Our backs against the bomb, our eyes on the stars

OUR BACKS AGAINST THE BOMB, OUR EYES ON THE STARS

An astronaut suspended between earth and moon, Archibald MacLeishwrote, sees the earth ''as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.'' Closer to home, there's another revelation that comes from circling this planet. As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are the thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the earth and all the living things it supports. The dissonance between this unity you see and the separateness of human groupings that you know exists is starkly apparent.

During my space flight, I came to appreciate my profound connection to the home planet and the process of life evolving in our special corner of the universe, and I grasped that I was part of a vast and mysterious dance whose outcome will be determined largely by human values and actions.

As I floated outside Apollo 9 with sunlight streaming past me, streaking over the Pacific at 17,000 miles an hour, I realized I was there on behalf of all humanity, that it was my responsibility to communicate this experience to my fellow beings, perhaps give them a glimmering of what I saw, what impressed itself upon me.

It's more than a metaphor to say we're children of the stars. The elements that form our bodies were forged in stellar explosions eons ago, and have been combined and sculptured locally into DNA templates by the warm glow of our own docile star. We're amazing beings, who wonder about our origins and purpose, our past and future. Above all, we can think and do. We can wrestle with ethical dilemma, ambiguity, and paradox. By any measure, we're a marvelous experiment.

But we're now also capable of terminating this cosmic experiment. The decision to unleash the devastation of the atom appears to depend on the whims of only two men, but in fact many others are involved: other heads of state, generals, faceless terrorists, even an errant computer. Any one could trigger events that would lead to hundreds of millions of deaths, if not planetary extinction.

Is anybody actually in charge? Or have we lost the handle on ourtechnology? It sometimes seems as if our machines have developed a life of their own.

But like it our not, we're married to our tools. And while we must wrestle with ourselves over how to control them, we have no choice but to make them. By nature, we're toolmakers, tool users. We see limitless possibilities for organizing and concentrating material and energy to extend our capabilities and to ease the burdens of life. Our tools also include weapons, which are sometimes used for protection, at other times to coerce and kill.

This marriage of human and machine has created the ultimate predicament. Our technology has progressed to where we can now manipulate energy and material to free ourselves from our earthly womb, or to destroy all life on it. Which will it be? I believe the right choice can only be made if we overcome our fears, our distrust of each other, our assumption of separateness.

Our future -- indeed, our survival -- is closely tied to the idea of our common destiny, and we must act, individually and together, out of an appreciation of that grand vision.

The extent of popular support for going into space always amazesme. Rich or poor, educated or illiterate, male or female, young or old, all over the world people are intrigued by and dedicated to the exploration of space. We've always been fascinated by the stars, planets, and celestial phenomena. Who among us isn't awed by the heavenly display on a starry night? Who hasn't pondered his or her place in the universe beneath clear skies in a mountain valley or on the high desert?

I don't know why this feeling is so common, but I suspect it's embedded within our nature. It seems to me that as we approach the day when life moves outward from the earth, realizing our ancient dreams, this yearning becomes a collective act, an extension of the will of all life to grow beyond our planetary womb. It's almost as if we're groping toward the stars.

I call this cosmic birth. Like human birth, it's a consequence of the nature of life, and extends the evolutionary path into the cosmic arena. I also believe that, like the human model, it moves us from a one-way relationship of depenency to a two-way relationship of love and responsibility.

It's in this context that I think we must act in order to ensurethe continuation of the life experiment. But how? Will our cosmic birth buy bread for the Third World? Settle disputes in the Middle East?

Action, for good or ill, comes out of vision. What I've been talking about is envisioning our role in life, in the cosmos. When I understand you and me to be one, I think and act differently from when I see us as separate. Yet while we may see ourselves as members of a community, there's no escaping individual responsibility. History emerges from a succession of individual, apparently independent, actions.