On that frontier we shall know

 On my national agenda, it was listed to generate a tomorrow for America: “TO INNOVATE LONG FUTURES SUSTAINABLE SPACE PROGRAM.”  The future is not yet written at any moment in time for any moment in history; yet, despite the improbabilities for certain many types of ventures in the centuries past, there have been those with the pure will of scholarly or research advancement, of craftmanship, of political maneuvers, of actualizing the realities of many kinds simultaneously, to advance the frontier belonging rightfully to exploration.  The concept of colonization was never a simple minded notion of aggression over other lands, but rather, drawn from an idealistic romance for new adventures upon new verges and edges of the known sphere in which so many did dwell.  Returning to the purity of frontier exploration after all the lands had been explored, this here to that so called “final” frontier, yet completely unbounded unlike the terrains of earth, can discover no true edge except for that one of the determinable and determined of the known sphere.

When imagination stretches beyond the confines of what is known, the act being undertaken is to “think outside the box.”  For many, the earth’s confines by gravity, delimited largely to its surface, is a box so enormous that one could not become situated beyond its grasp.  The civilizations’ make too is of such variety and extents that worlds upon worlds had been created in the millenia in which human beings have found themselves dwelling on this pale blue dot.  The advancement of knowledge is one undertaken not by all, historically, but by some, of these are a few who desire most of all to venture all about in a comprehensive manner, but also to the limits of the circumference which appears, elusively, to bind us all.  That desire, to be cultivated and groomed and forged, into the moment of pure intentionality, so sharp and acute and inexplicably refined that the action is emitted to exit these bounds of the earth’s surface, that is the team of the alpha explorers who managed much for what appears to those others so little, a journey extending above and beyond all that is known.

What is knowable cannot be known ahead of time, neither preformulated, prescribed, dictated, nor pondered.  Instead, it is found in the projector, that to be known by strict and rigorous measure and then determination: something could be known, over there, in this way, postulate the thinker who did not already known yet intuited that the origin of the truth about a particular something or somewhere, or perhaps in a long long future, some one, could reach our mediation through instruments, through knowledge comprehension complexes, through our reports, indeed, through our own eyes, ears, and brains.  

That travel is not sitting in a passenger cabin peering out of a window with ignorant eyes and dumb ears, and rather, is the traversal of the soul, from home, which is what has already been known, to a foreign place tor a foreign thing or being, to what is called “beyond” is the beyond of that familiar somewhat which was known by more than intuition, for those of us who had had the principle for traversal.  We imagine that Earth is home - who is this “we,” who had remembered and recalled thousands of times what is this planet but a celestial body trafficking itself by the principles we had determined for the motion of a massive body in space.  Upon what kind of meditation had the endless space found those limits, not physical in our minds yet, but as perimeters abstract to the ordering of rationality, out there?  For in the endless space is not land nor matter, but a vacuum not unlike the geometrical spaces defined by axes in mathematics, yet when travel of the body along with the mind and however spirited being out into that “space,” those who had discovered it is no abstraction, but an infinite virtuality of vacuum’ed space in which but an atom dwell every hundreds of cubic meter.

What could be known about such a place, as an enormity of physical extent that knows virtually no bounds.  What could be discovered inside this emptiness, where little matter and energy emanate, however large the numbers to measure such matter appear to most, we know that such matter exists but for an exception to the general terrain of empty mathematical but real expanse in each and every direction on all four axes which could be ascertained by all human beings to be here, in existence.

It was not yesterday simply that we discovered the endlessness, but in ancient times at the dawn of the human being was already considered, deliberated, and discoursed.  But it was only in yesteryear, perhaps about a hundred and fifty years ago, that it was founded, almost as a slip by scientists and sailors, as a frontier that one day we humans shall traverse.

The idea of transport was thought to be first to reach deliberation; however, in truth, the traversal began in the Renaissance period when the thought of a world beyond this planet transpired in the greats’ writings post observation, and that such a world bore harmony as well as order.  

America!  Upon these great men and their achievements shall be founded a trajectory for our nation to assume the real tracks by our bodies along with mind and spirited being that path above and out of this smaller world of our planet we call Earth.  The popular consciousness traverse much as well, from drama of the everyday, to the epics of nations, between the steam of technologies and the annals of pulp to papyrus to extraordinary scholarly fine print.  Today, it is traversing through the spans of the science fiction genre; not amiss was the earliest known science fiction Somnium by Kepler to the modern period.  In this story a man travels to the moon, yet no more than a century or two later, the laborious physical and mental effort went to the strife for the actuality of becoming spacefaring.  

The fare into space could still be compared to the action of taking sail into what was then a boundless ocean.  The oceans, so deep and so vast, it must be the largest thing in the universe, for those who slept under deck, and those who handed the deck, through storm and waves, with no land in sight, for periods extending just over the periodic rising and setting of the sun, and the seasonal fluctuation of temperature to latitude.  The brave sailors found that their centuries’ history gave the surety to ensure absolute certainty when faced for years and decades on end the lack and void of all that was known to them, on land.  On land, things and people even seemed a little foreign, a little different, a little away from the seas and minor instances of beings, mostly fish, but the occasional moster.  The circadian rhythm by which the cosmological parameters alluding and showing the truer scales of existence was more normal than the particular specifics that plagued most on land.

It is true today that post centuries of sailing, moving “habitats” are now in design, development, and execution.  The seas held secrets that no one on land had heard of, much of it about our cosmic situation, of inching about and mozing over the large surface of an almost sphere, whose core is solid, metal, and molten.  That today luxury habitats beyond cruiseships have set those wiser sailors onto trips defined by material refinements ought to be a clue that through careful and committed traversal, the disciplines in which the brave dares partake grow, blossom, and progenerates.  What sophistication had emerged over the centuries, where in nautical traversal is becoming the rending of home on the sea, for space we are more ambitious.  We are seeking the reality of being in that which has no true bounds we could ascertain, ever, with our physical bodies spontaneously with our mental minds.

The dream, then, is of a romance many millenia in the making.  To forge the materially actual tracks with the tracing out by our bodies and crafts into the nearly purely abstract dimension that is what is housing our small celestial body Earth which we find by experience to be so incredibly huge.  The romance is of our bodies and corresponding consciousness, true, but too and just as importantly, of the disposition of our original curiosity that shines the light onto what could be discovered and wrought, using the complexes we develop over time, may it be a lifetime for an individual or spanning centuries for a discipline, to disclose through rendition.  

This is the romance of the Frontier of Space.