Autumn 2026 blog entry
It’s easy to forget on a rainy day in November that human beings are now an interstellar species, in a sense. On November 18, 2026, NASA projects the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be one light-day away from the planet Earth, the distance a beam of light travels in 24 hours, about 16 billion miles. Voyager has been traveling for almost 50 years and has left the Solar System for deep space after a tour of the planets and the spectacular photograph that’s attached to this blog entry. That was Voyager capturing an image of the planet earth from just beyond the rings of Saturn, appearing as a pale blue dot from that distance.
I could recite astronomer Carl Sagan’s speech inspired by that pale blue dot or rehash my childhood dreams of being part of a species that was stretching outward into space on a journey of exploration and discovery, but I didn’t end up becoming an astrophysicist in the end (as eleven-year-old me dreamed); I study people, not planets. I am also old enough and disillusioned enough to realize that a lot of the publicly-funded scientific progress, past and present, is the result of rival states trying to achieve military superiority and the technological high ground, not the misty-eyed reveries of cosmic wonder. I have also learned from my Indigenous neighbors that the rhetoric of exploration and discovery has often been window-dressing to the subjugation and exploitation of human beings who were “discovered” in places that were “explored” (whether they wanted to be or not).
And yet, when I leash up my big fuzzy dog Tiny and take him outside for an evening walk in rural Northern Minnesota in a season of ever-shorter days, I still look up. A clear night sky on a crisp evening still inspires that sort of wonder that projects like Voyager and science communicators like Sagan (not to mention the late great Patrick Stewart and Star Trek: The Next Generation) once imparted to me. And I recognize that despite the fact that science as a publicly-funded enterprise (rather than an avocation of pallid upper-middle class eccentrics, as in the more distant past) has been put with less than noble motives to less than noble ends, there is still a message in milestones like Voyager that remains important, maybe even more so now.
Thinking about something made by human hands passing outside the boundaries of the Solar System makes me think of both past and future. Writing a song that bears the namesake of that ship is nostalgic; it is also a word to the future. Music, no longer astrophysics and not yet social science, was passion and refuge by the end of my teens. I self-produced my first solo album in 2002, then a gangly 19-year-old college kid who lived with his parents and worked at a café in the local mall. I co-founded a band with big dreams after finishing college the first time with a B.A. in philosophy; I still wanted to be a philosophy professor “someday” but didn’t feel like I had much wisdom in my early twenties (I didn’t). Playing in a band, mismanaging shows and even a live music venue, busking with an acoustic guitar in bars and coffee shops and even on the side of the road. The lifestyle caught up to me in 2012 and I decided after I regained my sanity that I was going back to school. I think sociology attracts people who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, but who feel intense curiosity coupled with a desire to make the world a better place—perhaps because they have seen humans at less than their best a little too often.
So, the song “Voyager” is the first music I’ve put together in a long time. It was part of last year’s sabbatical from teaching. Sure, I have, and am part of, other musical projects out there, but those belong to the past as well. Music being released that didn’t get released before, like some old demos and studio recordings from my band that I remastered and published last year. We haven’t played together since 2013; and I haven’t performed as a singer/songwriter since 2017, when I ran out of money in grad school and spent a summer busking in Kansas. Music I wanted to record but didn’t have the skill or knowhow or equipment. Music with my name on it that is “new” bears a little voice from my twenties still reasserting itself. Music is a young man’s game. But the past always bleeds into the future, shapes it.
Physicist and science writer Michio Kaku predicted in 1997, almost 30 years ago now, that the world of scientific discovery was coming to a close as the twentieth century ended; and that a new era of technological mastery was on the horizon. I encountered similar predictions in so many places, both before and since, some bold, some modest, some with an air of skepticism, others with an almost utopian gloss. I think Kaku and others were right about this general trend, but if scientific discovery was funded and legitimized as a tool of political power and colonial expansion, then what does an era of technological mastery bode if thought of in the same terms? Hyperscale data centers, expansive surveillance technology, increasingly autonomous combat machines, and the Internet itself as an ongoing algorithmic struggle between competing definitions of reality suddenly come into focus. Maybe at the smaller-scale level it’s why pervasive anxiety is reported by majorities of the population; an ongoing multitiered power struggle that has increasingly brought everyone to the front lines. This era of technical mastery is, perhaps ironically, a fast-growing job market for psychiatrists and clinicians and counselors, and maybe it will continue to be.
