Columbia

As for myself, I was never too deeply affected by the loss of the space shuttle Challenger - only because for me, it had always happened. January 26, 1986 was less than a month after my third birthday, a time when my life was almost exclusively focused around television and getting excited about trucks. I may not have even recognized the existence of space as a thing in and of itself. When I learned about Challenger, even though I was in the world on that day I learned it as history.

Not so with the space shuttle Columbia. Eight years and one day ago, I was in the middle of my second year at Trent University, and space launches had become routine. They ere even making good progress on a space station up there. So when the news reached me of the disaster, of the shuttle coming apart on reentry, I was hit by the punch of history repeating - and being in a position to directly experience it for the first time.

I'll say that I cried. I mourned. It wasn't just the seven astronauts who would never come home - it was everything that Columbia represented, that grand future whose eventual arrival I'd always taken for granted, and which was now really in the balance for the first time I could remember.

We've come back from that - but in fits and starts. That future is still in the balance even today. There's no certainty anymore, just drifting speculation that can never latch on to anything long enough to be real. But we can't forget. To knuckle under, to abandon that intrepidity that takes us beyond the sky, it wouldn't just be a loss for us; it would be a betrayal to all those who come after.

In February 2003, I was a regular contributor to Absynthe Magazine, a student publication on the Trent campus. In recognition of the day, I'm reproducing an article I wrote that appeared in the first edition after Columbia's destruction - and while it's plain to see that I had a hell of a lot to learn about writing back then, as a window into that time I think it's still worthwhile.

After Columbia, we must press on
By Andrew Barton

Many of us are too young to remember the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. On January 28th, 1986, the world watched as the shuttle and its seven crew members dissolved in a cloud of fire, a disaster from which the American space program took years to recover. On February 1st, this disaster was echoed in a high-altitude whisper as the space shuttle Columbia, active since 1981, broke apart on re-entry 200,000 feet above Texas. While NASA will undoubtedly scale back shuttle missions in the near future, it would be a grave disservice to the memories of the seven astronauts aboard Columbia to scale back the scope of the space program. We must not be cowed by this disaster and cower within the atmosphere, but be inspired to go faster and farther in spite of the dangers.

In his address to the nation in the wake of the disaster, President George W. Bush spoke on the dangers of considering space flight to be routine, and offered words indicative of a strong support of the space program. In a political climate where NASA has been routinely starved of funds to fund inefficient Medicare or corporate welfare programs, Bush's words and actions suggest a President willing to re-establish the United States as a spacefaring superpower.

"The cause in which they died will continue," Bush said. "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey to space will go on."

Though it is said that nothing worth doing is, or for that matter could possibly be, completely safe, the immediate aftermath of the Columbia's destruction saw a litany of voices rise up to challenge what they saw as billions upon billions of dollars sacrificed for no real return. Extreme proponents of this position have as of late begun to latch onto the disaster as a fulcrum for making their views known, claiming that the space program itself is a waste of resources that could be better spent solving Earth's problems. While the underlying motivations for this course of action are commendable, the fact remains that to cancel the space program would confine the human race to a single world, vulnerable to the capricious whims of nature.

One hundred years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky expounded on the theories that made the modern shape of space exploration possible. Of his quotes, among the most widely known is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." To give up on the adventure of space would be to act as an ostrich burying its head in the sand when predators draw near. Certainly, the exploration of space is dangerous, but space itself is dangerous. Beyond the thousands upon thousands of asteroids that cross Earth's orbit, with many more yet to be detected, there are the dangers of supernovae, interstellar molecular clouds, rogue black holes, and a host of other potential disasters that could scour life from this planet as if it had never been.

Space may appear quiet and tranquil, but the truth is very much the opposite. It is quite possibly the most dangerous frontier humanity has ever faced, while simultaneously the most bountiful. All we must do is take up its challenges, for otherwise, we will have doomed ourselves within reach of the final frontier.

I Know What My Sin Is

Back in 2009, I wrote a post which detailed my disillusionment with the 21st century as it had unfolded up to that point, and looked at the end of the decade as a pessimistic counterweight to the 1990s and 1980s, both of which struck me as more optimistic times - although, being that I'm just 27, my knowledge of the '80s zeitgeist derives mostly from what was written and produced at the time.

Apparently I'm wrong. Noel Maurer left a comment taking me to task for projecting my own view onto the spirit of the times in the late '80s and early '90s, and while I take issue with his assertion that the early 1990s recession was worse than the one we're in now - I haven't been able, personally, to find anything that suggests our current economic malaise comes in second place to anything but the Great Depression - he's got a point.

