Star Sailor

Originals: Essay

When was the last time you danced? I mean, just turned up some music and let go? Not a care in the world. Not worried about being judged. Alone, inside yourself, feeling the beat and letting your body take over from your mind for a moment. 

Children dance in this way. They close their eyes and sway and step and flow their arms around in the air, grasping at sound and pulsing with rhythm. There is an age when this changes, though. There is a point where the sensual movement of a body lost to music becomes the catalyst for sexual arousal. I think it is then that we lose our ability to dance freely. 

We can recapture it of course. If we are alone. Or if we are in the company of children, whose lead paves the way for letting go, even if some other grown-up watching becomes filled with desire for the other grown-ups present. It’s a shame, really. That once we pass into adulthood we are forever stripped of the innocent joys of being human. I imagine that’s what the Beat Generation were getting at, and the Bohemians before them and the Hippies after. 

Where’s our Beat Generation today? Where are the Neo Bohemians and the New American Counterculture? Have we lost our ability to express ideas contrary to the current order? Have we let paternalism become the guiding force of our society? I’m afraid we’re so focused on things that aren’t important that we are losing sight of the grand scheme of diverse social unity. We continue to sift ourselves into our comfortable groups. Conservative. Liberal. XYZ Class. A “Have” or a “Have Not.” Pro. Anti. Let’s get with the program: none of this matters. 

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

The human population is expanding. Tero has finite resources. The folks who run things (who knows and who cares who they are) usually solve this by fomenting war, which kills millions. We need to figure out another way; war is not an ideal solution. 

Off-planet. That’s been my argument for a long time. Before Space-X. Before Virgin Galactic. Some of my earliest stories are about interstellar colonization. That’s where our future lies. But we can’t get there unless we focus our resources (money, materials, labor) and make rapid advances. Sometimes I feel like we’re just on the cusp of another Great Leap Forward. But we spend too much money on the War Machine. And too much time arguing about what groups we belong to. And it strips us of valuable resources we could be using to further our space programs. As president, Dwight D. Eisenhower said: 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live? 

We need a shift in focus, a new agenda that aligns with our need to expand across the universe. And without placing labels on groups of people, we need to come together as a new generation of pioneers. We need to focus on universal humanism, coalesce into one group—humans—and cast our collective gaze skyward, while at the same time we throw our hands into the labor of space science. 

I am standing at the edge of the sea and the stars here tonight are clearer than any I have in recent years as a city dweller. Who knows whether all those stars are still up there. Some are certainly gone by now, their light taking so long to reach us that we are looking at a pinpoint of light that is possibly billions of years old. But there are still plenty of stars out there. Like ours. And there must be planets out there too. Like ours. A new frontier, a new home for us. More resources. More room. 

Lying back in my bed I can close my eyes and I am on the ocean in a sailing boat. This is how I imagine space travel will one day be. An 11-meter ship, sailing between stars and planets. A future me might be called a star sailor or perhaps a space cruiser. Adrift in the cosmos. Wow…can you only imagine the possibilities?