Tag Archives: Second Age of Exploration

How Space Exploration Can Unite Us

Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez

How Space Exploration Can Unite Us – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In this episode I argue that we should consider Space exploration as a way of uniting humanity around a common cause in what otherwise is a time when we seem far more divided.

My Dad woke me up just before 6 am on Christmas morning to watch the long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. Over the past few months, I’d heard and read a great deal about Webb, the engineering behind it, and the mission it has been sent on to travel to the Lagrange 2 point about 1 million miles, or 1.5 million kilometers, from Earth. Once there, Webb will serve as our newest set of eyes on the stars and planets far removed from our own. It will even be able to detect the chemical composition of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, which could provide us with far better leads than ever before to finding life on distant worlds.

In this last week of 2021, during the Christmas season, a generally happy time of the year, I’ve got to admit there are a lot of problems facing us that are sure to dominate the year to come. The COVID pandemic continues and has recently flooded humanity with a new wave powered by the omicron variant, leaving us scared and worried during the holiday season. The tensions that have boiled over in the last few years in this country, social unrest born out of decades of dissatisfaction, disenchantment, and the pressures of our lives in this Second Gilded Age have brought we Americans closer to the brink than we’ve been in quite some time. Globally, we can’t bring ourselves to do enough to combat climate change, the greatest existential threat humanity has yet faced. Still, the familiar tempo of the drumbeats rises quicker and quicker as the Ukrainians prepare for a potential invasion from Russia, and tensions continue to simmer in the waters between China and Taiwan. Both of these regional wars could well draw my country, the United States, and our allies in, cycling further and further until that simmering pot comes to a boil in the form of another world war.

Meanwhile civil wars, famines, and the other children of fear torment people around the globe in nearly every country, some worse than others. The 2020s have thus far proven to be one of the darkest decades in recent memory, with many of its woes being fruits born from the troubles of the 2010s, 2000s, and the century prior.

Yet alongside all of this, I still have hope that we, humanity, will see ourselves through these threats, that somehow, someway we’ll survive as we have now for so long. It’s interesting to me how the same story, human history, can be told in so many different ways. I was brought up learning the story of human progress, of ingenuity and invention from the Promethean discovery of fire to the digital age in which we now live. It’s a story that has a happy ending, that believes we will eventually overcome our sins and the ghosts that have haunted our waking days as much as our dreams of a better tomorrow. The question I’m left with now, as an adult prone to daydreaming rather than a child without a responsibility to make something of myself, is how do we achieve that future? How do we make tomorrow better than today or all the yesterdays in our collective memory ever have been?

I suggest we look to the potential of what Webb can tell us about the Universe around us. We are after all made of stardust, as Carl Sagan was famous for saying, and at the end of the day it is to that stardust that we will return. The exploration of Space has the potential to be truly revolutionary to our story. If done right, it could be the catalyst that pushes our boulder over the hill, letting us the eternal Sisypheans we are, out of the Hadean turmoil we’ve been in for as long as we can remember. By realizing we are not alone in the Universe, that there are others out there who like us have struggled and fallen time and time again yet still found the strength within them to rise up and build civilizations in their own images, to leave legacies for others to remember them by. We have the potential to overcome our troubles: war, hunger, poverty, ignorance. Let’s set those drums aside and sit down and talk to one another, get to know one another, and learn from each other. Let’s realize that we’re more alike than different, no matter who we are, where we’re from. We may speak different languages, and by extension think in slightly different ways, we may have different incentives for our actions, but at the end of the day we’re all still human.

On the Sunday of Christmas weekend, a date I know as St. Stephen’s Day, I read a thoughtful editorial in the Washington Post by the conservative columnist George Will called “National conservatives and racial identitarians have a common enemy: Individualism”. While I didn’t agree entirely with his argument, and while in general Mr. Will and I only agree on a small number of things (in particular our mutual love of baseball) the main thesis of this column made good sense to me, that here in the United States individuality and the ability of the individual to express their self has fallen by the wayside in many circles in favor of a degree of collective identity on both sides of the political spectrum. The focus has fallen so much on what divides us that we’ve lost sight of how we are really so alike. 

We are all Scrooges as long as we stay in our camps and refuse to venture out into the no man’s land between them. There are past wrongs that need to be delt with, crimes that have yet to be punished, I would be naïve to deny that. At the same time, we need something to bring us together, to break these circles of violence that have been carried out since the time immemorial, embodied in stories like the primordial Fall from Paradise described in the Abrahamic religions. At this point, it’s fair to say we’re in a time when revolutions and counterrevolutions born out of a spirit of vengeance are far more in vogue than any belief in a common humanity. Yet through the fog of war that we allow the dragons of our imagination to breathe out into our world, there are still those among us who send missions beyond Earth with hopes that knowledge will broaden our horizons and increase our knowledge of not only the Universe around us but of ourselves as well. This Second Age of Exploration offers us the chance to unite around a common purpose of bettering ourselves, of elevating humanity above that fog and into a new age in our history when we can achieve all those lofty ideals we continue to set ourselves from each generation to the next.

