My task was to remotely control a little rover, to drive it out of a crater. The crater was supposed to be on the moon, though it was really in a sand pit outside Montreal. And I was supposed to be on Earth, though also presumably on Mars, while still on Earth. Timing was everything. And so was positioning. The timing challenge was that the video only refreshed every second, making it hard to adjust to obstacles as you drove. The positioning challenge was that I needed to go at high speed up the 20-degree slope of the crater and thread the gap, just a little wider than the rover, between two rocks, and fast so as not to slide back down the crater, except not so fast that if I hit the rock I would tumble and end up like poor Gregor Samsa, stuck belly-up on his first morning after the change.
What actually happened: I gunned it. And evidently drove over one of the rocks to a position of immobility. An engineer had to walk over, pick me up (wheels still spinning?), and place me on flat ground. I wasn’t proud. I’m still even a little sensitive about it. And because of these uncomfortable feelings, now comes the part where I write my thin defense. Visibility and telemetry were limited. As was my training. It was my first time at the controls (such an advanced maneuver for a novice!), and I really shouldn’t point fingers, but my crewmates previously at the helm, who drove with far fewer challenges, both got up and left as soon it was my turn. They told me it’d be fine. I thought it’d be fine. Technically, it was. No one died, nothing was damaged beyond repair.
The lunar rover exercise was one of many projects we helped with during our mission. Testing a 3-D printer, assessing those space-suit trainers, and wearing workout shirts to the point of disgust were others. We’d try out various systems, offer feedback. This test run was provided by the Canadian Space Agency, which operates a facility for engineers and astronauts to evaluate equipment on their mock-up of the moon and Mars surfaces, yards about the size of a soccer field, featuring hills, rocks, sand, craters, and gullies.
It could have been worse. The Canadian engineers didn’t even implement the three-second video feed delay that one would experience with a real Moon rover, which makes making quick decisions even harder. High centering on a lunar rock and seeing your folly three seconds too late is the sort of mishap that ends a mission unless there’s someone nearby to dislodge you. That’s why there are pregame simulations, I guess. It’s why we practice.
According to NASA’s website, the moon is deep space. And the agency plans to send astronauts back to it sometime soon, across the 250,000-mile gap, as a stepping-stone for Mars, which is even deeper space, sometime thereafter. The moon as practice for Mars. One possible timeline: by 2020, the agency hopes to launch, for the first time, the Orion capsule (room for four astronauts, though it’ll be uncrewed to start) atop its brand-new, extremely thrusty Space Launch System rocket.
By 2022, astronauts aboard. Also in 2022, the first components of a mini space station to orbit the moon could be launched. This space station, called the Gateway, will act as an outpost and docking station for lunar missions. Finally, by 2028, a crew could very well descend to the moon from the Gateway to explore, test equipment, and conduct science. They could stay on the surface for up to a week. And after that? Vaguely, the 2030s are for Mars. According to copy on the website in early 2019, “NASA is keeping its eyes on human exploration of Mars. Our sustainable Moon to Mars exploration approach is reusable and repeatable—we will build an open exploration architecture in lunar orbit with as many capabilities that can be replicated as possible for missions to the Red Planet.”
I wrote my first article about NASA’s plans for Mars in 2005 for Science News magazine, and looking back I see that the current timeline is actually not too different from the one outlined in that Bush era. The major difference today is that some of the technologies—the spacecraft and the rockets—now exist and are almost, in operational parlance, okay to go.
The Curiosity rover, rolling on Mars as I type, digs into the crust, takes samples, and runs them through a spectrometer to see what they’re made of. It’s slow going and limited in scope. But a real human geologist? On a real Martian walkabout? She could, in mere hours, find the rock that might upend our entire understanding of how the solar system formed.
When you hold a rock, you’re holding deep time. The oldest terrestrials were formed more than four billion years ago in the Earth’s primordial crust, when our little protoplanet was a roiling, churning, molten mess, bombarded nonstop by meteorites, and the moon was only 20,000 miles away, its smooth seas forming against the heat of a nascent Earth as its far side, facing the void, was cooling into saw-toothed crags.
Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. Geology is mystery solving and storytelling. Decoding rocks and their formation is how we know what we know about the origins of Earth, the moon, Mars, our solar system. And the more kinds of rocks we can look at, the more we can know.
