Stepping out into Mystery: The Passing of Neil Armstrong

Armstrong’s historic words fit well into a narrative of progress seen in the American television series Star Trek begun in 1966. In that future world, poverty and war on earth had come to an end, and everyone was educated, enlightened, and using the latest technology. Space was the final frontier, policed by the United Federation […]

Armstrong’s historic words fit well into a narrative of progress seen in the American television series Star Trek begun in 1966. In that future world, poverty and war on earth had come to an end, and everyone was educated, enlightened, and using the latest technology. Space was the final frontier, policed by the United Federation of Planets Starfleet (the inter-galactic equivalent of UN peacekeepers). Depending on your perspective, it was an optimistic vision of globalization or the next stage in imperialist expansionism. While Armstrong and fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin left a memorial on the moon that said “We came in Peace for all Mankind” and included a tribute to the late Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, the race to land the first humans on the moon was propelled by fear of war. In September 1962, American President John F. Kennedy, apprehensive about Soviet advances in space exploration, proclaimed his goal to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade. The startlingly rapid advances in space exploration came out of this Cold War competition, although, by 1975 during a détente in hostilities, American and Soviet spacecraft docked together and conducted joint experiments. Such cooperation continued in the launch of the first international space station module in 1998. The station is now jointly run by cooperating bodies from Canada, the European Union, Japan, Russia, and the United States, and has received visitors from 15 nations. It is a global project that, in some ways, reflects the old Star Trek ideal.

The earth below the space station, however, is far from such fantasies of progress and unity. Over forty years after the first moonwalk, we use much of the technology first imagined in science fiction, but war and terrorism continue to kill thousands. Poverty kills even more. In the midst of global economic crisis, the launch of expensive machinery into space can seem, as it did in the 60s, a frivolous waste of money. Yet, while I am suspicious of narratives of progress that conveniently bracket out the rest of the world, I admit that when I went to YouTube to watch videos of the first moon landing, I grew teary-eyed at Armstrong’s solemn, ceremonious words as he placed his bulky boot onto the fine dust of the moon. Watching more videos of astronauts in their cumbersome suits, giddily dancing and singing on the moon, I couldn’t be cynical. There is magic in those moments. Neil Armstrong’s memories of his experiences sound less like the arrogant boasts of an expansionist than the awed words of a pilgrim in the presence of the sacred: “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

The magic and mystery of space exploration enthralled me from the time I read my first science fiction novel at nine years of age. Neil Armstrong’s death this year is the latest in a series of events that have reminded me of my old love for all things celestial. Last year I began craving the writing of one of my favourite authors Ray Bradbury. I re-read his Golden Apples of the Sun shortly before hearing the news of his death in June of this year. Two months after he died, NASA landed the robot rover, Curiosity, on Mars, with the mission to explore and analyze the geology and climate of the planet. The landing site was named “Bradbury Landing” after the author, whose imagination of the Red Planet apparently affected a whole new generation of space explorers. One of Bradbury’s most well known books was also his first: The Martian Chronicles (1950), a collection of linked short stories, imagines Mars as a kind of foil for earth history and a refuge away from its futuristic excesses.

His imagination of Mars was not limited to The Martian Chronicles but was also spread throughout his other short story collections. The planet became a stage for many different plays. The Mars stories I remember most vividly include “The Fire Balloons,” which imagines a group of missionaries to Mars who discover that perhaps the floating orb-like inhabitants know God more purely than they do; “The Exiles” in which magical creatures from earth’s literary history seek refuge on the planet from a totalitarian earth regime that is determined to exterminate all traces of “superstition”;  and “The Strawberry Window” in which a settler spends his life savings to have shipped from Earth to Mars pieces of his family’s old house to surprise his homesick wife.  Bradbury’s stories are filled with optimism about the resilience of the human spirit, and wonder at space exploration, yet he remains suspicious of narratives of progress that pose the superiority of one civilization over another or seek to diminish the magical or the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

This healthy sense of suspicion against the idolization of “progress” also shapes the work of one of my other favourite authors C.S. Lewis in his speculative fiction about Mars. In Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Ransom a Cambridge philologist is kidnapped and taken to Mars after he stumbles across unsavoury activity by an entrepreneurial old schoolmate, Devine, and his physicist partner, Weston. They have been secretly traveling to Mars in a spaceship Weston created and are looking for a human sacrifice to take back to what they assume to be bloodthirsty “natives.” The two men represent types that Lewis finds repellent: Devine has the petty colonial mentality of the entrepreneur who sees in the planet virgin territory from which he can exploit minerals and enrich himself. The physicist Weston on the other hand is full of grand ideas of progress, hoping to open planet after planet up for the expansion of the human race, even if it means exterminating those already there. The two combine the worst of imperialist expansionism and fascist ideas of racial purity.

The kidnapped Ransom escapes and is adopted by the Martians—or Malacandrans as they call themselves. Learning their language, he discovers the inhabitants of this old planet know far more of science and the universe than their visitors from earth. In fact, the “silent planet” of the title is not Mars but Earth, which is covered by a dark cloud that the knowledge of the heavens cannot penetrate.

Neither Bradbury’s stories nor Lewis’s novels denigrate science; however they do problematize a blind pursuit of technology at the expense of neglecting other forms of knowledge. While both novelists occasionally have dated ideas about the nobility of the happy “natives” and obviously describe more of a mythic Mars than the actual Mars NASA is exploring, both also provide narratives that caution against expansionism and imperialism, pointing to the necessity of tempering scientific inquiry with awe. It is not with arrogance that we approach the universe but with humility. And this, I think, is a point Neil Armstrong would have agreed with them on, as he said: “Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”