There are times when we need to sit back and reflect on the world as we have known it. It is an exercise men and women throughout the course of history have engaged in. One can be certain that the outcome of such reflections has almost always been similar, indeed in many instances the same. And yet it is true that the worries of one generation have centred on subjects quite different from that of another.
Which draws us to the human experience of our times. Let the mind travel back to all this endless exploration of space, all this endeavour to push frontiers to increasingly deeper zones of the universe. How is it that despite Voyager-1 and Voyager-2, launched in 1977 and having already travelled no fewer than 14 billion and 15 million miles into deeper space, we yet have no idea of whether there are civilisations on other planets, other worlds beyond the one we have inhabited for ages?
It is a question that will linger. But there is too the realisation that we have lived, and continue to live, in interesting times, as the Chinese would say. Had the Soviet Union and the United States not engaged in the race to conquer space, with Moscow launching Sputnik in 1957 and Washington following soon after, perhaps the innocence associated with the ages would still define the ways of the world. Think of how the 1960s specifically changed our views of our planet and of the heavenly bodies which lie beyond. Imagine the many doors to discovery science opened up for us, culminating in the moon landing of July 1969.
Science, yes, science has made all the difference. Physics, astrophysics, space science have made all the difference, so much so that we now have the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) moving inexorably into regions that might yield us the roots of the beginnings of the universe. The images of the endless number of galaxies the JWST has been beaming back to Earth are certainly a tribute to human imagination and ingenuity. Of course, in all this search for what lies beyond our world we have often stumbled into tragedy. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have perished at different times. In January 1986, all seven astronauts of the Challenger spacecraft were killed when it exploded within moments of lift-off.
Such tragedy has not dampened the human urge to lift life on to a higher perch. And not just in the search for life, or whatever else might be there, in the vastness of space. The point here is that science has never been in retreat, be it in space or in and around the mundane realities of life. Which is one way of suggesting that in our times, an era where climate change has been wreaking havoc in diverse regions of the globe, the need for human security can only have us fall back on science for survival. To be sure, science has its limits. It will not restore to us the world, those aspects of it that we have lost. The bigger truth is that science, taken as a collective means of ensuring the survival of Earth, is what we will have to hold on to.
In the past good number of decades, forests have vanished, rivers have dried up, sea resources have declined, deserts have witnessed inexplicable floods and monsoons have been without rain. When forest fires rage in California and ice melts in the Arctic, when polar bears hunt for food that is in a process of depletion, the image of the world before us is stark. It is a dying world we inhabit, surely. But with science there is always a way. Across the generations, human health has benefited with the endless stream of medicines allowing men and women to live longer. Covid was, and continues to be, a challenge. But with scientists putting their shoulders to the wheel, it has been tamed. Science gave us penicillin. Today it gives us a whole lot more.
And so we reflect on life. Obviously there are all the reasons for people to feel miserable about the state of things. We do not fully comprehend the hard lives Afghans live in these times. We come up against the harsh realities of disturbing politics nearly everywhere in the world. That women are yet vulnerable in a world of predatory men is an image we cannot wish away.
When helpless masses of humanity take it on themselves to climb on to rickety boats on the high seas in their search for a better existence in Europe, we remember with a shudder that the human condition has not fundamentally changed through millennia. Science put to macabre use has murdered millions down the ages. It is doing the same. We read of Oppenheimer and Turing. We have nightmares about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That is when we look up at the sky on a freezing winter night, observe a shining star out there, a star on which no life exists, and ask ourselves if we have not been creating the very conditions that will one day put an end to life here on Earth. But science, minus its power to wreak destruction, should be saving us all. If we can go for explorations of Mars, if spacecraft can go by Jupiter and Pluto and send back images of the silence which prevails there, there is yet hope for humankind.
And hope has a bonding with ground realities. Science has had the world increase its production of cereals in ways unprecedented. Vegetables and fruits have gone through swift expansion in terms of acreage and volume. In our own Bangladesh, young scientists and other people driven by ideas of happiness being the yardstick of life have been working in their individual ways towards contributing to an enhancement of life's quality. Middle-aged farmers, unschooled in science, have nevertheless grasped the basics of science, enough to know which crops to grow in which season.
Science celebrates the human imagination. In our times, in countries grappling with issues related to human needs, science must be part of academic syllabi all the way from nursery class to the university. It must be a process of work, a means of extending the expeditionary instincts of people; that journey into deeper space should complement the search for a better and a more humane application of the resources of Earth, all in the larger interest of generations today and those to be.
Ours is not yet a blighted world. It is not yet an accursed place. Earth is still home to beliefs, social and political and religious, convictions which often come into conflict but in the end stop at a point where upholding the common interest is all. As Archibald MacLeish would say, we are brothers on the earth together, brothers who know they are truly brothers.
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