Cosmonauts, Voyager, and Humans

Thursday, May 28, 2020

     Two documentaries show how small humanity and Earth are in the universe, but how big Earthlings' insights can be:  "Cosmonauts:  How Russia Won the Space Race," by the the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2017), and "The Farthest/Voyager in Space" (2019) by the Public Broadcasting System, of the United States.  The British and USians inject the obligatory national chauvinism and anti-communist hysteria in each film, but especially the second film makes humans small and big at the same time.

     Russia, still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the internal fifth column working for foreign interventionists not having sabotaged it and pillaged its public assets yet, was the first nation to send a rocket into orbit around the earth, an animal next, and a human, between 1957 and 1961.  Space suits the Soviets invented are the model for those used to this day by every nation that sends people outside Earth's atmosphere.  Rockets the Soviets invented remain the basis for rockets used to deliver cargo to space stations, another Soviet invention.  When the internal and external sabotage of socialism reduced the Soviet Union to several rump states in the 1990s, cosmonauts on the Russian space station were stranded and almost forgotten in a disintegrating vessel that almost didn't return to Earth.  The documentary lets various cosmonauts and engineers speak about the historic Soviet achievements.

     The second film, about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by the United States, that absurdly-named nation, shows humanity's smallness in the cosmos, but also great human insight.  By 1986, the two unmanned space vehicles had flown near Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and their moons and rings, some of them unknown by us until then.  In 2012, the crafts left the gravitational pull of the sun and thus the Solar System.  Aboard Voyager 1 is a record made of metal and gold, with recordings of Earth nature photos, human biology, language, and music, Earth's place in the Solar System, and other items about Earth and nature, which includes us.  Playback instructions and a stylus are there, too. 

     Long after humans are extinct, and the Sun is a red giant that consumed the Earth and much of the Solar System, this tiny proof of our once-existence will coast through interstellar space. The odds are vast against an intelligent being finding this object.  Pivotal space scientist Carl Sagan worked on the Voyager and other US space projects.  In the film, his son says that Voyager is about us more than about the cosmos.  Carl convinced his bosses to turn the Voyager cameras to photograph the Solar System as the craft left it.  The Earth is a speck in a faint sunbeam.  That's all we were and are, but this spaceship shows the heights we can conceive.

     The other day the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio One in British Columbia, Canada interviewed a Canadian astronaut during a call-in show.  One caller said that the $10/year/Canadian spent on the space program is a profoundly wise investment.  We struggle with poverty, injustice, racism, and other flaws born of our system based on private property and the profit system; but this $10 hints at what we can aspire to, if we choose.

    Look through a drinking straw at the sky, a woman scientist of the Voyager program said.  That tiny round view includes hundreds of galaxies, in a universe of billions of galaxies.  A century ago people thought there was only one galaxy, our Milky Way.  By caring to look and ponder, we humble and exalt ourselves at the same time.