Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (32 page)

Many people try to justify NASA by its spin-offs—although I think we’ve finally let go of the Tang reference. Of course we’ve got spin-offs, as every year’s inductees to the Space Technology Hall of Fame testify. NASA also exerts direct and indirect economic impact in every community where it does business. Its presence has fostered educated communities. Meanwhile, salaries get paid. Goods and services get purchased. Sum up the economic impact, and NASA is net positive. Yet none of this fully captures the soul of NASA’s mission.

Something else captures it, though, something that’s rarely talked about: the sheer joy of exploration and discovery. Not all countries offer their citizens this possibility. People living in poor countries are reduced to the three biological imperatives: the search for food, shelter, and sex. Ignore those basic requirements, and you’ll go extinct. But in wealthy nations, we can go beyond the basics. We have time to reflect on our place in the cosmos. We might think of this as a luxury, but it’s not. The way I see it, exploration and discovery fully express the biological imperative of our brain. To deny these yearnings is a travesty of nature.

Space knowledge is one of the fruits of using our brain. So are numbers. I like numbers, especially big numbers. I don’t think most people have a feeling for how big the big numbers are. What do we call things that are big? We call them astronomical: astronomical debt, astronomical salaries. The universe deals in big numbers, and I want to share some of them with you.

L
et’s
start out small, just to get warmed up. How about the number “1”? We understand the number “1.” Go up by a power of a thousand, and we get to 1,000. That’s another number we understand. Go up by another power of a thousand, and we get to 1,000,000. A million. Now we’re getting to the populations of large cities. Eight of those live in New York City. Eight million people. Go up by another power of a thousand, and you get to 1,000,000,000. A billion. You know how big a billion is? I’m going to tell you.

McDonald’s has sold a lot of hamburgers, so many that they’ve lost count. Just between friends, let’s call it 100,000,000,000—a hundred billion. Do you know how many hamburgers that is? If you start in Colorado Springs and lay them end to end going due west, you’ll get to Los Angeles, float across the Pacific, get to Japan, go across Asia and Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, come back to Washington, DC, and keep going. You’ll get right back to Colorado Springs on your 100,000,000,000 hamburgers—fifty-two times over, in fact. By the way, I did this calculation based on the bun. It’s a bun calculation: fifty-two times around the planet. By itself, the patty won’t stretch as far. Then if you want to stack the leftover burgers, you can make a stack high enough to reach the Moon and back. That’s a hundred billion for you.

Back to a billion. Anybody out there who’s thirty-one years old? In this year of your life, you’ll live your billionth second. It’s the second that follows 259 days, one hour
,
forty-six minutes,
and forty seconds (minus, of course, all the leap days and leap seconds of your life.) Most people celebrate their birthday. I celebrated my birth second—my billionth second—with a bottle of champagne. I’d be happy to recommend some champagne for the occasion. But you’ll have to drink it real quick, because you’ve got only one second to celebrate.

Let’s go up by another power of a thousand, to a trillion: 1,000,000,000,000. A “1” with twelve zeroes. You cannot count to a trillion. If you counted one number per second, as I just mentioned, it would take you thirty-one years to count to a billion. How long would it take you to count to a trillion? A thousand times longer—thirty-one thousand years. So don’t even try it. Thirty-one thousand years ago, cave dwellers were making rock art in Australia and carving small, thick-thighed female figurines in Central Europe.

Now go up another power of a thousand, to the “1” with fifteen zeroes. Now we’re at quadrillion. The estimated number of sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived is a hundred quadrillion. That includes Congressional filibusters. They’re part of the tally.

Up another power of a thousand: “1” with eighteen zeroes. That’s quintillion, the average number of grains of sand on a beach—even the sand that comes home with you in your bathing suit. I counted that too.

Up yet another factor of a thousand: “1” with twenty-one zeroes. That is the number of stars in the observable universe. Sextillion stars. If you came in here with a big ego, it won’t play well with that number. Consider our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, which is kind of like a twin of ours; within its fuzzy cloud system is the puddled light of hundreds of billions of stars. When you look farther, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope, you see nothing but these systems, every single one of them appearing as a smudge. Every smudge is a full red-blooded galaxy, kin to Andromeda, containing its own hundreds of billions of stars. Getting a taste of cosmic scale makes you feel small only if your ego is unjustifiably large to begin with.