I've also picked up a "declinist" vibe from some works of the period, but in the grand scheme I thought those were outliers. Things like 1991's Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, which also reflects a general attitude towards climate change when it was still popularly considered only as the Greenhouse Effect, or James P. Hogan's 1992 The Multiplex Man, feed into the "end of the West" concept - and while Fallen Angels mires the entire world in radical technophobic ultra-environmentalism, The Multiplex Man goes one further and has the former Eastern Bloc become the new center of technological and economic growth. As for the hope of cold fusion as "one of the big game-changers," S.M. Stirling's 1989 short story "Roachstompers" - despite the other qualities which struck me as somewhat disturbing - looks at the negative consequences of the game being changed in such a big way.

So I was wrong about the nature of the time - but that got me thinking. My conception of the past was greatly colored by the attitudes of the works created during them. How, in twenty or thirty years, will the '00s be seen by those who haven't been born yet or are still too young to have any understanding of the decade?

Historical events, or the lack of them, may have something to do with that. Part of my conception of the late 1980s as an optimistic time came from the historical awareness there - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and in 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. From where I stand, it seemed as simple as "the threat of nuclear war that you've lived with for forty-five years is over! Why the hell wouldn't you idiots be optimistic?"

I can't think of any equivalent historical events for the '00s that would similarly mislead an observer in, say, 2029. Personally, when I sat back to think of positive historically-significant events of the last ten years, the only one I can think of that might qualify is the inauguration of Barack Obama. Even then, the nature of how the remainder of his term unfolds will color the perceptions of future observers. Until at least 2012, we'll only have speculation.

I would love for the things we worry about today, like deficits in democracy or environmental damage, to look as quaint in 2030 as 1990's fears of "crime and racial tension." Personally, I don't believe we have that luxury.

Mired in the One-and-Twenty

I don't remember the 1980s - not really. Born as I was in 1982, and at the tail end of it, what I recall of the decade is isolated flashes, swatches of darkness and light, events that were significant to a child but none that give me perspective today. My first strong memory of the greater world outside of home was Operation Desert Storm, the opening of war against Iraq in January 1991. But I can look back at what was produced at the end of the decade, and when I do, I take from 1989 a sense of optimism. The Cold War had ended, the future seemed wide-open, and technology would transform the world for the benefit of all. Fusion, cold or otherwise, tended to crop up as one of the big game-changers.

Ten years later, in 1999, the West was flush from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing vacation from history which was the 1990s. The world was getting more prosperous by the day, it seemed, and liberal democracy had built a foundation that would weather any storm. The twenty-first century was upon us, and through it anything would be possible. I mean, look at it! It's the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! It's where all the hoverboards and robot buddies and starships and dashing hero captains live! We'd made it fifty years with nuclear weapons without reducing the world to a cinder! Aside from a bit of existential dread about Y2K, I remember 1999 as a time to be optimistic about the way ahead.

Today, in 2009, the game is different, and I don't think it's just me. TIME Magazine called the last ten years the Decade from Hell - I prefer "Decade of Broken Dreams," even though some people think it's an excessively purple term. We've seen the twenty-first century, and been blinded by the glare; tasted its fruit, only to have it turn to ashes in our mouths. I can't think of another decade that's ending on as sour a note as this one; of the future ever seeming so dark, I'd have to wear night-vision goggles.

For decades, the twenty-first century was implicitly the great beyond, the city on the hill, and there was no alternative to it being a good and decent place where technology would work miracles and all our petty twentieth-century problems would be solved. It was the gateway to the Grand and Shining Future. After all, the crew of the Enterprise didn't have to worry about nuclear war or STDs or poverty in Africa. This was supposed to be the time where we made the first steps toward solving the problems that have bedeviled humanity since the beginning.

Ten years, and we've hardly started. What these ten years have taught us is not only that things are worse than we thought, and getting worse faster than we thought they could get, but that people don't even believe things are getting bad - as if the slow death of the Arctic ice cap or the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the ticking timebomb that is the tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases in melting northern permafrost is on the same plane as the question of whether or not the Shroud of Turin is genuine. Then again, it's hard to care about the environment when you've been fired or laid off or made redundant or what have you and you don't know where you're going to find money for food or rent.

For me, the promise of a better future seems, for now, to be hollow. Maybe in 2019, we'll have found new reasons to hope for a better tomorrow.