We are here for what amounts to a few hours,
a day at most.
We feel around making sense of the terrain,
our own new limbs,
Bumping up against a herd of bodies
until one becomes home.
Moments sweep past. The grass bends
then learns again to stand.
—TRACY K. SMITH, “US & CO.,” FROM LIFE ON MARS
Out on the salt flats, in high mountain ranges, and on the Arctic, skyglow doesn’t compete with stellar light. There we may see isolated radiance and not mislabel it as an outlier, but nodes within a larger narrative. We once looked to our stars, not simply to seek a story of how we came to be, but to etch out the contours of tales about what we have done since. Each society mapped constellations and asterisms differently over the centuries. Chinese culture looked at the sky and saw celestial light as they did in terrestrial society, assigning the stars names of rulers and soldiers, not the figures of myth, as did the ancient Greeks. Nearly all the stars we can now see are carved out into discrete territories, codified based on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models, and the information about them kept by the International Astronomical Union. For the unaided eye, this modern sky, it seems, has mapped mystery so thoroughly that in the mid-twentieth century, some thought it would take no less than an explosion on the moon itself to turn our attention above.1 We now peg our dreams to stars of other kinds.
So on a night of teasing warmth, the kind that cleaves summer from autumn, I responded to a curious invitation to come to Bryant Park—to the lawn Paul Holdengräber once showed me lies above the underground archive of the New York Public Library—to celebrate the launch of a capsule of humanity into geosynchronous orbit for billions of years, nestled in the Clarke Belt. My interest in what would actually happen at such an event brought me out. I darted needle-like through the crowd for yards, trying to find one of the metal seats on the grass where hundreds sprawled to sit and listen. Telescopes to view the gloaming sky—an alternative set up by members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York—piqued my interest. I stood there instead to have a closer look at the transition into night.
Vision that evening was bodily. To look up, people craned. When rapt, people were still in dense silence. When scanning the sky, heads swiveled, as panoramic vision is never resolved, not static, but constant. In the gloaming, interest seen in gestures and isometric poses never seemed to wane.
The program didn’t emphasize the logistics of how this communications satellite with an image-containing silicon disc, as small as a piece of microfiche affixed to its anti-earth deck, would be launched from a remote part of Kazakhstan later that fall, and the crowd that filled the tightly packed lawn the size of half a city block didn’t seem to be there to hear it. Central to the run of the show instead was a reading by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, a talk by Trevor Paglen, an artist and geographer at the University of California–Berkeley, remarks by the chief curator of Creative Time, Nato Thompson, who, along with Anne Pasternak, invited Paglen to conceive the time capsule project, and a dialogue moderated by Holdengräber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library, featuring filmmaker Werner Herzog on how Paglen had selected the pictures that would go into the capsule—all meditations on how we would record our endeavors here on Earth, a cave painting for the future.
Paglen admitted that the project’s conceit was ambitious and fanciful, even “absurd.” It was not done in the hopes that ancient aliens might come across the satellite, and miraculously see the many pictures and photographs. “Do the aliens have eyes? Do they care about art? I wouldn’t overburden them with art,” Herzog teased, as he began to turn the talk into a roast.
Yet opacity is what gives the project poignancy. We could never convey what we have done on, to, and through the Earth with our lives.
“It’s meant for us,” Herzog later admitted, his antics subsided, his taunts turning to thoughtful meditations.
What one hundred images did Paglen elect? They included HeLa cells culled from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 without her knowledge; the monster math function by cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez which had no real-world applications, a fact that Henri Poincaré lamented in 1899 as a failing, but Núñez saw as a sign of human agency; a detail of the painting the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder—an emblem of communication breakdown; an image of a bug in the computer (the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard, where a moth in the computer’s paper created circuit failures); a picture of Babylonian math tablet YBC 4713 filled with word problems; a detail of a list from a book of a million numbers; and the longest pattern-free list produced by the RAND Corporation to show the limits of mathematics. There is, too, orbiting around us a captured moment of astonishment: the NASA image Earthrise, taken from a lunar landscape; a transcription of the “Wow!” sequence—a frequency detected and seen as a potential sign of life in other realms—and a photo of the first time we put sharks behind glass in aquariums just as we put mannequins clothed behind display windows.
The accent was on an atlas of experiences of a particular kind—the lines between our feats and our failures, the one planetary story of which we are all a part, “a perpetual crumbling and renewing” as Virginia Woolf called it, on a global scale.2 The project’s potentially inert nature (no one may ever come to view these works) is an allegory for the centrality of failure to the society which created it.3 On the lawn, I watched as we talked about hurling into orbit—the widest horizon we have—images of triumphs, folds, and how we managed to meet the mountain that hovered in our sights.
I wrote this book, too, as a time capsule, a way to gather seemingly disparate stories to show their common themes and as evidence of the capacity of the human spirit that often has to be seen to be believed.
The moment we designate the used or maligned as a state with generative capacity, our reality expands. President John F. Kennedy once mentioned an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.4 Failure is an orphan until we give it a narrative. Then it is palatable because it comes in the context of story, as stars within a beloved constellation.
Once we reach a certain height we see how a rise often starts on a seemingly outworn foundation. The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, it will always be both the void and the start of infinite possibility. The arc is one for which there are few perfect words. Its most succinct summary may come from the wisdom in seventeenth-century poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide’s haiku: “My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.”
When we take the long view, we value the arc of a rise not because of what we have achieved at that height, but because of what it tells us about our capacity, due to how improbable, indefinable, and imperceptible the rise remains. There are advantages to certain opportunities, including their seeming opposite, that make our path as curved and as precise as an arrow’s course.