Contemporary English

Contemporary English – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I'm proposing that we've entered a new period in the history of the English language.

Could it be good for us to start thinking about a new period in the history of the English language? A bold question if ever there was one, after all that would imply that we’ve moved past Modern English and into something that could potentially be “Postmodern”? Heaven forbid I go into “post-this” and “pre-that”, things which we academics love to play with on a daily basis in our writing. I’d argue that we may well have moved past “Modern English” as it has been known for the last five hundred years, since its birth in the Renaissance, and into something new. This change isn’t dramatic, it’s been happening over a very long time; even though English has been in its modern phase since the sixteenth century, it’s continuously evolved with each passing generation.

So, what makes today any different than yesterday? Why make the break here between Modern English and whatever we’re going to define the next period of English as? I’d argue this is in large part because of the influx of a great many more voices speaking and writing in English than ever before. Not only is English now a global language, spoken by hundreds of millions of people around our planet, but it’s become one of only a handful of languages through which most global affairs, whether economic, political, or social, are conducted. English is influenced by the introduction of popular words like woke just as much as it is by the theorizing of scholars like me trying to invigorate those ancient Germanic and Latinate elements still living in the fibers of our tongue.

My own native form of English, American English, is a great example of how the language is changing. I argue that one of the main reasons why many American English speakers differ in their phonology and word choice from both the old colonial Americans of the East, as well as our English cousins across the water, is because we have far more ethnically diverse immigrant elements in our English. There are hints of the Irish, Finnish, Flemish, Swedish, and Welsh in my English that my ancestors spoke, just as there are traces of the German that many the immigrants who settled in my native Midwest spoke. Our ancestors may have spoken “broken English” when they first arrived, but that broken English has become our English, another thread in the beautiful and diverse tapestry that is this most diverse of languages. 

Yet alongside the influx of new words, and ways of expressing ideas that have proliferated in English are new circumstances that have forced us to come up with new words to express ideas we hadn’t considered before. Just as Modern English was born out of the dramatic transformations in the European understanding of their world and the globe at large in 1500, so too our English is being changed by our own growing understanding of our now global world and its place in the Cosmos. This may be a good time to begin to talk about a Second Age of Exploration, this time not out across the oceans but instead out among the stars. And just as the English of Caxton developed into the English of Shakespeare by way of the English of More, so too our English has developed from the English of Asimov, Heinlein, and Sagan into an English that can prove useful to humanity as it tries to make sense of the wonders previously unknown that our explorers are sure to encounter in Space.

So, what do we call this new English? Perhaps we could take after the oft-quoted George Orwell and call it Newspeak? After all, dystopian visions of the future are just as much in vogue today as stories of violent moments in our past ever are. Or we could call it Global English, to better reflect the geosocial nature of our language as a new lingua franca for all humanity? I see the point in both arguments, but I have less a taste for dystopia and more for utopia, expressed in my love for the stories told in Star Trek, and as much as I’d say it’s good to acknowledge the global nature of English in naming this new period in the history of the language “Global English”, that name also smacks of hegemony and empire, something to be avoided. Instead, I suggest we consider something like “Contemporary English”. This reflects that a change has occurred from Modern English, while effectively meaning the same thing. In short, it’s a perfectly politically safe bet.

Think of how this language is changing every day. There are more efforts at either being gender neutral in speech or inclusive of the diversity of gender which we are all quickly learning about. Think of the extreme irregularity in spelling personal names. My own given name, Seán, has at least four different spellings. For the record, I spell it the Irish way, Seán. English spelling really hasn’t been purely phonetic for centuries, yet today I often meet people who do have phonetic spellings of their names. The funny thing is, at first situations like that throw me for a loop because I’m so used to the idiosyncratic ways that we spell words, including names, in English. This new phonetic spelling is one big influence that the diversity of English speakers has had on our common language. I do think there should be more cultural awareness of the underlying rules in English, but that’s more a problem of poor English education than anything else, something I’ve written about previously.How we react to the diversity of English speakers will dictate how this language continues to evolve in the coming generations. Just as the first English explorers’ interpretations of indigenous American names and languages reflected the culture of their time, so too the ways we interpret what to us are foreign words and ideas will reflect upon our own time. In this Second Age of Exploration, I hope we can learn from our history and explore with a passion for learning far more than any desires for conquest. Our English will be a reflection of our intentions as much as it will be a tool for our usage.