[Press play: Teach me how to dougie by Cali Swag District]

By Abak Hussain

After the first moon landing some 57 years ago, it must have seemed like we were just getting started. Baby steps to the great unknown, here’s mankind blasting off from its cradle ready to go to infinity and beyond. It would probably go on for a bit with more and more trips to the moon, until that was cheap and efficient, with little moon colonies and permanent staff, and then we would push on, maybe landing on and colonizing the rest of the planets and their little moons along the way. This was the great big overarching fantasy of the space age, and these thoughts inspired the works of Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov and others. The zeitgeist spawned a whole entire space age aesthetic: fashion and interior décor and all. (Kubrick imagined a Blue Danube-inspired space waltz, but I think of a dougie — that infectious hip hop move of swaying side to side to the beat.)

In reality it didn’t quite work out that way. After a handful of Apollo missions, with the US winning the race to the moon and the wheels coming apart for Soviet Union’s outsized dreams of domination, the world realized all of this was mind-bogglingly expensive and the payoff was just too little. There didn’t seem much point pushing out into space or even going back to the moon when there was really nothing up there. The progress narrative that had been created at the height of our technological optimism was becoming harder to justify, and the space program was fraught with controversy down here among the people of Earth.

Sure, NASA had the tech to dougie to the moon and back, but it became harder and harder to justify a multi-billion dollar joyride at the end of the Sixties when times were a-changin’ on our home planet. The fantasy didn’t die down though. Space still fired the imagination, and hard sci-fi in film and TV really took off: it was cheaper and more fun to let Hollywood take us to space and search for ETs than let NASA get up to its wasteful shenanigans. And so the world changed, tech evolved rapidly and in ways we could never have imagined. The world entered “the future” in ways the Apollo astronauts with their analogue calculations never predicted; just imagine the computing power each of us are packing in our latest iPhones. And in all this time, even with the rate of progress accelerating at an alarming rate, spacewise we hadn’t ventured any further than Armstrong already did back when bell-bottoms were peak fashion and the pill ushered in a cultural revolution. There have been six human landings on the moon ever, all in the three year span between 1969 and 1972. It’s like we quickly saw that space was a fun little exercise, but not a serious or feasible direction for our civilization.

Let me interrupt this somewhat pedantic flow of thoughts now for a personal reflection, perhaps to see if there is a point to these Kubrick-style musings. I am a considerable sci-fi nerd, but within the many sub-branches of sci-fi only some float my boat. Others leave me cold or worse. Too much AI/robotics gives me a headache, mind-bending time travel stuff makes me break out in allergies. Existentially uncomfortable shows like Black Mirror or Rick and Morty, though intellectually brilliant, cause me cogitative pain and cramp my style. I respect them but I do not enjoy them. (You will say that’s exactly the point of those shows; and you would be correct. I don’t care.) On the other hand, shows that make my day present humans as an interplanetary species in some plausible way, however vaguely. I love The Expanse, which is also a favorite of space nerd Jeff Bezos (I do not love Bezos). The Foundation based on the Asimov saga (which I have not read, so don’t tell me things like “the book was better”) is thrilling in a similar way though a little more untethered from Earth. And my current favorite: For All Mankind, which is the best kind of “what if” show. Everything about this series — which imagines that we never slowed down the space program after the early lunar missions, but kept going and going and going — is just perfect. It takes reality as we know it and then flies off at a wild tangent, and that sort of thing is my jam. In For All Mankind, we see a Soviet Union that never collapsed, learnt to cooperate with the US, and a North Korea that has managed to become a formidable space power. Stanley Kubrick’s iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, back in 1968 imagined what the future (at the time from his perspective, the year 2001 was far into the future!) of space travel might be. Astronauts journeying to Jupiter are confronted by an evil AI called HAL. It is one of my favorite films of all time, and an exception to the rule that I do not like AI characters. In a way, For All Mankind fills in the gaps. Instead of a match cut that shows a bone thrown by an ape turn into a space satellite, we see bit by bit how the space program may have inched forward. I will not give spoilers, but it is all borderline fantastical, but also believable in its own way.

The vision of future and progress shown in For All Mankind does seem a lot happier and hopeful than the “future” we are living in today. After the space exploration program sputtered and went dormant after its initial run, now, at last it is coming back in vogue. But the hope and joy is gone. Recently NASA’s Artemis program sent a ship to go around the moon and back, technically further than anyone has ever gone before. For the most part, the world gave an indifferent shrug. Tech barons are also greedily trying to lay their claims to space. Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin. Elon Musk has SpaceX. They keep shouting that they will revive the space age and the private sector will succeed where NASA didn’t. What a grim thought that the two most unethical corporate bosses in the world want to take the lead in pushing humanity forward. Already, their ventures have been disastrous for the planet. They have shown themselves to be ethically bankrupt, and willing to dump the problems of the world on ordinary people to satisfy their egos. They will wreck the environment and destroy Earth without a thought if it means winning capitalism. So the space game is back on, back from the dead, but this time it is a Pet Sematary­-style monster. No thanks. I’ll root for the kind of progress that actually elevates us in our values. We have work to do in protecting the planet we already live on, improving our systems of social justice. As for scratching that whole space travel itch, I’ll stick to my shows.

Abak Hussain is Contributing Editor at MW Bangladesh.

Photo credit: NASA