Gravity: a review and brief reflections on earthbound existence

(Numerous spoiler alerts.)

"Life is impossible in space."

So begins the critically-acclaimed and blockbusting new film Gravity - the most humble, human and hopeful sci-fi film I've ever seen.

How can a sci-fi flick be humble? This was no "to infinity and beyond" celebration of hubristic human intergalactic imperialism. This was an extended study in our inability to survive a mere few hundred kilometres above the surface of the only habitable piece of rock in the known universe, a precarious existence in orbit (i.e. perpetually falling back to earth and missing, which is what orbit is) threatened not by aliens, not by an absent God, not by international tensions and conflicts, but simply and depressingly by the unforeseen consequences of our shortcuts and fundamentally by the inability to deal with our own junk.

Even amidst death and destruction, the Earth itself was the star of the show, the jewel in space, the pale blue dot on which all human hopes depended. The sheer beauty of the planet was the backdrop against which the crises and tragedies of the tiny cast played out. Indeed, the last line from the one human who felt somewhat at home in space was an appreciation of the beauty of the earth, praising the wonder of sunlight reflected on the Ganges.

When it all comes crashing back to earth, we are thrown again onto the ground, finding in the mud between our fingers the basis of our only hope. The sense of being "home" at the end was overwhelming. We are creatures of the dirt. It is no coincidence that the only survivor is named Stone.

The film was redolent with images of gestation and birth, symbolism that even became a little heavy handed at one point as Stone floated in the fetal position trailing a breathing tube. Numerous rapid dangerous movements through narrow spaces and a final desperate breaking into and out of water completed the natal symbolism. Stone, having found in space the ultimate womb in which to hide her maternal grief, the ultimate car ride to delay the full recognition of her loss, is reborn back into the world of pain and loss, the world of gravity, the word of dirt and mud. Her final embrace of the mud was a return to roots, an acceptance of her existence on a finite planet, a rediscovery of being fundamentally a pedestrian rather than celestial species.

We are humans from the humus, 'adam from 'adamah, and our destiny is tied intimately to the planet that is our only home, a home threatened by our inability to deal with our own junk.

Bolt vs Curiosity: it's no match

More than a few news sites this morning selected Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, as their lead story. Bolt broke an Olympic record and ran the second fastest 100m ever recorded to win gold in London, recording a top speed of something like 45km/h.

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck on Mars.

Every little boy (and plenty of little girls, I'm sure) dreams of running fast. And Bolt's 9.63s sprint was probably about two, three or four times as fast as most young children can run. I remember the first time I ran 100m against the clock, I came in at roughly 20s. I won't say how old I was...

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck, weighing almost a ton, on Mars.

Bolt raced in front of a crowd of 80,000 at the stadium and hundreds of millions around the world. He is an international celebrity whose endorsement is worth millions to any brand and whose face is recognised by countless fans everywhere.

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck, capable of finding evidence of extra-terrestrial life, on the ruddy surface of another planet.

Bolt's top speed was about 45km/h, the fastest any human has ever run. Curiosity's top speed was about 21,200 km/h. Bolt's speed was roughly double that of my boyhood efforts. Compared to my boyhood efforts at launching myself into space, Curiosity surpassed my - let's be generous and say 50cm - jump by a factor of 1.12 billion, travelling roughly 560 million kilometres from the surface of Earth to that of Mars. Bolt has trained for years in order to get every last detail correct: working on his running style, his start, his finish, his crowd-pleasing theatrics. Humans have been trying to work out whether there is or has been life on Mars for centuries and this mission has been in planning for eight years and en route for eight months, with scores of highly trained rocket scientists planning every last detail of a mission out of the Earth's gravity well, through the irradiated void of space and which culminated in seven minutes of terror, a hugely complex multi-stage precision landing procedure that had to be entirely automated, given the fact that signals from Mars to Earth take fourteen minutes and the entry only took seven. Imagine getting an almost one tonne truck to slow from over 21,000 km/h to zero in seven minutes while falling through a thin atmosphere with relatively strong gravity and landing on a precise spot on the far side of a planet without kicking up any dust or breaking billions of dollars worth of delicate scientific equipment. Wow.

