The Injustice of Space

The injustice of space has everything to do with the injustice of time, and vice versa. We cannot understand space, or solve its greatest mysteries. Humans die too soon. It is a fact, one riddled with disappointment, that our generation was born too late to explore the world, and much too early to explore the cosmos. We live in a time between. Time’s greatest mischief is to taunt us with what we will miss, what we cannot hope to experience. We won’t be around to witness the completion of the Time Pyramid in the year 3183, discover what lies beneath Jupiter’s unyielding winds, or revel in the tie-dye of galaxies as Andromeda comes to embrace us 3.75 billion years from now. Those who have known the bright star in its prime will miss the brilliant and somber farewell of our familiar supergiant, Betelgeuse. Exoplanets such as GJ 1214b, a world covered by sea, or 55 Cancri e, a planet of solid diamond, will remain distant mysteries that we cannot explore. Voyager 1 will continue its lonesome journey through space long after those who carefully gave it its golden disk in 1977, a message from humanity, are gone. We must live with the question if there will ever be a response to it.

Despite the inevitability of what we will miss, there may be justice in that time has given us things that these distant relatives will envy about us. Though their skies are spectacular and their discoveries immense, Niagara Falls will have dried up by the year 24,815, Saturn’s rings, numerous and awesome, will disperse, and in 600 million years the moon will no longer be able to form a complete solar eclipse as it drifts away from us. Though space may be vast and incomprehensible, and our lives finite and infinitesimal, we are engaged in a desperate fervor to understand it. We stretch out our fingertips, willing them to extend beyond our physical boundaries, just to graze the surface of the universe which continually turns its back, and walks away. We seek out the inconceivable, the abyss, the esoteric. To attempt understanding, we must rely on an accumulation, we must rely on those who came before; and for those future explorers, we are a meaningful precedent.

About the Author

Kristen Stedman is a sophomore communications major obsessed with tea, outer space, and old buildings. She wishes whoever is reading this a very nice day and a very happy life.