When I was twenty-something and working in a corporate job, I started looking at the people who were ten and fifteen years ahead of me on the ladder. They were perfectly fine people, well into the lives they had built. They were also, in some quiet way, exactly what I did not want to become. I had no specific objection to any of it. I just felt that following that path would mean spending the next thirty years pretending to be somebody I wasn’t.
So I left. I booked a flight to Asia for what I told everyone was “about a year.” I had read a couple of books that promised something better than the script I was on. I told myself I was going to travel, then come back, then start a business, then settle down. None of that was a plan, really. It was a story I needed in order to walk out the door.
The truth is I did not know what I was looking for. I just knew it was something else. That trip ended up running years, mostly in Vietnam, where I taught English and then managed a school full of grown-up students working through their evenings on a new language. And every now and then I would catch myself wondering what I had actually been chasing when I left.
This, I think, is a small-scale version of the much bigger question I want to write about today, which is one people have been asking since rockets first started reaching for the sky. Why do we explore? Not just leaving home for a year. The other kind. The kind that involves a launchpad, a budget that could feed a city, and a small group of people lying on their backs with engines screaming under them. Why do we keep doing it?
The first place to look is NASA’s own answer, because if anyone has been forced to articulate the reason, it is them. They put it like this: “The reasons to explore the universe are as vast and varied as the reasons to explore the forests, the mountains, or the sea. Since the dawn of humanity, people have explored to learn about the world around them, find new resources, and improve their existence.” That is the official line. It is also probably the truest line. We are doing in space the same thing we did in boats and on foot for tens of thousands of years before we had the word “space” at all.
The astronomer Carl Sagan had a sharper way of putting it. “Exploration is in our nature.” In the passage of his book Pale Blue Dot, he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” For Sagan, the act of leaving the planet, even by camera, seems to be a way of being honest with ourselves about how small the home we are fighting over actually is.
In 2008, the physicist Stephen Hawking gave a lecture for NASA’s fiftieth anniversary lecture series called “Why We Should Go Into Space.” His argument was less poetic and more practical. He thought the long-term survival of our species depended on it. “It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all,” he said. That is a fairly large claim to make about a few hundred billion dollars of rockets. But he wasn’t done. “It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth,” he went on, “but it will give us a new perspective on them, and cause us to look outwards rather than inwards. Hopefully it would unite us to face a common challenge.” Survival, perspective, and the chance of putting our differences down for a minute. That was his pitch.
The perspective part of Hawking’s pitch is the part that has held up best. Ask the people who have actually gone. They almost all come back saying the same kind of thing. There is a name for it now. It is called the overview effect, and NASA has been collecting reports of it for decades. Christina Koch, who is on the crew of the upcoming Artemis II mission to the Moon, described what it feels like through one of the station’s windows. “You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries,” she said. “All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.” Retired NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer said that every crewmate he had brought into the cupola for that first view had ended up crying. “It is heart stopping. It is soul pounding. It is breathtaking.”
The thing I keep coming back to in these accounts is what the astronauts do not talk about. They almost never come back talking about what they saw out there. They come back talking about what they saw in here. They went up to look at the universe and ended up looking at us. That seems to be the real product of going.
Which brings me back, slightly sheepishly, to my own small version. I left Ireland thinking I was looking for somewhere else. I came home, in dribs and drabs over many years, with a much clearer picture of where I was actually from and the kind of person I was actually becoming. I do not want to compare a bus ride to Hanoi with a flight to the International Space Station. That would be silly. But the shape of the thing seems similar. You go out hoping the destination will explain itself, and the destination turns around and explains you instead.
I think this is probably the honest answer to why we explore. Not for the resources, though those come. Not for the technology, though that comes. Not even for survival in Hawking’s grand sense, though I take his point. We go because there is a particular kind of seeing that is only available to people who have gone somewhere and then turned around. You cannot do it from your living room. You have to leave first.
NASA’s wording, when you read it again, says exactly this. The reasons to explore the universe are as vast and varied as the reasons to explore the forests, the mountains, or the sea. Plural. The reasons are plural because the people are plural. Every person who goes brings their own private question with them and brings their own answer back. Some bring back rocks. Some bring back patents. Some bring back tears. Some come home and quietly start treating the planet a little better than they did before.
If you ever find yourself sitting at a desk wondering why a few humans climbing into a rocket should matter to you, the people who have actually done it have an answer. It mattered to them. Not because of what was out there. Because, it seems, of what they could finally see when they looked back.
