Reaching for the stars

Years from now, when we bore our grandchildren rigid with tales of The Great Blackout of '03 (or 8/14, as it may come to be known), we'll speak of the grand sense of camaraderie that sprung up among normally standoffish Torontonians. Drivers gave lifts to office workers stranded downtown, neighbours shared batteries, families held impromptu cookouts and gave away their thawing meat before it spoiled. We all made new friends.

And some of us wandered alone, to reacquaint ourselves with some very, very old ones: Cygnus, Draco, Leo Minor, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Andromeda. One of the unexpected consequences of the blackout was the way that the stars, lacking earthly competition, sprang so brightly and effortlessly out of darkness. The fierce white light of the almost-full moon was startling in its intensity, and by a happy coincidence, Mars was the closest it's been to Earth in 15,000 years, close enough to glow like a fireball in the night sky. On Thursday night, stargazers were reminded that the Milky Way is more than the name of a candy bar: the arch of stars is a thing of infinite beauty, what the !Kung people of the Kalahari desert call the "backbone of the night."

Light pollution, the glare that prevents city-dwellers from seeing stars as clearly as we could on the night of Aug. 14, is here to stay. And compared to the gunk we pump into our air and water, it seems like one of the more benign forms of pollution. Not being able to see the stars can be considered an unfortunate, but not devastating, by-product of urban life: the trade-off for safer streets and the ability to do more than just turn in for the night when the sun goes down.

But the recent blackout gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on what was lost. It's often been said that to look into the night sky is to look back in time; some of the stars we see are so far away, they've already burnt out by the time their light reaches us. But to commune with celestial bodies is also to look back into our own history, to the dawn of humanity. Since the first ape descended from the tree, stretched its legs and thought, "You know, this wandering upright thing is OK," the stars have been our constant companion. While virtually every culture has a creation myth to explain the creation of the heavens, the moon and constellations are our cultural heritage from a time before culture. The modern world contains sights more bizarre and complex than could be imagined by ancient people, but the stars we see are the same.

For centuries, the night sky was used for navigation. It told people when to move to new hunting grounds, when to plant crops, when to bury the dead, anoint new rulers, slaughter animals, make babies.

Later, scientists figured out the motion of the planets and deduced our place in the cosmos, sometimes suffering and dying for the knowledge. And in this century, in a wild burst of enthusiasm, using computers not much more advanced than what can be found in the average 21st-century car, we sent a few men to walk on the moon. Standing on the shores of the cosmic sea, as Carl Sagan put it in his 1980 book, Cosmos, "we have bravely tested the waters and found the ocean to our liking, resonant with our nature."

But that was more than two decades ago. Since then, we have regretfully picked up our beach towels and coolers and headed back to the cosmic parking lot. Space exploration has proceeded at a glacial pace since the lunar missions, with the exorbitant costs being one of the main factors cited for its decline. The recent launch of Spirit and Opportunity, the two Mars probes, happened because they were sold to the public as a bargain, at a cost of US$800 million for the pair. (That may seem like a lot, but not compared to the Viking missions of the 1970s, which would have cost US$4 billion in today's dollars.)

On Aug. 13, the day before the blackout, the government of India announced that they were planning an unmanned lunar mission by the year 2007. Talk about a bargain -- their preliminary estimate for the project is US$82.5 million, less than the budget of many big Hollywood movies. Still, much of the press coverage questioned how the prestige project would benefit the Indian people.

The answer: it won't benefit them directly. But that doesn't mean dips into the cosmic ocean aren't worthwhile. While India will doubtlessly make much political hay out of their moon mission -- and that's their right, god knows the US is still milking its lunar landing -- the fact is, space exploration benefits us all.

There are so few things we do as humans, as citizens of the cosmos, that any small effort in that direction ought to be encouraged and applauded. So that when the lights go out and we are humbled in the presence of the stars, we can say to ourselves, "We were there."