Even back in the ’60s, NASA understood the importance of training its astronauts as geologists. “Our point of view was that the moon is made of rock, and a large block of relatively inexpensive shirt-sleeve time on Earth might be the key to choosing the most important samples during those precious hours on the Moon,” writes Don E. Wilhlems in an argument for astronaut-geologists in To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist’s History of Lunar Exploration (1993).
Astronauts-in-training visited the Grand Canyon, Big Bend Marathon Basin in West Texas, the Sunset Crater cinder cone with adjacent lava flows, and Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, all analogs for the lunar surface. They learned to map structures and record where exactly they found which samples.
An “erratic” is a rock or a boulder that differs from the surrounding rock and is believed to have been brought from a distance by glacial action: a stone out of place. An extraterrestrial erratic is called a meteorite. More than 61,000 meteorites have been found on Earth. Of those, more than 200 have come from Mars and more than 300 from the moon. They are brought from a distance by ejecta, formed from the impact of an asteroid or a comet. The principle applies to chunks of Earth blasted into space as well. It’s kind of a sweet fact of the solar system that though separated by tens and hundreds of millions of miles, the Earth and Mars have a history of swapping rock.
Lunar meteorites are ID’d by comparing chemical and isotopic composition and mineralogy to lunar samples from the Apollo missions. Geologists confirm a meteorite’s Martian-ness, however, by the gasses trapped inside—inside the glass formed by the high-heat impact—that match the makeup of the planet’s atmosphere.
On our crew, Oleg and Sian were the trained geologists. They’d bring back samples from the lava flows near our dome. Oleg even led a seminar about the geology of our site, the local lava tubes, which are also a kind of cave found on Mars.
One of the reasons Mauna Loa was chosen as the HI-SEAS site was its geological similarity to Mars. Martian volcanoes, long extinguished, are estimated to have formed between one and two billion years ago. The major ones are of the shield volcano variety, meaning their gently sloping sides built up over time. Scientists have dated the youngest of the Martian lava flows to between 20 and 200 million years old. So about the same time dinosaurs roamed Earth’s skies, land, and seas, Martian volcanoes were pouring forth.
Similarly, but different, Mauna Loa is an active shield volcano though it’s been quiet for decades. Its cooled flows provide the mountain’s characteristic long and low profile. When observed from sea level Mauna Loa seems to carve across the horizon with barely an apex despite a peak at 13,700 feet. It is the world’s largest volcano, a mound of rock so massive that it sinks 26,000 feet into earth, even below the ocean floor, and forms 51 percent of the landmass of the Big Island, born between 600,000 and a million years ago.
Something muddled my awareness of time on Mars. On May 24 in my journal I wrote that we were already talking about getting out, only little more than a month into the mission. So soon? I also noted that I couldn’t remember when we drank the last of the Crystal Light, a favorite. “Was it yesterday or the day before? This time compression … is really something.”
Days seemed to drag, weeks seemed to vanish in a flash. A month could feel like a year, and a night’s sleep could feel like a twenty-minute nap. On real Mars, a day—the time it takes the planet to spin on its axis—lasts twenty-four Earth hours and thirty-seven Earth minutes. A year—the time it takes to revolve around the sun—is 687 Earth days.
We kept to Earth time. But on Mauna-Loa Mars, I’d never experienced such an amorphous chronometry, and I became obsessed with it. What was its root? Was it seeing the same people every day? Living with the same backdrop? So few trips outside? The never-bright-enough indoor lighting? The same smells, same schedule, day after day? What was this environmental smoothing doing to my internal clock? In my journal, I wrote of my intentions to write an essay on the natural history of the second. I would visit the antique clock repair shop in my San Francisco neighborhood, hang out with its proprietor. We’d become friends and talk time. I wanted to get a better hold.
There are, of course, scientific studies. People older than forty report that time moved more slowly in their childhood but sped up in their teenage years and into early adulthood. The reason for this may be that our brain writes new experiences to memory, but not familiar ones, and the longer we live, the more familiar it all can seem. Another study shows that the experience of terror, true fear for our lives, can also slow our clocks. The neuroscientist David Eagleman tested this by using an amusement park ride that drops people from a height, eyes skyward, onto a net 110 feet below. He asked them to gauge the length of their fall. On average, they overestimate it by 36 percent.
