A Spaceship Called Earth
THE BITCOIN ESSAYS
Originally Published December 2023
5 Minute Read
v1.0
“It will be many a year before man will fly in the air by machinery.” // Chicago Tribune, September 1903
“The present generation will not live to see man fly.” // The Boston Transcript, December 1903
Contrary to popular pessimism, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17th, 1903. Only 66 years later, Neil Armstrong performed the moon landing.
Humanity is incubated in a perpetual paradox. Daily, linear lives, enmeshed in exponential ones.
We all “appear” here in the same manner. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, awoken by the God-ordained light of consciousness. We don’t ask for such life; we are made, not begotten. Born in chaos, molded by it, unified in the fight against entropy. Drowning in our own biology, yet strangely, alive.
Our ancestors called this place Earth. We tell our progeny the same. Our perceptions of home widen as the generations roll on. Early pagan inklings suspected something flat, lying bear on the back of an enormous beast. The Bible uncannily prophetic telling us “God.. hangs the Earth on nothing.” // Job 26:7 // And now, the 21st century experience may be something similar to the popular 2000s drama, ‘Lost,’ in which 48 passengers crash on a mysterious island. In our case, we find ourselves not stranded in open sea, but open space. What we now perceive to be a giant rock, orbiting a more giant nuclear fusion reactor.
We “arrive” here in a state of naked ignorance, indoctrinated in culture, victorious history, and the maps those victories have drawn. Earth, we’re told, is fallen, under “the curse.” Awaiting a future redemption to a Glorified state. The creator has sovereignly allowed subjection to futility; the creator will restore it. In the meantime, we continue on with our pre-fall mandate; subdue creation.
This project, “subdue creation,” is the unfolding saga we all awaken to; most choose to participate. Earth in some sense lies agnostic, like an enormous digester, slowly erasing the efforts of finite man. Yet incrementally, humanity makes progress on this project. Mastering agriculture to be free from the perpetual hunting and gathering. Generating social fictions to trustlessly scale beyond the confines of the Dunbar number. Harnessing resources, channeling energy, projecting power. Eventually arriving at marginal leisure to dream up science-fictions of what future projects could look like when extrapolated beyond the home planet. And so the 19th-Century imagination concocted what contemporary culture calls the “spaceship.”
This concept, the “spaceship,” invokes the primal pioneer. A spirit of adventure. In a way, our imaginations beckon our bodies to go; harkening us toward the unknown. We must go, we think. We must leave, because the “land of our fathers” was once, merely land. From our vantage, we peer up toward merely space; but one day perhaps it too will be passed to our progeny as heritage.
Envision for a moment the perspective of a spacefaring youth, looking out the window of their O’Neill colony toward the mother planet, Earth. How would our humble planet appear to them? Perhaps Earth from this vantage would look to be the mothership.
And what value, you ask, does this mental exercise offer? How about perspective. More, a paradigm.
To conceive of Earth, not as the default, defunct planet to escape by spaceship; but rather, as mothership. The prototype. The one we HAVE to get right. That’s quite a mindset.
It’s comforting in a way. To sit here, writing, reading, imagining oneself not stranded on rock, but cultivating on soil. To conceive of Earth as home, the original O’Neill colony. The one we got right so the others could spawn.
I’m not positing we have gotten it right. Nor am I suggesting it’s guaranteed we will. I’m merely suggesting we try; flip our paradigm away from abandonment, and toward cultivation. To treat our inheritance as the ship God gave our ancestors. The one they subdued and built upon. The one they studied to understand its processes and function. The one they stewarded and passed on to us. The ship we hitched a ride on and built a future inside. ‘A Spaceship Called Earth’.
This is Jonathan David Kellogg – Writing for
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