Earthlight on the Moon

Your Rocketeer is on the road this week celebrating Thanksgiving with family. For this reason a short post will have to suffice. There is much talk about UFOs/UAPs nowadays. I don’t need to lay that out for you, it’s everywhere. My interest in UFO’s is less about the technology than the beings inside that technology. I’m not one who expects all extra-terrestrials to be either evil bastards or angelic all-knowing beings. On the contrary, I think there are all sorts “out there.” What I hope is that at least some of them are worth talking to. And that they’re interested in interacting with us in a way that does not include eating us, enslaving us, turning us into some sort of alcoholic drink, smoking us, etc..

We are very isolated on this piece of real estate we call Earth. I personally believe that the human race can be great if given a chance. We have not been given a fair shake. At least not for a very long time. We’re a mess of a species at the moment. We have a lot of work to do to put ourselves back together sufficiently to rationally communicate with anything not from here. But we can do it!

There is a wider universe out there. We used to dream about, you know. That was before NASA. That’s actually true. You can see it if you read stories and magazine letters. Dip into popular culture back in the years between the end of WWII and the end of the 1950’s and you’ll see it— a general decline. Both Sputnik and NASA made headlines back in the late 1950’s. The moon launch was in the late 1960’s, of course. And I remember how much fun it was thinking about Apollo missions in the early 1970’s when I was a child. Move forward by the decade and our dreams shrivel. Oh sure, Elon Musk is talking about Mars now, but that’s been talked about for a long time. We are very skeptical today, and with good reason. It was different once. Once, long decades ago we dreamed of space. We knew we’d get there. We knew it! We allowed our imaginations to soar “out there.” The pulps were full of these sentiments. It’s one of the reasons I love them so much.

There is much reason to think that we’re moving into an exciting (if chaotic) time. Within this new era may come new technologies, perhaps leaked out from people who daren’t before. And then there are the space aliens...what might happen in that quarter? It’s anyone’s guess. For me, it’s about mankind becoming a species worth feeling pride over in relation to otherworldly beings who actually want to friends. For those aliens who don’t want to play nice...well, we are a violent species. Maybe we need our own space fleet. Maybe we already have one. Who knows? If we do I hope it’s run like something like a fleet from a Doc Smith novel. That would be cool.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a poem from back in that dreamy time of 1941. It was written by Lilith Lorraine—an early science fiction writer, poet, and editor. The accompanying image is by Chelsey Bonestell, who knew a thing or two about space art.

Happy American Thanksgiving, space explorers!   

This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.