Vision

                   Vision

For God so loved the world
That He gave to all men eyes.
And to some He gave sight.

Up, Up and Away!

If you've read three or more of my blog posts, you know that I think humanity's future lies in Space. And I tend more toward the "Shining city upon a hill" view of our future colonies, rather than post-apocalyptic outposts teetering on the brink of disaster.

And I hope, those shining new colonies will not be born of some global catastrophe on Earth like the current migration out of Africa and the Middle East. It is post-apocalyptic. Many of those people are not looking for a better life. They're just looking for any life at all.

I do not fancy an Earth left in smoking ruins. I don't think it will happen like that.

Humans have always moved on from their natal homes. They seek wealth, adventure, a new vista, a safer place to raise their children. A place where they can build the life they want. I don't think emigration from Earth will be any different. We'll have people who want one or more of these things just like we always have had.

Just as we do have.

I think colonies in Space will happen as they always have. Explorers will be inspired by the possibility of "going where no man has gone before." The new Columbuses will be funded by entrepreneurs who see the possibility of wealth by providing resources more abundantly and more cheaply.

Scientists will hitch a ride with the new Hudson Bay Companies to expand humanity's knowledge.
All manner of Engineers, will imagine and design better ways to get there, to live there. And the rest of us will go for the jobs, for the better neighborhoods. For the same reasons we up-stakes and move to a new town today. Eventually we'll even move to a colony because that's where the one we love is from and has family they want to be near.

That's just the way we humans work.

Yes is the answer. Space is our Future.

Up, up and away!

The Cover Letter

“He’s a nice man,” my husband said.

I know, I thought. I can’t do that. He’s a busy man. Not to mention that I’m more than a little star-struck by him.

“Go ahead. Send him your book. He might like it.”

How cool would that be?!

My chest felt a sudden crushing sensation. You know, like right at the top of the first peak on the roller coaster. The last few seconds before liftoff. That feeling that something awful might happen.

“Write a cover letter and send it to him,” he said.

A cover letter. Of course. I was not at the brink yet. I would compose the perfect cover letter and mail Murder on Ceres to Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s an astrophysicist. He can see that humanity’s future lies off-Earth. He knows we’ll still be humans and, with or without flying cars, he knows that the future will be normal for those humans who inhabit it. It will be different from today, but it will be just as normal to them as yesterday’s future is normal to us. He’ll get what I tried to do in my
sci-fi/murder mystery.

It could take days. That cover letter. Weeks, maybe.

I began the next day. “Dear Dr. Tyson.” The honorific Dr. is used only for medical doctors except in the South? I’ve been told. And how many times have I been told that all things Southern are somehow less-than? I think of my poetry teacher in college – Dr. Norman Russell, who was a botanist of the first order. A well-respected scientist AND poet who was originally from West Virginia and I’m originally from Oklahoma. Both states are definitely south of New York where Dr. Tyson is from. But Mr. wasn’t right for Dr. Russell and it didn’t feel right for Neil deGrasse Tyson so I kept the honorific.

I then proceeded to write what amounted to little more than a fan letter, telling Dr. Tyson how much I admire him and his work. That I never took issue with his stance on Pluto. That his Cosmos was great and that I was much relieved to hear him say such nice things about Carl Sagan. That I was impressed that he wrote essays for Natural History magazine home of another of my heroes Stephen Jay Gould. That he has a wonderful sense of humor like so many scientists do – Stephen Hawking being an excellent example.

I did show admirable restraint and didn’t mention that I think he’s hot.

I hardly mentioned my book at all.

My editor (who happens to be my daughter) and her friend kindly read my letter and suggested changes.

The letter morphed into a sensible communication that explains a little about Murder on Ceres and why he might enjoy reading it.

Murder on Ceres is an old-fashioned murder mystery set in the future. The story
itself follows intelligent, by-the-book Police Detective Rafael Sirocco, as he tries
to balance the demands of his job and his responsibilities to his family. Through a whirlwind of illicit drugs, space pirates, and secret identities, Rafe chases the truth
all 270,000,000 kilometers from the shining cylinder of Ceres Colony to the alien landscapes of Earth.

And a more reasoned description of my admiration for him.

I appreciate your treating science as “normal” and humanity’s future in Space
as inevitable. I am a great admirer of your work. I think you share my lifelong
passion for space travel and a faith in our future as a species. I hope you enjoy
Murder on Ceres.

Very truly yours,

I signed the letter, ate two left-over muffins, had another cup of coffee, headed to the post office.

I was going to lunch with a friend so I had on make-up and was wearing a dress. Did I mention that I was trembling as I handed THE ENVELOPE to the young woman behind the counter in the post office?