Virginia Woolf, in Orlando, writes: “Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”
That’s memory, which can, depending on how closely you’re paying attention, sometimes feel nearly the same as experiencing a now or fantasizing a future. Simultaneity. A collapsing of all possible timelines. Did my brother die yesterday or three years ago? Am I still partnered with Jill, as in my dreams? How long has it been since my own death? Is it possible that my parents never met?
For better or worse, most of us live in a world of standardization of time, and we can blame or thank trains and their schedules for this. In 1883, North American railroads, which had previously been operating on their own times, adopted a standard time to keep trains on the same track from colliding. Factories followed suit, and soon time became regulated and precise.
Trains, along with telegraphs, were also responsible for a noteworthy event, an example of technology’s ability to bewilder through the compression of time and space. Before the telegraph, steam engine was the fastest way to send information over great distances. But after the telegraph, information seemed to fly at seemingly unbelievable speeds. Consider Fiddler Dick and his gang of pickpockets. This group became famous in the nineteenth century for working London train stations—they’d nab a wallet, hop a train, and disappear into the ether. But a telegraph connection along the rail line between London Paddington and Slough meant a message of the crime could be sent and the police would be waiting when the offenders stepped off. Time, and the related perception of space, is relative and evolving.
Quantum mechanics backs this up. What if time is less a fundamental property, and more an emergent one, arising from its interactions with other aspects of the universe? In other words, what if time’s forward march of cause-and-effect is just dependent on your perspective, the way the night lighting in a room makes it look like a monster in the corner when it’s really just a pile of clothes?
A Journal of Physics paper from 2015 outlines this possible emergence by reminding us that even physicists don’t consider time to be absolute. “Physicists are in the situation where time is an essential physical parameter whose meaning is intuitively clear, but several problems arise when they try to provide a clear definition of time. First of all, the definition of time is different in different branches of physics.” The authors compare classical and non-relativistic physics with classical and non-relativistic quantum mechanics with special relativity and with general relativity. The reference frames for time are different for each—in physics there is no absolute agreement on what exactly constitutes “time.”
The authors go on to describe some specific physics issues that, when hashed out, imply that the state of the universe is actually static, meaning it is fundamentally without time. It sounds very strange because everyday observation tells us this can’t at all be the case. But what if, the authors propose, the universe is in fact static, and that time emerges from this static state because the state is entangled? Here, “entangled” refers to a quantum mechanical property of two particles whereby the act of measuring some feature of one particle somehow affects the measurement of the corresponding feature on another particle, no matter how far apart the entangled particles are, inches to billions of light-years.
And so they tested this question. To perform their experiment, the scientists created two entangled particles of light, and then they looked at properties of these photons in two different ways asking, is this system static or is it evolving? In one case, for an “internal observer,” the system appears to be evolving. In other words, the internal observer saw the passage of time. But for another “super-observer,” with a zoomed-out view, the system appears to be static. How can this be so? When considering entangled particles, it seems the fact of their evolution, which is also a signifier of time, depends on your reference frame. That is, who you are and what you’re looking at. This is actually the case with much in physics. For the most part, we’re looking at a universe and accepting time progression as reality. Peek through to something else, and maybe it’s not really what we thought it was.
As I write this, the East Coast winter is turning to spring. My brother is dead, and my marriage is ending. My parents are aging, I am no longer young, and I spend much of my day-to-day life in solitude except the few hours a week I’m socializing, often with gusto, as if to make up for the hours spent alone.
I have a hypothesis. I wonder if the year-round pleasant climate of Silicon Valley is part of the reason for the rise in immortality start-ups and more generally the belief that it’s possible for human beings to live forever, or at least much longer than we currently do. And, adjacently, that it’s possible to upload a consciousness into a machine, for humans to merge with one or many machines, an idea known in the business as the Singularity. Is it because, unlike in many parts of the world where seasons appear in relief and act as reminders of the cyclical nature of time, aging, death, and birth, you can magically think your way out of the natural ending of things? In Silicon Valley, and maybe even in other parts of California in general, seasons are all so easy to background. Death can become theoretical. Then again, it could also be the money, a proxy for power, and one of our great insulators from a variety of mortal realities.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I was shocked to find roses blooming outside my neighbor’s building in November. But then of course, within a week, they had wilted. Imagine my surprise when a few weeks after that they bloomed again. Having grown up in Kansas, where roses come in early June and only early June, this rejuvenation struck me as opulent, and even a little like cheating. It was like San Francisco was getting away with more than the fair allotment of beauty. I now know that various kinds of roses continuously bloom, and it’s not just a San Francisco thing, but at the time, my midwestern sensibility led me to take slight offense at so many nice Bay Area features—the mild weather, the stunning views, the recurrent roses. After a few months of it, though, I came to enjoy those roses and to see their renewal, the replenishment of those petals, as a natural variant, no longer showy, just another way to be.
