at home in this world. It has become out of place. Obsolete. Used up. We have gradually put ourselves out of it. Someday, too, it may no longer support human life. Not knowing fully what is out there, we leave the Earth not knowing fully what is here. Or why we were put here in the first place.

The old nightmares we had of looking down the world and flying farther and farther from it brought cold sweat to our brows and woke us up terrified. But with technology and the accompanying freedom brought to our imaginations, we merely turn around and face other worlds never before conquered. We have jettisoned our fears and ignorance and directed our spaceship to the much, much wider, deeper and higher reaches of the Universe. Or perhaps, to Heaven? Is it really out there or is it merely one of the possibilities of the Universe? An imagined place in an infinite space? Could there truly be such a happier space and a better place?

I must be crazy to think that people would actually see and reach for Heaven using only cold, lifeless technology. The moon or Mars, perhaps. But Heaven? Either I’m still floating out in space or I’m out of place. Time to put my feet back on the ground. Or shut my mouse.

(Top photo: Blue Earth seen from the International Space-Station, courtesy of NASA TV; Photo above: UP Oblation in Baguio City looking up and reaching out to Heaven naked and innocent as Adam.)