Space exploration - a spiritual journey of discovery

Leonidas

December 18, 2012

Space exploration has deeply transformed our world and our culture. Although its roots are traced in the Cold War politics of its beginnings, it soon transcended them, and started becoming what it really is: a path of exploration like none other! If we are to answer about the impact of space exploration's absence on the future, we must examine what space exploration meant in the past and what it means today. And its meaning is simple, yet profound: a spiritual journey of exploration and discovery! In my view, space exploration is the nobblest of all of man's endeavours. It's not only pretty pictures of an alien landscape or flags and footprints on an alien world. Space exploration is as much an inner journey of discovery as an outer one. With each step forward in space, we take an inner step forward also. Towards a better understanding of ourself and our universe. With every new discovery and every bootprint on an alien soil, a new perspective and awereness. A new way of looking at the world. A new way of being human. With every journey in outer space, we make a similar journey in inner space. Examining and questioning our long-held beliefs and ways of being in the world, under the light of a new understanding and insight, whether this comes from an astronaut's view of Earth from the Moon, or the discovery of the building blocks of life, and the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system. So in essence, space exploration is a deeply spiritual journey, both an inner and an outer one. It has that much potential! It can transform people and transcend boundaries with a single image or data set returned back, the way no other human endeavor can. So, if we were to deprive our future from space exploration, we would deprive ourselves of all this journey. We would lose one of the biggest reasons of being called 'human'.