In theory, I’m not so against the idea of aiming for immortality. Like a moonshot or a Mars-shot, I believe good could come from the effort, as long as the discoveries—perhaps some cures or treatments for diseases—aren’t out of reach of so many. But also, in a more basic way, who’s actually able to afford to live longer? The same people who do now? And what’s the cost of this kind of longevity? And what might be the cost, more generally, of seeking immortality for a species with such an apparent acquisitive bent anyway?
A few years ago, I heard the science fiction author Neal Stephenson speak at an event in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was answering a question about his own writing when he offhandedly, it seemed to me, said that the only reason humans have explored space at all is because Adolf Hitler wanted a missile with the range to bomb London. Before the invention in 1944 of the self-guided V-2 missile, nothing else had the capability. The space era exists because missiles, which are just rockets aimed at earthly targets, finally gained enough oomph to travel the distance. The rocket is one of humanity’s greatest technological compressions of space and time.
I looked into it and learned that more than 1,300 V-2s were fired at England and Belgium and France during the last months of World War II, in Germany’s last efforts to stave off defeat. More than 2,700 people were killed by them in London, but countless others died in their production. Though it was Wernher von Braun who oversaw the invention of the technologies that made the V-2 possible—from its powerful motor that launched it fifty miles high to its liquid ethanol and oxygen combustion, to its self-adjusting guidance system—it was prisoners in concentration camps, working in an underground factory called Mittelwerk, who made the actual physical missiles. Conditions at Mittelwerk were brutal. Prisoners endured little sleep or food, no visible daylight, and poor sanitation. Workers were executed when suspected of sabotage. This is space exploration’s provenance.
After the war, Russia confiscated the V-2 factory and test range and reverse engineered the technology. But America got von Braun, who went on to build a derivative of the V-2 called the Redstone, for the U.S. Army. This was the rocket that eventually took Alan Shepard into orbit.
The technological concepts behind the V-2 are the foundation of all rockets today. For travel into space sixty years ago, as now, we still effectively light a match and ride a fireball into the sky. Brute force. It turns out that finding a more elegant way to shrink the extensive distance of space is very difficult.
Proposals do exist, though. For instance, there’s an idea for something called a space elevator, wherein one end of a tether is anchored to the earth and the other extends beyond the atmosphere with a car that would slowly ascend and descend. Such a tether would need to be made of extremely strong, lightweight material. Some people have proposed carbon nanotubes. As of yet there are no prototypes.
When you ask questions about space travel, it’s only a matter of time before you end up at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, which I attended in 2015. The event, based on a broader project spearheaded by former astronaut Mae Jemison, aims to gather researchers, writers, artists, futurists, engineers, medievalists, economists, and adventurers to change their reference frame around space exploration and space technologies. Although it might not be possible to build a starship that travels beyond our solar system in 100 years, Jemison says, might it be a worthy endeavor to work toward? Imagine the benefits that might fall to Earth in the meantime.
At this conference, I attended a talk by a man who proposed a 100-year-long starship simulation, something like HI-SEAS, but longer by roughly a century. The speaker suggested that the rights to a video feed of participants could be sold, something like the MarsOne scheme, and the money invested. The project could be maintained financially on the interest accrued by investments over the decades.
Another speaker proposed that a material based on the microstructures found on sharkskin could help wounds heal faster—an important technology if you’re far from the resources of a well-stocked hospital. The medievalist spoke on the clothes people would wear on intergenerational spaceships. Someone else talked about the ethics of frozen embryos aboard a starship because if those embryos developed and babies were born, those babies would grow into people who wouldn’t have been able to consent to being born in space. To this, someone in the audience said the same could be said about parents-to-be who move to Nebraska. And Jill Tarter, the cofounder of the SETI institute, which aims to explore the origin of life and the evolution of intelligence and who has the same job as the Ellie Arroway character in the book and movie Contact, was also in the audience, seemingly always asking the most trenchant questions. In one case, to George T. Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceflight company, she said: “George, is Virgin Galactic taking on any responsibility before you launch a constellation of six hundred satellites for cleaning up the junk that’s already there that’s a threat to this common layer of infrastructure?” The crowd, or maybe just me, went wild—she was the only one to challenge him on his company’s responsibility toward the enormous amount of existing space debris orbiting Earth. Whitesides didn’t give a satisfying answer.