High demand to fix damaged human beings; low demand to reassess what’s doing the damage, big-picture. Maybe that’s part of a shift away from public universities and schools as a site for developing the new weaponry of socio-cultural and political-economic supremacy; a shift toward private industry and technology. With this shift comes a shift from political power to profit (which is not to imagine these have ever been fully separate); this is already evident as the machinery of technological mastery is producing tremendous wealth for a relatively small clique of people. The university environment, by contrast, has produced measurable goods and benefits to society in terms of safeguarding and expanding art, culture, and other forms of skilled human accomplishment while also expanding opportunities for upward mobility through education. This was not why it was funded to the degree it has been; it’s a perhaps lofty side-effect of much more gritty, realist, and everday agendas.
As I watch budgets strain and even some of the top universities see layoffs and cuts, I think about whether that is coming to an end now, and if so, what will take its place. I think of the vast troves of classic and rare books being bought up, chopped up, and fed to generative AI models before being destroyed. I think about all the music I have written and released being scraped without so much as a request for consent and fed to the machine. Will this era produce a range of creative novelty, knowledge, and inspiration that will be celebrated for centuries to come, or just digest en masse what has come before and leave little of lasting value behind, another vaguely mysterious and remotely pitiable “dark age” for future thinkers to ponder (assuming humanity survives this thoroughly hubristic era)? Is there a way to quantify that, or even know in advance?
Voyager 1 is powered by plutonium batteries, by the way. Plutonium 238 is made from enriched nuclear waste—that’s the kind of plutonium that powers that little ship beyond the confines of our Solar system at close to 40,000 miles per hour. Plutonium 239 is used to make the tools of apocalyptic warfare. One single neutron of difference. What is the social significance of a neutron? What does it mean that humans can use such superficially similar scientific knowledge and technological innovation for such ennobling and dystopian ends? Is it possible that, to paraphrase economist John Maynard Keynes, this era of technological mastery will lead the nastiest men with the nastiest of motives to produce wonders like Voyager, that will be greeted with profound wonder tempered by a strange nostalgia 50 years from now?
I guess there are two things that I get from thinking about Voyager’s imminent milestone (and thinking about the song I wrote about it). The first is the recognition that maybe the most important part of living in an era of technological mastery is an ongoing public awareness that technology doesn’t “decide” anything; nothing is inevitable in a world where reality itself is up for grabs. People speak and act into being what is inevitable and what is obsolete, what is valuable and what is not; and this may be more true than ever before precisely because of the innovations that shape this era. The second, related, comes from a lifetime of reading, writing, making music, and now teaching; doing the very things that some of the prophets of technological mastery seem to have declared obsolete, irrelevant, and certainly not worthy of financial compensation or legal protection. With those brief glimpses into the night sky and those moments I spend talking to a classroom full of students (even if it’s increasingly in the form of a Zoom recording), I shut off the noise of this constant struggle for attention and influence and rediscover some clarity of purpose. Why I write, why I read, why I teach, why I spent many hours of the past year thinking about the sociological significance of a 50-year-old spacecraft that’s less technologically advanced than my wife’s Subaru but has somehow left our star system. The universe is a big and complicated place and doesn’t owe you or me or even our species or planet anything. It’s a privilege to even exist for a moment and get to be a part of this. I don’t have to know what tomorrow brings to be grateful for today, and to continue learning from yesterday.
Further Reading:
Kaku, Michio. Visions.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot.
Additional links and readings in hyperlink above
Image credit: NASA, Voyager 1, Earth from beyond Saturn (public domain)