In all of these galaxies, there are stars of a particular kind that manufacture heavy elements in their core and then explode, spreading their enriched contents across the galaxy—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, and on down the periodic table of elements. These elements enrich the gas clouds that birth the next generation of stars and their associated planets, and on those planets are the ingredients of life itself, which match, one for one, the ingredients of the universe.

The number-one element in the universe is hydrogen; so, too, it is number one in the human body. Among other places, you find it in the water molecule, H
₂
O. Next most common in the universe is helium: chemically inert, and thus not useful to the human body. Inhaling it makes a good party trick, but it’s not chemically useful to life. Next on the cosmic list is oxygen; next in the human body and all life on Earth is oxygen. Carbon comes next in the universe; carbon comes next in life. It’s a hugely fertile element. We ourselves are carbon-based life. Next in the universe? Nitrogen. Next in life on Earth? Nitrogen. It all matches one for one. If we were made of an isotope of bismuth, you’d have an argument that we’re something unique in the cosmos, because that would be a really rare thing to be made of. But we’re not. We’re made of the commonest ingredients. And that gives me a sense of belonging to the universe, a sense of participation.

You could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

I think about human intelligence a lot, because I’m worried about this idiocracy problem. But look at our DNA. It’s 98+ percent identical to that of a chimpanzee, and only slightly less similar to that of other mammals. We consider ourselves smart: we compose poetry, we write music, we solve equations, we build airplanes. That’s what smart creatures do. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that self-serving definition. I think we can agree that no matter how hard you try, you will never teach trigonometry to a chimpanzee. The chimp probably couldn’t even learn the times table. Meanwhile, humans have sent spaceships to the Moon.

In other words, what we celebrate as our intelligence derives from a less than 2 percent difference in DNA. So here’s a night thought to disturb your slumber. Since a genetic difference of 2 percent is so small, maybe the actual difference in intelligence is also small, and we’re just ego-servingly telling ourselves it’s large. Imagine a creature—another life-form on Earth, an alien, whatever—whose DNA is 2 percent beyond ours on the intelligence scale, as ours is beyond the chimp’s. In that creature’s presence, we would be blithering idiots.

I worry that some problems in the universe might be just too hard for the human brain. Maybe we’re simply too stupid.

S
ome people are upset by this. Don’t be. There’s another way to look at it. It’s not as though we’re down here on Earth and the rest of the universe is out there. To begin with, we’re genetically connected to each other and to all other life-forms on Earth. We’re mutual participants in the biosphere. We’re also chemically connected to all the other life-forms we have yet to discover. They, too, would use the same elements we find in our periodic table. They do not and cannot have some other periodic table. So we’re genetically connected to each other; we’re molecularly connected to other objects in the universe; and we’re atomically connected to all matter in the cosmos.

For me, that is a profound thought. It is even spiritual. Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

This is an epic journey my colleagues and I have been on—in my case since I was nine years old. The rest of the world needs to understand this journey. It’s fundamental to our lives, to our security, to our self-image, and to our capacity to dream.

• • •
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ODE TO CHALLENGER, 1986
^*

Eager and ready you stood

In stately pre-launch repose.

At “Main engine start 3–2–1,”

From a mighty cloud you rose.

Your rockets thrust you skyward

But on “Throttle up” they failed.

A fireball consumed you,

Wayward boosters left their trail.

The Atlantic was below

Where Columbus first set sail.

An enterprising journey,

Where the brave alone prevailed.

Your astronauts showed courage.

With you they fell to sea.

There was pilot Michael Smith

And commander Dick Scobee.

The engineers Greg Jarvis

And Judith Resnik were there;

Ellison Onizuka

And physicist Ron McNair.

Who could forget the teacher,

Christa McAuliffe? She gives

Children dreams and parents hope.

In life she died, but now lives.

Our urge to explore remains

Deep within us, ’til last breath.

But therein lies the challenge:

To discover, we risk death.

The nation stopped; the world mourned.

To space you did not climb.

Lost to NASA forever,

Hallowed forever in time.