By far the most compelling talk of the conference was the proposal for a new kind of propulsion system, providing range and speed that’s impossible with chemical rockets. The propulsion would come from an ultrapowerful array of lasers, said the speaker, Philip Lubin, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Normally, Lubin studies the origins of the universe, but he had become enamored by the idea of yoking lasers together to get a beam powerful enough to push small spacecraft to some fraction of the speed of light.
This ultra-high-powered laser beam would push against something like a sail affixed to tiny spaceships about the size of a button but packed with electronics like sensors and cameras and communication chips. The beam would blast the tiny spacecraft to about 20 percent of the speed of light—so fast that it could arrive at the Alpha Centauri star system, our nearest neighbor at 4.37 light-years away, within twenty years. Compared to our current rocket technology, which could only get us there in 30,000 years, Lubin’s laser-based space travel would be an almost unbelievable advance.
And the laser system wouldn’t just be for interstellar probes, Lubin went on. We could locate one laser array on Earth and another on Mars to create a ferry system. A one-kilogram package could travel to the Red Planet in three days. Just a month or so for a larger, crewed vessel, taking into account the human body’s tolerance for acceleration and deceleration. What’s more, Lubin added, the lasers could be used as a way to clear some of the space junk that circles the Earth and threatens the safety of astronauts on the space station and can also damage expensive satellites.
I talked with Lubin after his presentation, after a cluster of other eager attendees had descended and dispersed. He was by far the darling of the event. I asked him if the physics really was sound and, thinking of the fabled space elevator, if there needed to be any new technologies built in the meantime. Lubin told me that based on current technology trends, everything he proposed was either feasible now or would be in the coming years. Nothing fundamentally new needed to be invented. He had even sent the idea to his enemies in the physics community, people who’d love to see him fail. He said they agreed, begrudgingly, that his proposal checked out. Of course it wouldn’t be easy and wouldn’t be cheap, Lubin said, but it could be possible.
About six months after the 100 Year Starship Symposium, Lubin sent me some excited emails. He had some news, and if I wanted to cover it, I should get ready. He and his team had been given $100 million by billionaire Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner, to build a small interstellar spacecraft aimed at Alpha Centauri. It’s likely not nearly enough money to fully complete the project, but with that blast of cash, the idea suddenly became slightly less crazy. It can start to clear an orbit of its own.
But I also think about the dark truth of all propulsion systems. Any technology that can close the unfathomable gap between celestial bodies is also, by its nature, able to be weaponized. It just depends on where you point it. And too, the conditions that accelerated the development of rockets in the last century were highly politically and militarily motivated. Is it possible to find the resources and the will to build a new kind of space-propulsion system without a geopolitical impetus? To do so in a globally cooperative way would take treaties and political agreements as well as international will, to be sure.
I should note that these kinds of high-powered laser arrays could actually have a third use beyond space travel and weaponry. They could also be used to beam energy, collected by orbiting solar panels, back to Earth, something called space-based solar power. Japan, Russia, China are actively pursuing the use of powerful lasers for just such a purpose, though some of these projects are decades old and still in the early stages.
In every movie in which a wormhole facilitates fast travel over vast distances, inevitably, some character in the film will enact the explanation by picking up a piece of paper and pencil, folding the paper, and jabbing the pencil through to prove the point: this is how we bend space and circumvent the strictures of time.
I hate this demonstration more than is reasonable, though I must admit it proves a point succinctly and visually, which is great for film. It’s just the trope of it that makes me cranky. And probably too, the fact that there’s no clear path to anything close to a wormhole in its elegance for space travel. The math allows for it, but the practical requirements, as they stand today, are truly physically impossible.
