The Final Frontier
by Sean M. Kelly
Space, the final frontier . . . I remember how these words used to send shivers up my spine. In the late '60s, I became one of the first Trekkies and, like many other young boys, followed the progress of the Apollo moon mission with the focused intensity of religious devotion.
At that time, my greatest hope and desire was to be an astronaut - a scientist/explorer/hero with the combined virtues of captain Kirk and Mister Spock. With the arrival of puberty and the turbulent teens, however, this desire gradually faded, as did the popular interest in the space program generally.
There were other, more pressing challenges to face. The exuberant idealism of the '60s and early '70s gave way to the hard-headed (and hearted) realism of the '80s and '90s. The tragic death of the Challenger astronauts stands out in grim relief to what has become the otherwise purely mechanical and business-as-usual character of the space program. Has there been a betrayal of vision? Have we turned our backs on the final frontier?
While I sometimes recall with a certain nostalgia the early days of the space program, I am disturbed by the claims of some futurists regarding the vital importance of continued investment in deep space exploration. I am not referring to the common argument about inevitable spin-offs from space technology (in medicine and communications, for instance), but rather to a religious or metaphysical worldview which, though sorely lacking in substance and depth, continues to enjoy a dangerous appeal.
According to this worldview, human evolution is currently stalled as a result of the planetization of the species. Like fruit flies in a jar, human beings have reached a point of maximum growth, both demographically and culturally. The problems we have created for ourselves - pollution, social injustice, meaningless lives - have become too complex and deeply ingrained to rectify (without some kind of outside help, that is).
By the same token, the nobler side of human nature, which this worldview identifies with the drive for exploration and discovery, has nothing left to stimulate it to further growth and expression. As a species, therefore, our only hope is to invest all reasonably available funds and energies in the space program with the explicit goal of colonizing the solar system and perhaps eventually beyond.
Advocates of such extraterrestrial colonisation point to the fact that those chosen to journey forth will have been selected for their superior intelligence and co-operative temperament. As the progenitors of a new breed of "spacelings," they will signal the emergence of the next step in the evolution of humanity - constitutionally and culturally superior beings who will also serve as the models and teachers for the less fortunate of us fated to remain on ghetto Earth.
There is so much to object to in this futurist scenario it is difficult to know where to begin.
In the first place, it is by no means evident in what way the kind of intelligence such a project would select for is superior. Astronauts are traditionally selected for their technical expertise and for their ability to interface with highly complex machines in an artificial environment. While such expertise is doubtless reflective of a certain kind or dimension of intelligence, it in no way follows that the more technically adept are necessarily superior. If this were true, then one would have to consider the simplest of computers, and even adding machines, to be more intelligent than Mozart, for instance, or Christ or Buddha.
These futurists's technocentric view of intelligence, in other words, is blind to the highest and noblest, to the imponderable essence of the truly human. The corresponding vision of progress and evolution is similarly truncated and ultimately inhuman. The standard for what is higher on the evolutionary scale is, once again, the degree of technical (or technological) efficiency and physical mastery. Although one often hears of "higher consciousness," one looks in vain for any indication of a widening or deepening of the inner life. While our spaceling descendants might be supremely adapted to living inside, and indeed as a part of, highly sophisticated machines (for such would be the nature of extraterrestrial environments), there is nothing to suggest that they would be any farther ahead in the cultivation of wisdom and love or compassion - qualities the best of humans have always held in the highest of esteem,
Despite the scientific veneer of this futurist scenario - and here we come to the heart of the matter - its root assumption is easily recognizable (to some, at any rate) as a secularized version of the millenarian Christian ideal of salvation from without: the logical conclusion to a literalistic (mis)reading of the "Kingdom of Heaven." As in the popular understanding of the Christian myth, this world is looked upon as a "vale of tears," its inhabitants as fatally flawed, and the god-principle -that which is accorded the highest value - is naively pictured as residing "up" or "out" there. As Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, however: "If those who lead you say to you: See, the Kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will precede you."
Is space, then, really the final frontier? I think not. Although exploration of the physical world, whether earthly or cosmic, is surely an endlessly fascinating and intrinsically valuable human enterprise, the extraverted drive that fuels it is something we share with most other animals. Humans, in any case, have always manifested a healthy curiosity about the world around them. At the same time, however, the extraverted drive that has brought us to space, though a momentous development in many respects, is fundamentally continuous with the very process of demographic and technological expansion that has put the Earth in peril.
The truly last frontier, therefore, is not outer but inner space, the space of consciousness itself. Despite the heroic efforts of such pioneers as Christ and Buddha, or of such figures as Hegel, Aurobindo, and Jung in the modern period, our theoretical and practical knowledge of inner space is still in its infancy.
By all accounts, the human head and heart are boundless to those with the discipline and courage to look within. Without such discipline and courage, no amount of technical mastery will save the day, whether here on Earth or in the stars.
This essay originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, 17 October, 1993, under the title, "Exploring the Space of Consciousness."