So well done Mr Bolt. But what kind of planet do we live on where many of the major news organisations think that a man doing what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years (just very marginally better than anyone else) is bigger news than landing a space laboratory capable of reconstructing the deep history of another planet and searching for evidence of extra-terrestrial life on the surface of a planet 560 million kilometres away? Well done NASA. You deserve all the gold medals today, for an achievement that leaves every olympian, no matter how awesomely superhuman, in the shade.

Knowledge is superior to strength, skill to speed, carefully planned and executed cooperation to isolated brilliance. Yet better even than knowledge is wisdom. Though don't hold your breath for the day that the pursuit of wisdom makes a news headline ahead of a photogenic man running quickly at a corporate-sponsored event. Nonetheless, if Curiosity finds what it is looking for, we'll need plenty of wisdom to grasp it.

She [Wisdom] is more precious than jewels,
    and nothing you desire can compare with her. [...]
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
    those who hold her fast are called happy.

- Proverbs 3.15, 18 (NRSV).

The virtue of Curiosity and the seven minutes of terror

As a socially-awkward young lad, I grew up reading more than a little sci-fi. For many years, stories of the real life exploits of astronauts just didn't cut it in comparison to the realm of the imagination. Yet as I've come to appreciate a little more of just how complex, demanding and risky working in space actually is, so my respect for rocket science has grown. It is indeed rocket science, after all.

At the same time, I've become increasingly suspicious of pinning any of our hopes on the (for many) cherished dream of one day colonising other planets. Indeed, the two developments reinforce each other. Learning more of the challenges raises both admiration regarding what has been achieved and the barriers to the Star Trek interstellar techno-utopian dream. Not only are interstellar distances staggeringly large, but the technical challenges at every stage are enormous. This video gives a sense of the many difficulties involved in just one step in an operation to get an unmanned rover to our second-nearest planet, a project we've been working on for forty-odd years (with many failures and some stunning success).

I don't begrudge the space programmes their funding. I think Curiosity is a great name for this project; curiosity and wonder are at the heart of knowledge's raison d'être and learning about the cosmos needs no further justification. Furthermore, even from a purely instrumental perspective, NASA's work with satellites looking back at our own planet has been one of the vital ingredients helping us raise our sights from local to global impacts as we've sought to grasp the scale and pace of changes wrought by human activities. So I will be holding my breath in the early hours of 5th August waiting for news of a successful landing (ok, maybe I'll be asleep, but holding my breath in spirit). I too am curious.

But as we seek to understand more about the worlds beyond our world, let's not get carried away by unlikely dreams. Those other wonders of astronomical investigation, telescopes, may have been revealing a growing list of earth-like planets throughout our galaxy over the last few years. Yet the nearest of these, Gliese 581g is still something like 192 trillion km away. At that distance, the fastest space craft we have yet built would take a mere 87,000 years or so to reach it.

For some, the idea of interstellar travel is an inspiring long term goal. In principle, I have no particular problem with this. Yet I get the impression that as the magnitude and proximity of our various ecological threats becomes increasingly apparent to more people, so the dream of escaping from here to start a new life elsewhere has grown. In this form, as potential salvation from our self-inflicted termination, the idea of colonising exo-planets is an illusory psychological defence mechanism, a dangerous distraction from the task of caring for our neighbours and preserving what we can of a habitable world. Yes, perhaps with some currently unimaginable silver-bullet technical breakthrough perhaps we'll be jetting off at significant fractions of the speed of light at some stage. But let us acknowledge that as a way of keeping (a tiny fragment of) the human race alive in a cosmic insurance policy, it is, quite literally, the longest of long shots.

We look to the stars, but our feet remain on the only planet we can realistically inhabit in the timeframes relevant to our self-destructive trajectory.

Thesis question articulation VIII: Possibility

Possibility: part one
Series begins back here.
Finally, we arrive at the beginning and find that it is the centre. The possibility of: these first words of the sub-title are critical, as they designate the sharp focus of this project, limiting its scope, directing its attention and making it, I believe, original research.