As a kid, when I learned about black holes, I thought they were the ticket to time travel, that getting sucked into the black hole would make us the pencil in the time-space piece of paper. I remember working very hard in fourth grade on my first long short story about a wayward astronaut not getting turned into spaghetti as a black hole’s gravity pulled him in, but simply transporting to a future version of his own universe. This was the year Mrs. Shannon was my science teacher. When I asked Mrs. Shannon if she understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, she said, to my surprise, that she understood only some of it. I respected her for her humility and honesty and also for her love of cats, which I too, loved. That was the year I would stay after school and pore over back issues of Science News magazine, reading about astrophysics. I wanted to understand everything. I was in love with how a collection of clues could be stitched together to make an invisible thing visible.
Perhaps this needn’t be expressly stated, but I wasn’t very popular in school. My family was a strange family, and I was a quiet and strange child who sensed that something about my true self was perhaps unknowable or if knowable, then possibly undesirable. A friend once told me that she senses something of a fugitive in me—one who’s always aware of the exits, whether or not she uses them. Maybe it was my impending adolescence and the slow dawning to me that I would need to deal with the fact that I was not like other girls and not like the boys either, which left me wondering exactly what kind of adult person I’d grow up to be. I don’t think I could imagine it. I sought refuge in those science stories of faraway places operating under strange but knowable physics. Places that you could almost imagine if you just think about them hard enough and in the right way. I identify fourth grade, when I was nine and soaking up as many scientific concepts as my young mind could grasp, as the year when my desire to place myself within a vast elsewhere truly engaged.
Most of us exist in a synchronized, agreed-upon time and within some kind of bounded, shared space. In New York, I’ve felt the shared space more than anywhere else I’ve lived, though of course you can also get it in London, Moscow, Lagos, Shanghai, Mexico City, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Nairobi, São Paolo, any place where humans exist in density. In New York, I had to adjust to the subway, the way you sit next to people, stand over people, pack in between people. The agreement is we keep to ourselves. To make eye contact is an act that ranges from ignorant to rude to aggressive. In New York, adjacency is unavoidable, and it’s treated as normal as long as you follow the rules.
Space mattered tremendously to us inside that Mars dome. There was such little privacy. Sian noted this fact at the beginning as she quickly designated her workspace with her equipment and her shelf space in the bathroom with toiletries. Simon did similarly, with his computer monitor and robotics equipment. Yajaira, chief science officer, took the lab. Oleg was a bit more mobile, often working with his laptop on one of the inflatable couches in the common area. I claimed my space, a seat at the shared table near Angelo. There was a lot of computer staring, which wasn’t so different from Earth. Most of us spent much of our time inside in the shared common space, which felt, in some ways, like a social free-for-all. So much so, that in order for me to concentrate on reading or writing, I had to steal away to my room, which as a group we had agreed would be bad if it happened too often—a kind of self-isolation that could be dangerous for crew cohesion. But in the shared spaces, I had a hard time focusing.
About three-quarters into the mission, I learned that Oleg didn’t treat our public spaces as public spaces. It turned out he was treating all shared spaces as inherently public and private, a little like the New York subway. Unless the situation was expressly social, like cooking, working on a project together, or eating a meal, he wouldn’t interact with others. I wish I had known! I had spent some parts of the mission considering his aloofness, and wondering why he wouldn’t return a smile or greeting when we passed each other on the stairs or in the kitchen. It makes sense, in a way. He’d grown up in Brighton Beach from age eleven, riding those trains. He knew how to give people their space. I just hadn’t known he was doing it.
When you think of grand things, the vastness of the sea, an endless desert, a hulking mass of granite that rises up before you, and the impossibility of deep space, how it keeps extending virtually forever, what do you feel? Do you ache for purchase, for something to hold on to? Can you grab it? Do you become anxious? Do you quickly turn your mind to other thoughts?
The author Robert Macfarlane suggests that people who summit mountains are “half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” I recently watched a couple documentaries about rock climbers who scaled the face of El Capitan in Yosemite. I imagine the same can be said of them. To sublimate into something as unfathomable as that rock, to hug, to press into it as if your life depends on it with your fingers and toes, the insides of your knees, a shoulder, a palm, to press your pain into such an ancient structure soaring high above the valley—my hands are sweating just thinking about it—is certainly an experience of deep time. Is it the same love of self and oblivion that calls people to outer space? A demand of some kind, to be annihilated? Or finally, a yearning for humility?