Somehow ABC Radio news bulletins on New Year’s Day managed to juxtapose a soul-tingling item about the exploration of deep, deep space with a soul-stupefying item about shallow politics.
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The news from space was to do with the spellbinding success of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in taking a cosmic stickybeak, four billion miles from Earth, at Ultima Thule. An earthling had to be tragically thrillproof or perhaps even clinically dead not to be left tingling by the news of the New Horizons achievement. Our species has never before had a good ogle at anything so very far away.
At his and her best, what a piece of work is man! What a mystery it is that the USA can somehow at the same time nurture a NASA of such flair and genius and a White House of such imbecility.
But in news bulletins that triumphant item was cheek by jowl with an item reporting NSW Labor leader Michael Daley reminding us of why we increasingly view party politics with scorn and think of party politicians as scum. Daley was trying to take party advantage of some Sydney railway hiccups.
Sydney’s railways, unusually stretched by teeming revellers going home from harborside New Year revels, were disrupted by freak lightning storms that biffed electrical wiring and signalling in eight places. This resulted in (shock! horror!) some delays.
Michael Daley, his voice throbbing with fake indignation, fumed that the disruptions were somehow the fault of the NSW government.
Listening to him trying to make some shameful political hay out of a night of freak traffic and freak storms the bubble of joy given by the New Horizons news (mankind at its brilliant best) was burst by a nasty little prick, by the reminder of mankind at its petty, grubby political worst.
I mention this not only because the event (the news bulletin with its dazzling peak and stagnant trough) gave a true shock.
It was also because it all speaks to a theory I have been brewing for quite some time.
My theory (for the moment without any corroborating findings by political science) is that it is no coincidence that our well-known and much-measured growing impatience with worldly party politics comes at a time of phenomenal achievements in space exploration, achievements spectacularly reported to all earthlings by the wonders of the internet.
What if, now that we can ogle Mars and even Ultima Thule, goings-on on Earth, especially among Earth’s small, wriggly things (party politicians) begin to bore us?
I am just an average earthling with an average curiosity about space but there are several internet sites I visit regularly for the latest news they give (with spectacular images captured by spacecraft and by Rovers beetling about on Mars’ playing fields) that bewitch and bedazzle.
I spent, in a virtual sense, quite a lot of 2018 on Mars. The world marvelled at a 360-degree selfie Mars rover Curiosity took in August (at the same time that, trivially, the Liberal earthlings were dumping Malcolm Turnbull) showing itself framed by a spectacular red, craggy Mars-scape.
Then, too, how could Earth and its politics (Iet alone small Canberra and its niggly-wriggly politics) compete for the attention of active minds with 2018’s asteroid-visiting adventures? Forgive me if in 2018 I took less interest in Barnaby Joyce than in Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft alighting on the asteroid Ryugu, scooping samples from it, then, later, dropping two tiny hopping robots on it to send home pictures of the asteroid’s surface.
Nothing that Barnaby Joyce or Peter Dutton or Malcolm Turnbull or even newsworthy Zed Seselja did in 2018 was in any way different and new (it was just flawed mankind behaving the awful way it always has and always will, as Shakespeare has so deftly captured it in his plays) but what the fiendishly clever Japanese did (and continue to do) with Hayabusa2 is all fabulously new. If only Will Shakespeare could be here to know it, to write poetically about it.
This year Hayabusa2 is going back to knobbly Ryugu to take a bigger and better sample, which, this time, will be landed in Australia in 2020. If Hayabusa2’s momentous and dinky-di-special visit to Ryugu this year coincides with the trivial earthly event of the Australian federal election, and if at the same time there is, say, another spellbinding selfie taken by a Mars Rover, how many of us will give a fig for what our campaigning weasels and stoats say on the hustings? For we, the people, are beginning to lift our gaze up out of politics’ gutter and out towards the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.
