The Public vs the Scale of the Universe

Most people have trouble intuitively grasping the scale of the universe.

Its not that we have problems with the numbers. Most people can bandy the facts and figures around pretty easily. Approximately 238,000 miles to the Moon, 93 million miles to the Sun, 4.3 light years to Proxima Centauri, and so on. Not too much difficulty there.

But visualizing those distances accurately is not instinctive at all. In a way, we're built against that--we have only these analog animal brains of ours, after all. Our minds are hardwired by evolution to deal with things on a human scale, and as a result we tend to mentally shrink everything down to that scale so we can more easily handle it, no matter how inaccurate that view may be.

You can see this popping up a lot in science fiction. The popularity of Space Opera science fiction, for example, can at least partially be credited to how it shrinks travel to other solar systems down to a human scale, with interstellar travel taking days or weeks at the most and entire planets usually represented by over-simplified sets of cities and environments. Space-borne disaster movies such as Armageddon or the more recent Moonfall suffer from this as well, portraying human nuclear weapons as being able to do more than imperceptibly nudge massive celestial objects like the Moon or a moon-sized asteroid. Trying to move the Moon with nuclear weapons would be like trying to propel an aircraft carrier out to sea by hitting it in the stern with a handful of firecrackers.

But I think this lack of understanding scale also colors how the public perceives a lot of scientific endeavors, and usually not for the better. For example, there recently have been a rash of blogs and opinions online complaining about how NASA has waited so long to return to the Moon or to mount an expedition to Mars...almost as if the Moon were right next door and Mars was just a jaunt down the street.

But the failure here is really in understanding just how far away even the Moon is, and how difficult it currently is to send people there. A round trip would cover a distance of roughly 20 times the circumference of Earth. When was the last time any one of us circumnavigated the globe even once? Even with modern commercial jets, how much would 20 such trips cost you in terms of time (both in preparation and in actual flight), resources, and money? And that would just be a taste of the raw distance involved. A trip to the Moon, performed entirely in hard vacuum and microgravity, would be far more difficult and expensive than that.

It was done before during the Apollo program, of course, with great difficulty and risk. But the problem is, we found nothing on the Moon that made it worth the expense for astronauts to return. Its not that the Moon doesn't have valuable resources we can use, its just that with our current level of technology we can't build up the infrastructure there to profitably exploit them. Why? Because the Moon is just too damn far away, and sending things there has proven just too expensive so far as a result.

And Mars is much, much worse. At its closest approach, Mars is about 36 million miles from Earth, or about 1440 times the circumference of Earth. How long and how expensive would 1440 trips around the world on commercial airlines be to you? Now imagine doing it twice, as you'd probably want a return trip back to Earth as well. Now imagine how difficult and expensive a flight that distance through a hostile, deadly void would be in a spacecraft using current technology.

Like the Moon, its not as if Mars isn't ripe with valuable resources and potential scientific discoveries. But we just don't have the technology yet to reach all that distance and set up all the infrastructure that would be needed to make it worth the expense.

In the future, of course I think things will turn around, with the development of faster, better propulsion ssystems and more long-enduring and reliable life support systems. But as much as we may want that to happen in the near future, its much more likely that it will not happen for decades yet.

If people, especially those controlling the purse strings in Congress, understood just how vast the distances were out in space, I think they'd understand the need for more long-term planning and execution in the space program. We have to break out of the short-sighted cycle of trying to restart the space program every 4 or 8 years whenever we have a new president.

And I think the public in general would be more supportive of space efforts, knowing how daunting the task faced by NASA and other space agencies are. I think educating people on the true scale of things should begin in the science classroom, and science writers--and even science fiction creators--should be mindful of trying to convey that when it comes up.

Ten Year Ago, Star Wars Fell Off A Cliff

I hadn't realized that it had been over 10 years now since The Phantom Menace was released. Of course, I imagine that is not an anniversary most people tend to observe, but it is significant as it marks the downfall of one of the great science fiction franchises.

I use 'downfall' purely from a quality standpoint, of course. Star Wars still makes scads of money and has many ardent fans, my 8-year-old nephew among them. But few people who aren't wonder-filled prepubescents can deny that as far as story quality and cultural impact goes, the franchise is only a shadow of its former self and shows no sign of resurging. Phantom Menace was simply a bad film, and Attack of the Clones somehow managed to be even worse. Revenge of the Sith was better than the first two but was still only mediocre at best.

Its interesting that the franchise has fallen so quickly and so completely in the public's eye. Once, it was held as the pinnacle of fantasy-related story telling. Today, its just another scifi franchise among many, and far from the best.

Its also interesting that it is not weathering its current downturn anywhere near as well as many of its peers among long-running scifi franchises have handled theirs. Star Trek and Dr. Who have all had up periods and down periods, yet none of them fell quite so spectacularly as Star Wars. I have to wonder why.

Star Trek has had many mediocre, and some outrightly atrocious, episodes among its many series and movies. And yet, the public seemed a lot more forgiving of Trek's sins than those of Skywalker and co. Even after outright bombs like Star Trek V and Nemesis, the Trek brand remained essentially untarnished.

I think in part it might be just the sheer volume of Trek stories out there. Everyone seems to have a sense that if the current incarnation of Star Trek sucks, another one will eventually come along that will be better (and that's pretty much exactly what's happened recently.)

But also I think Star Trek strives for something Star Wars never has: story transcendence. It tries hard to be more than just pulp adventure; it explores new ideas and is unafraid to ask the BIG questions about things like destiny, mankind, existence, god, love, and other things. And very occasionally, it succeeds ('The City On The Edge Of Forever,' 'The Inner Light,' 'The Visitor.') Even when it fails (which is more often than not) we recognize the nobility of the attempt, we are more willing to overlook it because hey, at least they're trying.

Doctor Who is very similar in this regard, especially in its modern incarnation; it too tries for story transcendence and occasionally succeeds, though its best stories tend to be quite a bit darker than Trek's. ('The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' and 'Human Nature'/'Family Of Blood' are the two storylines that stand out most for me.)

I guess Dr. Who and Trek are like good friends that we see struggling and striving for a hard-to-obtain goal, so that when they succeed, we can't help but cheer. And when they fail, they pick themselves up and try again. Who can't admire that, at least at some level? Its almost like what Rocky Balboa said--its not how hard you can punch, but how many times you can pick yourself up after being knocked down that determines if you're a winner or not.

Star Wars hasn't picked itself up yet, if it ever will. The keepers of the franchise insist that its mistakes were in fact successes, that there is nothing really to correct, that there is no higher goal for them to try and reach. It fell to the mat and apparently likes it there. And so the franchise keeps floundering, and the public has no interest in seeing it revive, as its not even trying to do better. What's there to cheer for?

The potential for future greatness is there, mind you. The Star Wars universe is very rich and can be mined for a lot of great stories and ideas, as some authors in the 'Expanded Universe' novels and comics have shown. But will we ever see that creative vitality for Star Wars make its way back onto the screen? It doesn't seem too likely, anytime soon.