As I write this, four human beings are travelling to the Moon; Artemis II launched from Cape Canaveral on the evening of April 1, carrying Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen on a voyage that will go further from Earth than any human has been in the history of spaceflight. I watched the launch courtesy of coverage by CBC news, and for a moment, I felt awe and wonder at what our species can do when we set aside our differences.
Alas, friends of mine reported that, mere moments after liftoff, there were people claiming the launch was faked using AI. A laughable notion, but one that, in our current dark era of AI slop, we must face, and will continue to face, if and when we proceed to landing humans on the Moon and even establishing a permanent presence there.
Arguments of faked space missions have gone back to the Apollo moon landings, though the details differ (then it was supposed to be actors and movie sets; today, generative AI is the preferred culprit). I will leave the technical arguments against such fakery to the experts in the field and instead focus on why I suspect people would wish to deny the wonder and accomplishment of this moment.
(A caveat before I proceed. I am by no means a psychologist. What follows is based on my observations of human nature in our current era, combined with words written by wiser people than I. If I err, those errors are mine alone. With that out of the way, let us press onward.)
In 1955, C. S. Lewis gave a talk about the genre of science fiction, giving his thoughts on the genre and its subgenres as he knew them at that time, and his thoughts on the reactions by critics to science fiction in general, and it is here that his words provided a crucial insight to our current moment. If I may quote him:
“If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavour on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals.”
— C.S. Lewis, On Science Fiction, published in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966).
“Trouble among the stewards…” Who can look at our world today and not see trouble? Our Earth is boiling. The international order that had kept the peace since 1945 has crumbled, and the old barbarism of Might Makes Right seems ripe to replace it. The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year and shows no real signs of stopping, and the war with Iran, only weeks old, escalates beyond control. America is ruled by a mad, senile despot who seems determined to leave the world in ruins before his inevitable passing. Far-right fascist movements are surging. In the United States and elsewhere, the rights of anyone who isn’t a straight white man are being savagely curtailed, and have sparked fierce resistance among the people. Even truth itself is under siege, as tech-billionaires have forced large language models into almost every aspect of our digital world, flooding the internet with AI-slop. I could go on, but I trust the point is clear: there is certainly trouble among the stewards.
Into this mess sometimes referred to as the polycrisis, we have this singular moment: four humans, representing a small but diverse cross-section of humanity, travelling further than any human has voyaged in over fifty years. They will see things only a handful of humans still living have seen – and, due to the interconnected nature of modern civilization – will share those things with us to a level of detail the people of the Apollo era could only imagine. They are taking a breather up on the deck, and are sharing the experience with us all.
This experience cannot help but remind us of our smallness in the cosmos, and with that smallness, can reduce many of our fights to the level of nursery squabbles. That smallness is equal, regardless of the status we may have here in the paper-thin veneer we call “normal life”. Regardless whether one is a homeless refugee or the richest man on Earth, regardless of one’s nation, language, religion, ancestry, we are all equally small against the scale of the universe.
It can be sobering, and either heartening or frightening (depending on your perspective) to consider that the titles, wealth, and power people accumulate for themselves are, in fact, insignificant. That Donald Trump is as tiny as the people he hates and oppresses. That there is an entire universe that does not even know who we are, much less who he is.
This moment also highlights the Olympian task of spaceflight. It is far from easy to send people to the Moon. In fact, this time, it has required many nations working together to build the spacecraft now speeding Moonward, and many more to track that spacecraft and keep active the fragile communication link between us and the four people aboard. It highlights what we can do… when we choose to.
Finally, the moment reminds us that our current miseries are miseries of choice. If we can send people to the Moon, there is little we cannot do with regards to the problems facing us. We could feed and clothe and house everyone. We could provide education and medicine to everyone. We can speak with our enemies and resolve our differences. Instead, we keep choosing to give power to people who hoard wealth for themselves, to fund stormtroopers and concentration camps, to bomb schools and orphanages. But – even now – we can choose differently.
It is thus little wonder that many people, both among the powerful and the powerless, may choose to deny this moment exists, to claim that it is fake. For the powerless, there can be a certain comfort in imagining our miseries as so far above us that we cannot hope to end them. And for the powerful, there is the fear that if the powerless ever realize what they can do if they choose to, if they ever escape the hopelessness that keeps them in line, then the powerful will have their power stripped from them.
Now, as much as when Lewis gave his talk over seventy years ago, the idea of “escape” is a dangerous one. Lewis made note of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien’s question of who are the class of people who are most concerned with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape. The answer should be obvious: that class of people are known as jailers.
The powerful have long sought to imprison us all. Hence why they have of late backed authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his ilk. This desire also explains their push to use generative AI to flood the internet with slop. If no-one can tell truth from falsehood, people would stop believing in anything. We would thus imprison ourselves.
Against this bleak future, moments like Artemis II break through like sunlight through clouds. They show us there is more to existence than our own prison yard, and thus open our minds to possibilities we would not have thought of previously. They give us that brief, refreshing escape like Lewis’ lone steward stealing away to the deck. Such moments are fleeting, and can sometimes be missed, but they are real and should be cherished when we encounter them. Through them, we might yet imagine a better world, and find the courage to bring it about.