Man on the Moon

Forty years ago, a man walked on the moon for the first time. (Unless you believe in conspiracy theories and Kirk Cameron, in which case you may as well stop reading here and pick up the more comfortable work of fiction by the Sarah who is not on a box of dessert, but could just as well be.)

Forty years after a manned flight to the moon, I sit in the top floor slanted ceilinged bedroom of my grandparent's Cape Cod. Rain is making music on that slant. High above that rain, an astronaut is at work at a space station, floating in orbit around the Earth. A camera films him. A live signal is beamed down by satellite to the silver laptop on my desk. I gaze at the images and marvel at how easily we accept this as commonplace.

In 1969, a young boy may have had this room as his bedroom. It isn’t difficult to imagine him in his pajamas with stars and planets on them. His collection of Robby Robot toys on the floor. A mobile of the solar system suspended from the slanted ceiling. I can picture him staring out the window, up at the night sky. Imagining those men walking on the moon.

How far will science have taken us forty years from now? Will my own grandson be sleeping in this room, sending text messages to his best friend on board a spacecraft from another planet? Will things we now consider far fetched be accepted as commonplace to him? Time travel, transporters, extra terrestrial beings? How far fetched does something have to be, before it can safely be considered beyond the range of possibility for longer than a person can imagine?

Almost everything in Jean Luc Picard’s world is either already in ours or soon to be. There are exceptions of course, but for how long? Looking back at how quickly science has emerged from science fiction, it seems silly to write anything off as beyond that range.

I can almost recognize how much effort it must take for our own higher consciousness to stay immersed in this world. On a higher plane, we must already realize what more there is to discover. Before coming into this world, perhaps we were well familiar with other worlds, and only agreed to forget all of that in order to be fully present in this one. How strong must be the temptation each night, while we dream, to step out of the accepted limits of this world at this time and go freely to explore those others? How much we must love this one to keep coming back, perhaps bringing with us a deeply stored recollection of some piece of the future. How else does it come into being?

Rain on the roof. Robby Robot on the floor. Astronaut on the laptop. Transporter in the closet?