One of my biggest dreams is to travel to Jupiter. I know, I know: that sounds more like a day dream than a serious life goal, but for the longest time, I have truly wanted to get onto a spaceship with three or four of my friends, and take a trip to that huge, gassy, planet toward the edge of our humble, milky, galaxy. It's no wonder I fell in love with Star Trek: boldly going where no one has even dreamed to go is absolutely my jam.
If you've worked with me anytime in the past ten years, you know I love to look at the sky. As the Head Star Gazer in Residence, documenting spectacular moons and unique planetary transits, and reporting on amazing stellar events are in my job description. But if you've worked with me in those past ten years, I've also been either one of the few Black people or the only Black woman on the team, and in the company. And it does not go unnoticed, even if people don't talk about it, but it just doesn't make sense to me. We can get to the moon, but we can't get more Black people or women in computing? In engineering? In medicine?
To be fair, a trip to the moon is easier said than done, let alone a trip to Jupiter. And while humans have landed on the moon, the amount of human effort, labor, and resources it takes to maneuver the mechanical wonder that is a spaceship is not insignificant. But it is inefficient.
You see, I don't think we're actually using the full potential of the human collective to achieve great things. In fact, I believe that the reason we haven't had more Black people in engineering, or made space travel a thing is directly correlated to the amount of injustices, inequity, and suffering we have on this planet. The most renewable of resources, the human mind, has been held captive by struggles for power and domination, for land, for people's bodies, and for people's labor.
This isn't to say that what we have achieved in the last two millennia isn't remarkable. It's to ask: how much innovation have we missed out on because we treat women as second-class citizens? How many mathematical phenomena have gone unnoticed because we have enslaved humans whose minds could have unpacked them? How many more inventions could we have experienced if we did not subjugate Black people around the world? How much have we lost as a human collective because we refuse to honor the renewable path that is human life?
I know how idealistic this sounds. So let's get practical. It took over 400,000 people over 10 years to figure out how to land on the moon because NASA and the American government realized that it would need all hands on deck to meet this goal, and so they made sure they used all available resources to do so.
In need of computers, NASA hired the formidable women mathematicians who, because of the need, invented the tools to compute, tools we still use today. In need of proper management, they hired the best managers out of the Air Force, and in need of various technologies like heart monitors and new metal alloys, they hired across universities and across disciplines. All the while, Black people, and all women still suffered large material inequalities. And yet, America made it to the moon.
How much further would we have gotten if we continued to support and invest in a society that engages all its humans as first class citizens; and if we created systems for shelter, food, healthcare, and a quality of life that allows us to think deeper for longer? A renewable path starts with the human collective's decision to meet a goal for itself that is also bigger than itself. It demands an end to borders and bigotry for the time it takes to achieve those goals.
Oppression at macro and intimate scales crushes the human spirit and the human ability to create, evolve, and transform. The policies and the institutions that are designed to advance inequities and, ultimately, death, are hampering human progress at an unsustainable scale. More bombs, more pandemics, more computing, more capital: all of these come at the cost of human genius, and I want us all to take a few moments to think about what we're missing out on, and to grieve what we've lost, so that we can attend to a future that renews us all.
The renewable path requires us to see all humans as worthy of living this life. I realize this is not an easy thing to do when you've been socialized into exceptionalist thinking that puts a gender, a sexuality, a race, a religion, or a nationality above another. These struggles for power seem never-ending because the human collective has not decided to aim a little higher, and it doesn't seem that people want more for themselves than just surviving.
But I really, really-really, want to get to Jupiter in my lifetime. And the sooner we realize that humans are capable of so much more than war, strife, and bigotry, that sooner I can get there.