Space: The Final Frontier. It’s the final frontier because we’ve explored everything else. The base premise for quite a few science fiction series, novels, and movies, the desire to seek out and explore is seemingly built into us. The video game No Man’s Sky is the most recent incarnation of this idea. Filled with beautiful landscapes and a seemingly endless universe of planets to explore, it tantalizes the imagination of all who play. Emphasizing wonderment over plot, it implicitly carries the message of modern thought towards science, that of knowledge and discovery for their own sake.
The current prophets of this movement include scientists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, the late Carl Sagan, and other such popular scientists. Cosmos, the show run by Carl Sagan and rebooted by Neil deGrasse Tyson is the flagship of the movement, emphasizing that science is the grandest of all ventures, exploration and the garnering of knowledge is the highest of all human activities.
C.S. Lewis questioned the nature of the scientific enterprise and more specifically the desire to explore by examining the motivating forces behind our quest to expand our range of immanence. He claimed that “Probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it desires.” Our science has methodically stripped the divine wonder from the natural realm; we’re left with facts, the likes of which do little to warm us from the metaphysical chill of meaninglessness. The game No Man’s Sky itself propagates this message, “Any meaning found in No Man’s Sky is imposed on the universe by the players themselves, not by a premade story created by the game’s designers.”[1]
The late Walker Percy would have smiled at this.
Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and a dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. You make enough money and move to a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: “Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.” Explain your emotion.[2]
Meaning does not come with travel. We, in fact, bring meaning with us. But if we’ve exhausted our reserves of meaning, how can we expect to carry any with us? There is a desire for mystery, for symbolism and our science allows only for the symbol of math variables and the mystery of the (as of now) unexplored.
As an engineer in the programming world, I am deeply indebted to science. It brings much to the table, has brought about prosperity, health, and a plethora of human goods the likes of which people twenty years ago couldn’t imagine, much less 200, still less 2000!
And we as humans would be worse off without this noble enterprise. It is just designed to answer questions of matter, not of what matters. Stephen Jay Gould coined this concept as the “Non-overlapping Magesteria Principle.” Himself an agnostic, he saw the truth that science is concerned with empirical matters, not matters of moral truth or any other such metaphysical questions, desiring to leave those questions to other realms.[3]
Science does not bring meaning with it. It brings fact, but these facts will not feed our desire for meaning.
We are foolish to think this will change with location.
[1] See “What ‘No Man’s Sky’ and CS Lewis Tells Us About the Spirit of our Age”
[2] Walker Percy, “Lost in the Cosmos” p. 27-28.
[3] Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magesteria”
