When Starlink Orbits

It's such an honest experience, looking up. It's in the northern winters you get the best skies. Leaves descend from the deciduous trees and the fall clouds begin to dissipate. Daylight becomes an event each day, lasting a few hours, and then when the sun sets the world returns to it's natural state, cold and dark.

I never liked the cold. I don't like the short days or the biting wind or the way my feet swell. I don't like hinding inside, bending my fingers in my gloves to bring back bloodflow, keeping doors and windows sealed, wearing thermal underwear beneath my shirt and a wool sweated above. But this morning, I looked out through my bedroom window into the pre-dawn skies and I fell in love with the worlds bigger than mine.

This morning, I saw Starlink orbiting by us. It was beautiful: not a scientific wonder but an inch worm of glowing orbs making its way past the horizon. It was like magic, like the second it dove behind our rolling hills it ceased to exist entirely. It moved so fast I could hardly hold my breath, but when it disappeared I found myself starving for air, craving the fresh winter breeze in my lungs, the clearness of arctic water, and purity of a Northern nights sky.

I love Science Fiction, I love science. I love the ISS, virtual reality, backup cameras in cars. 3D printing, LLMs, the Tesla Cyber Truck (there, I said it*). And I love all the things we sacrifice for this greater existence, the silence of the Florida Everglades, the stillness of the northern night sky, clean waters at the temperature they should be at, landscapes untouched by mineral mines. I love people, labor rights, community, human decency.

A colony with a cutaway view, Rick Guidice, 1970s

It would be nice to understand space, but I know its too vast for me to ever understand completely, and to try could drive me mad. Isn't that how we got to space in the first place? Isn't that why we're there now? The madness of mankind. The myth of the great thinker:  Socrates, Galileo, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing. David Bowie? Steve Jobs? Elon Musk? The Beats, the Post-Beats. The Modernists, the Postmodernists, the Post-postmodernists. Is it ego, audacity, madness that makes them great? Or is there really a bigger picture they could see that their contemporaries couldn't?

Octavia Butler wrote about space as heaven, as refuge, as collaboration, a common good. In the world she put on paper it was something to believe in.

Here and now, space is a devision between reconciling with the past, observing the present, and prioritizing the future.

Much like Ada Lovelace was to the computation age, Man's assent to the moon feels before it's time. How could we land in the stars before inventing GUIs? Before floppy disks and GPS, before Rubix Cubes? The science of the 1950s and 1960s space age was exploration, how can, what if. Will humans survive space radiation? Is the moon even solid?**. This time it is determination, inevitability. It is happening with or without public support, with or without government funding, it is the madness of men who are intoxicated by their own greatness that all other experiences are rendered casualties. If humans can survive the climate crisis, human's will colonize space, the question is which humans?

These are my questions this morning: Why let technology exist solely in the hands of the mad? How can we, as collective humanity, choose which science fiction to make science? And how much longer do we have?