It has been exactly fifty years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. So much has changed since then, in ways that his contemporaries could never have anticipated. The very notion of “conquering space” has come to seem vaguely quaint, as human aspirations have moved on from the merely physical to the profoundly virtual.
We no longer think primarily of the physical universe when we think of exploration — John F. Kennedy’s bold vision of a “new frontier” has become yet another old frontier, as distant from us in its way as the California gold rush dreams of a century before.
Even the recent blockbuster space epic — “Avatar” — whose grand visual sense of space opera captured the imagination of a rapt world-wide audience, was not really about visiting outer space. On the surface it may have appeared to be about space ships and alien planets, but that was merely a ruse. “Avatar” was actually about inner space — the space within our minds, where the limits of biology meet the endless possibilities of cybernetically enhanced evolution.
In the end, the forces in that film which set out to conquer a planet were shown to be hopelessly out of touch with real power. The true conquest was the transcendence of the physical itself — the triumph of escaping one’s very body, to achieve a different state of being.
As our collective minds turn inevitably to the future possibilities of social networks, of augmented realities and computer-implants, of ubiquitous interfaces that allow us to enter ever more detailed worlds of fantasy, we realize we can never go back to the merely physical.
And so we find that the astonishing journey of one lone spaceman who ever so briefly escaped the bounds of earthly gravity itself, is floating away from us, gently yet inexorably, into the unreachable mist of history.