One of my joyful memories from childhood was looking at the night sky. I grew up in Los Altos, California, when it was still a small town in the middle of agricultural properties, primarily apricot orchards and bean fields. Between the time my family first moved there and my graduation from high school, the whole area had become “suburbia.”
The bean fields and apricot orchards had been replaced by residential subdivisions. Over that time, the vision of “star-studded” nights was gradually replaced by the neon glow of business advertising. I definitely miss the night-time magic of a “star-studded” night sky.
At this point in the evolution of humanity, there is no where left on the planet that hasn’t been influenced by what’s usually called “light pollution.” It is, of course, hard to tell whether that is “good” or “bad.” For most of human existence, people have been afraid of the dark. Primitive people had “camp fires” for a reason: the fire let them see what was about to pounce on them. Humans, after all, are not the biggest, strongest, or fastest animal. We use our brains to compensate for what we lack in size, strength, and speed.
In spite of the saying, “Curiosity killed the cat,” humans have always been the most curious of creatures. Consider the places humans have gone out of curiosity: pretty much everywhere on the planet and to the moon. Consider as well all the places we (humans) still want to go as suggested in what is usually called “science fiction” literature. My son was still young enough to sit on my lap when we started watching Star Trek on TV. He was about 10 when we went to see the first “Star Wars” movie in a theater. We went four times.
The TV series and movies brought up old memories of my times of watching the night sky. When I was about 12 years old, a friend and I were out in the evening watching a couple of lights moving across the sky. We had just noticed them and wondered aloud what they could be when the Navy launched jets from Moffett Field. We watched as the jets approached the lights we had observed. The lights changed direction and headed away toward a mysterious “something.” The jets couldn’t keep up, and the whatever it was disappeared in the distance.
Also about that time, my uncle who was a career Air Force pilot came to visit. My father asked him what was the highest he had ever flown. He gave a figure that surprised my father, who repeated the figure and asked, “What were you doing up there?” My uncle said, “Chasing a UFO.” My father asked, “A UFO? You don’t believe in those, do you?” After a moment of silence, my uncle said, “What I believe is classified.” That ended the conversation, but my uncle’s response gave me chills. I knew what it meant that his belief had been “classified.”
It was along about that time that the popularity of science fiction “exploded.” We (humans) have always wanted to know, “What’s out there?” When we can, we go look. The old saying is a ship is safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for.
In “Andrea del Sarto,” Robert Browning has the artist say, A man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Else what’s a heaven for. In Ulysses, another poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had his protagonist say, that his goal was to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The “giants” of history and literature set a “high bar,” and most of us will never come close to that standard. And that’s OK. The main thing to remember is that we can always attempt to reach beyond what we can grasp. We can always attempt to strive, seek, and find without yielding.