The Home Planet [antikvár]

Like most fathers, by clear star-studded skies I used to take each of my two little boys in my arms for a glimpse at infinity. The splendor of the unreachable silenced their chatterboxes for a few seconds. They raised their arms and closed their little fingers in a futile attempt to grasp one of the twinkling sparks that dot our dreams. The little fellows obeyed the command reported by Ovid: "God elevated man's forehead and ordered him to contemplate the stars." None of us three was gifted with a space explorer's destiny, and I lcnow that deep in our subeonsciouses a regret is buried. But the three of us have dedicated our lives to explore another infinity, the sea. And each time we have met, discussed, or worked with space pioneers, we have felt like brothers. My father was ninety-one when the Apollo program was deployed. He never believed that a humán being would ever reach the moon. When Borman, Lövell, and Anders, in Apollo 8, spun ten times around the moon, he told me: Wonderful. Extraordinary. But believe me, they will never land on the moon." Unfortunately, he died just before Armstrong made his historic first wallc on the queen of our nights. Since then, probes have been sent to most of the Sun's planets; space stations have been put in orbit to demonstrate that humán beings can live and work in outer space; astronauts and cosmonauts have been able to leave their space stations, wallc in space, and even make essential repairs. A program to land people on Mars is in preparation. The acquired technology has immediately been aimed at practical and profitable applications: worldwide communications, global positioning systems for ships and aircraft, and remote sensing to better know our planet and monitor its resources and to trace migrations of whales, fish, and birds. Unfortunately, it is now almost monopolized by the military. This fallout has proved to be surprisingly beneficial to knowledge, to science, and to the future of humanity. But it was unforeseeable when Gagarin was shot into orbit on board Vostok I in 1961. At the origin, the pioneers of the greatest adventure of all times were motivated by the drive to explore, by the pure spirit of conquest, by the lofty desire to open up new fields to humán genius. When I listened to the space explorers of all countries recently gathered in a meeting at Paris, they were all friendly, exchanging such feelings. From their exceptional journeys, they all came baclc with the revelation of beauty. Beauty of the black slcy, beauty and variety of our planet, beauty of the Earth seen from the Moon, girdled by a scintillating beit of equatorial thunderstorms. They all emphasize that our planet is one, that borderlines are artificial, that humanlcind is one single community on board spaceship Earth. They all insist that this fragile gem is at our mercy and that we must all endeavor to protect it. The meaning of space conquest is symbolized by the famous set of pictures taken from the moon, celebrating the birth of a global consciousness that will help build a peaceful future for humanlcind. That future is in the hands of those who dedicate their lives to explore Teilhard de Chardin's three infinities: the infinitely big, the infinitely small, and the infinitely complex. And from all the beauty they discover while crossing perpetually receding frontiers, they develop for nature and for humanlcind an infinite love.