“Have a nice day,” she said.

“You have a nice day, too,” I said.

Then she said, “You look very pretty today. That’s a good color for you.”

Oh, my. Do you think that’s a good omen? Can I be forgiven a small slip of superstition?

I was over the first peak on the roller coaster. Free-falling. Murder on Ceres and its cover letter were away. Flying. That crushing feeling was replaced by exhilaration and I left the post office with one of those nonsensical grins that you just can’t contain.

I did it!

November 22, 1963 -- November 22, 2013

 President Kennedy's Grave

with the Lincoln Memorial in the background

 

   I knew this year would be worse than last year or eleven years ago or forty-three years ago. I knew the media would fill the days leading to my birthday with questions and comments and constant reprise of the Zapruder film. That's right. My birthday.
   Sometimes Thanksgiving falls on my birthday, but the anniversary of President Kennedy's murder always falls on my birthday.
   November 22, 1963, my sixteenth birthday. My world was already dangerous. We were in the middle of the Cold War. My best friend's father had flown in the Berlin Airlift several years before and we had been afraid a Third World War would start then. President Kennedy had threatened the Soviet Union if they did not remove their missiles from Cuba. And we had been afraid of nuclear war then. Women's magazines had recipes and diets and articles about home bomb shelters. We had tornado drills at school and bomb drills.
   Fear was already a backdrop for my life. But like other almost-sixteen-year-olds, backdrops are just that. Mind catching each time they change, but quickly moved to the background as the activities of  life took center stage. And each time the scary moment passed, somehow my sense of security was recovered and all the dangers of the world receded.
   And then a man murdered President Kennedy. An English-speaking, white American whom I would not have recognized as different from my neighbors or me had I met him on November 21, 1963. And he did it in Dallas, Texas, a city more like my Oklahoma City than any other major American city. It was too close to home. It would not recede into any background.
   The murder of President Kennedy was the end of my sense of security, just as Pearl Harbor must have been the end of my parents' and the murder of President Lincoln must have been for Walt Whitman's generation and the burning of Washington, D.C., must have been for the young people of the War of 1812.
   Each of us must surely come to the realization that the concept of 'security' is false. That the concept of ideal is illusion. For me it came with the assassination of JFK. For my son it was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. For my daughter, fifteen years younger than my son, it was September 11. I don't know what it will be for my grandchildren, but it will surely happen. And the event will be just as shocking and just as threatening. It will not recede into a backdrop but become the next layer of tragedy on which our human condition rises.
   For every tragedy that reminds us how fragile and flawed we humans are, there are countless triumphs. The English burned our capital city, but with each generation we come closer to achieving a class-free society. And truly, so do those English and the rest of the world. President Lincoln was murdered and freedom and equality for all may have been delayed, but with each generation we come closer. And Pearl Harbor did not begin the end of human civilization, but began the end of another in the list of tyrants who would subjugate humanity. A long list that each generation faces.
   I gave up on security and ideals a long time ago. Fifty years ago, to be precise. But I do not give up on humanity. And hope is a great replacement for security.

Neil Alden Armstrong

On a grainy black and white television, I watched Neil Alden Armstrong step on the moon July 20, 1969.

People completely disinterested in the event filled the room. Old people whose first trip away from small-town Oklahoma was to go to WWII. And a baby less than two-weeks-old, visiting from its small-town in New Mexico. That baby’s older siblings argued and played with their dog. The baby’s parents, grandparents, and an assortment of other adult relatives chatted and cooed. I felt like I was the only person in the room who cared about the picture on the TV, being received in an American heartland room, live from the moon. And maybe that day, I was. At least in that room.

I knew that with that small step and giant leap we as a species were starting our emigration away from our natal planet.

We all come from a long line of immigrants. My great-grandparents came from the old-country. Someday one of my great-grand-children or great-great-grandchildren will say they came from the old-world. And their new world will truly be a new world, not just a new continent, or a new country, or a new neighborhood.

I do not believe that I will visit a colony on the moon. But I do believe that I will live long enough to see other people do just that. Average people. Not only highly trained, physically fit astronauts hired by and representing this nation or that one. But a geologist from a state university somewhere in this old world, going to do research. A teacher husband joining his doctor wife. He will be one of many to teach the colony’s children. And she will be one of many to provide professional support to the colony’s growing population. A population of miners and mechanics and technicians and restaurateurs and grocers and all the other people who make a community thrive.

That teacher will teach the children about astronauts from the 20^th Century who rode the ships into space. He may not take the time to teach them about the dreamers and the scientists and the regular people just like them who made it possible for humans to out-migrate from Earth. But he will teach them about Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human being to stand on the moon.