In 2019 I was in New York City where there was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, and some mild excitement could be seen on banners, Google Doodles, etc., but otherwise it kind of passed without much fanfare. I completely ignored it, one of those "Huh, OK, that's cool" moments and just letting the moment pass by. That seems to be the prevailing attitude of my generation and all my circle of co-workers, friends, and acquintances (admittedly, a dwindling number since the pandemic hit)......we talk about Game of Thrones (a new prequel series coming out this weekend), living in different cities, sports, food, music festivals, social media and new Iphones....but I can't think of a single time that I've discussed space travel with anyone at all. It's just not a topic that comes up.....but maybe it should?
I get it; there are so many stressors, details, obligations, traffic tickets, appointments, etc. to keep up with daily life there's very little time to worry about something that the normal person probably won't get to see/ travel to in our lifetimes; planets and stars just look like bright dots in the night sky. NASA isn't embarking on missions to the Moon anymore, but there's a bigger prize: Mars. Most of our TV shows, media, and query about whether there's life outside of Earth has been centered on Mars for awhile, with the Mars Pathfinder series and Elon Musk's company SpaceX going to Mars.
To me, space is difficult to even fathom: There's 8 planets (and one Dwarf planet, Pluto) just in the orbit of our sun and solar system, and there's millions of suns in the Milky Way, the galaxy that the sun is in, but then the Milky Way is only one of many galaxies within the Local Group of galaxies, and the Local Group is one of millions and billions of groups within the entire universe......and then the universe as we know it is infinite. Hard to wrap one's head around. It becomes one of those existential/ philosophical puzzles with no answer, since there's no end, no right answer, it just stretches endlessly on. Another obstacle to me being interested about space is having no interest in personally getting on a space flight.......I never wanted to be an astronaut anyway, but just the amount of G-force, lack of gravity, and falling from the sky makes my stomach churn......I would not be a good astronaut (I keep thinking of that scene in First Man where Ryan Gosling/ Neil Armstrong is in the flight simulator and keeps throwing up. No thanks). The planets, as cool as they are with all the different colors and rings, aren't really that interesting because they're not living things: they're big balls of gas or earth, and don't talk or do anything like human beings, so they're not relatable at all. So what's left? Basically it's like if the ocean was infinitely deep, and we kept sending missions down to explore areas (that actually sound more compelling to me because there's actually fish and living creatures abundantly existing in the ocean) but knowing that there would be no endpoint, and so far no life forms have reached back out to us. So what's the point? Maybe inhabiting Mars eventually after we (chuckle) destroy Earth? Hard to fathom that concept, but given the amount of issues we run into on Earth, somewhere we have much better knowledge of, living on Mars seems like quite the challenge, especially to convince ordinary people to go.
In conclusion, space seems cool and there's plenty of great facts about astronauts, galaxies, asteroids, distant stars (supernovas, red dwarfs, oh my!) but it's understandable why ordinary people aren't that interested and doesn't excite people, except maybe when the astronomy category comes up in Jeopardy and all of a sudden I'm channeling all the terms like Cassini, Saturn V, Voyager missions, SpaceX, Halle's Comet, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colling with Jupiter.
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