The project is not attempting to answer “what ought we (as Christians) to do now?” (i.e. under these modern conditions of perceiving a predicament of societal unsustainability), which is a much broader question of daunting scope and complexity, demanding careful and multifaceted answers. Its answers will develop and shift according to both the further development and understanding of our situation over time and according to our particular social location in the world with the opportunities and threats we find ourselves facing. It is also a question that has received much consideration from both within and without the Christian church.

This project is also not attempting to answer one subset of this broader question, namely “what ought we to think now?”. This too is critical and complex. An analysis of the cultural patterns of both behaviour and thought that have led us into this mess and suggestions for new conceptions or for the recycling of old ones are pressing needs of the hour. And once again, Christian and non-Christian thinkers are making interesting suggestions on these matters.

Instead, this project asks “under what theological conditions is moral thought even possible today?”. It will investigate the threats to reflection upon the question “what ought we to do (and think) now?”, the ways in which the process of attempting to answer it might be short-circuited or the moral landscape flattened out such that genuine moral though is attenuated. It is asking after the theological space that enables moral reflection to take its time without being hurried into an answer by the threat of contemporary or imminent crises. What is the character (rather than content) of moral thought during a predicament such as the one we presently face? How does the Christian gospel shape and provide for the moral self at this time? What is it about the good news that enables the possibility of moral attentiveness even (and perhaps especially) in today's adverse and apparently hopeless conditions?

Finally, the project is interested not only in the possibility of, but also the possibilities for Christian moral attentiveness. That is, not just about the preservation of Christian moral attentiveness against the various threats that may numb it, but also about how this predicament may even be a source of spiritual and moral renewal.
This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

Virtual spaces: loving our neighbour in web discussion

A guest post by Michael Paget
I've been reading a lot of blogs recently. I'm not a blogger. I don't have the confidence of my opinions, or the brevity of expression, to put my thoughts in the public space. Of course, there are benefits to being a passive observer, with all that entails about 20-20 (in/hind)sight. Recently, I've been passively observing some online disagreements about creation science, on a variety of blogs and discussion forums. And it's left me wondering: what is the shape of love for the weaker brother or sister in online debate? I'm going to argue that it has more to do with more than just how we debate, but also whether we should debate at all.

In the 1960s, Edward Hall developed a spatial theory of relationships, culture and communication. He proposed 4 spaces which we use to develop personality, culture and communication. Public (12 ft +), social (4-12 ft), personal (18" - 4 ft) and intimate (0 - 18").

Some kinds of communication are better suited to one space than another. The space described by web forums is a kind of public space which is de-personalised by the absence of face-to-face contact. When we dialogue online, we express ourselves not only publicly, but also without the benefit of being confronted with each other's humanity. The stakes are heightened, because our discussion is exposed, rather than intimate. But the normal factors of interpersonal contact which provide restraint, especially in the intensity of a theological discussion, are absent.

At the same time, some people are more competent in one space than another. I have a friend whose writing is just marvellous. He is warm, witty and conversational. Yet in person, he is awkward, uncomfortable, almost fractious. I have no idea how he relates intimately. A great many people find it extremely hard to function well in the public, unrestrained, de-personalised and semi-anonymous context of the web. The internet is in many ways a great blessing; however, it is also a highly unusual environment, which places new and unfamiliar strains on relational behaviour.

I suspect that the social context - in particular, the unavoidably human and personal presence of the Other - in which we, as humans, are designed to operate, is particularly important for some people. Some of our brothers and sisters - some of us - simply do not function well in the online space. And I suspect that the proportion of us who are affected adversely by this environment is much higher than we will readily admit. Apart from the regulative pressure of true sociality, we present as far less socially capable, generous or gentle than we are in our more frequented 'spaces'.

A new application of care for weaker brethren may be called for. We need to recognise that 'weakness' is spatially dependent. Perhaps, then, we would do well to consider when and how we introduce certain issues, or engage with certain people, online. More discussion boards would be password-accessible only. Fewer blogs would allow anonymous commenting. In effect, we would only be doing to discussion what we already do to films and TV - restrict it to those able to process and engage healthily.