In 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 was about to exit the solar system when Carl Sagan, who was then on the mission’s imaging team, got what he had been asking for for a while: a photo of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. Sagan wrote later about that picture of the Earth from this distance in his book Pale Blue Dot. I’m going to quote at length because it really is beautiful:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
“…How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
It’s in this grand tradition that Jeff Bezos launched himself into space on a rocket shaped remarkably like an enormous hog. Bezos is one of a few billionaires who are pioneering a business—his is called Blue Origin—that plans to send commercial flights to space.
Blue Origin has to sell this venture, and what they propose—the pitch—is this: You can’t really get the life-changing magic of seeing the awesome insignificance of Earth without, well, going to space. You don’t even have to get 6 billion kilometers away. You can just pop up and back. Among the astronaut influencers tapped to talk up going to space in a pretaped ad that rolled on the company YouTube minutes before lift off was Mike Good, who has spent a little less than a month in space across two missions, and who said, “It really can’t help but change your life, it changes your perspective. Having that experience makes you feel smaller.”
And Jeff Ashby, who has flown a total of 436 orbits around Earth, said, “I find it’s very interesting that people can look at a picture of Earth taken by an astronaut, but they don’t get that change inside that actually being there in space gives you. It is one of those things you kind of have to do.”
It’s one of those things you have to do! The pitch is that you can’t really see how insignificant you are until you actually get up there and look back and see how small everything is, so you better go. You better go to space! You have to literally get up there in order to get the full benefit of knowing how actually small and insignificant you are, personally, and we are, more generally.
A lot of people think that these men and their effort to know space is just another delusion of grandeur, just another flight of privilege, just another money-making opportunity for those with enough of it. Conquered the world, yeah? Well, on to space then. But what if this is the only option for therapy for the big guy? No normal therapy will do, even though schools graduate specialists that cater to the absurdly rich and their particular challenges. Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world and he simply has got to go to space to deal with it.
The thing is, in order to amass enough wealth to justify a bunch of engineers and a flight crew sending you up to kiss the sky so you can finally feel some perspective, finally locate your place in the world, you might have to grow a company that is, let’s say, complicating things on the Earth you’re looking back at. So you get the money that necessitates the space experience that helps you realize you’re but a speck and there isn’t much point in amassing all this wealth. Weird trick!
If Bezos’s new rocket company is to deliver on its promise proclaimed before launch, that one is changed by experiencing space, then the worthiness of its mission, the reason one might pay a bunch of money to get up there, can be measured in how much it changes Bezos himself. We’ll know space is worth it for its transformative reasons if suddenly upon return, Bezos, I don’t know, puts a little more effort into changing the conditions over which he presides back on this very Earth. Or at the very least maybe just starts paying an equitable share of income tax?
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