by Jasper Gilley
Of the many shocking things associated with the 2016 American presidential election, not the least was Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again. All else about the election be as it may, I find this slogan fascinating because it expresses a very prevalent sentiment in contemporary politics, whether implicit or explicit. No matter the policies that one advocates, insinuating that the application of said policies will return America to some mythologized great past gives one’s policy recommendations a strong emotional urgency. Using the word great to describe a nation, especially in a temporally dynamic context, begs the question: what makes a nation great?
Unfortunately, the answer to this question is almost always defined in a way that invokes pathos much more than logos.Make America Great Again was an effective slogan for the Trump campaign because it allowed voters to conjure up a nostalgified memory of a bygone era of their choice, and believe that Trump would bring back said era. Even if politicians answer the question what makes a nation great? directly, answers diverge on each side of the aisle. Republicans might say that liberty and unbridled capitalism make a nation great, whereas Democrats might say that a nation is great which ensures the welfare of its citizens.
Is there any comprehensive definition of what constitutes a great nation? I will argue that a comprehensive summary of America’s greatness, at least, lies in a school bus-sized metal contraption which is currently 13.15 billion miles away from the United States itself.
I am referring to the Voyager 1 unmanned space probe. Along with its sister probe, the confusingly named, Voyager 2, it was launched in 1977 to make scientific observations about the Solar System’s outer planets – namely Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Here is a photo of Voyager:
My bad; wrong Voyager. The Voyager from the 20th century (as opposed to the 24th) looks like this:
A good bit less exciting, but on the upside, it’s not fictional. Anyway, the Voyager probes were the first to get real scientific data about Jupiter and Saturn, and the first to visit Uranus and Neptune at all. Along the way, they snapped some iconic photos that you’ve almost definitely seen without realizing which probe took them. Here’s a photo that Voyager 1 took of Jupiter:
Here’s a photo that Voyager 2 took of Saturn:
And here’s a photo that Voyager 2 took of Neptune:
It’s worth noting that any decent photos you see of Uranus or Neptune were taken by Voyager 2 because no other probes have been there since. Finally, here is the iconic Pale Blue Dot photo, which was snapped by Voyager 2 as it left the inner Solar System. Earth appears as the little point in the middle of the rightmost streak of light:
After concluding their observations of the gas and ice giants (the latter being a recently-coined term for Uranus and Neptune), the Voyager probes headed for interstellar space. Of the two probes, Voyager 1 is going faster, so that on August 25th, 2012¹, it became the first terrestrially-made object to cross the heliopause and actually enter interstellar space. Here is the link to a ridiculously cool NASA site that displays in real-time how far the Voyager probes are from the Earth and the Sun, along with their velocities, and how long it takes light to travel from them to Earth (as of the writing of this post, the better part of a day in the case of Voyager 1.)
All this is very cool, you might say, but how is it relevant to us back on terra firma who must contend with the incessant flux of human politics? For one, adherents to the Make America Great Again emotional dogma might consider that there is right now an American flag speeding towards the stars 190 times faster than a bullet train. If humanity were to drive itself to total extinction (by irreversibly making Earth inhospitable for life, say), billions of years in the future, long after the death of anyone who might have even known of the existence of humans, there will still be an American flag speeding around the Milky Way galaxy. Indeed, there is so much space in between the objects in the galaxy that neither Voyager probe is even remotely likely to crash into anything, ever. So when the last star fizzles out after the heat death of the universe in 10^100 years or so², the Voyager probes will still be zooming around empty space with their American flags, long after every life-form that ever lived in the universe is dead. To me, that is more than enough to pronounce the United States a permanently great nation. It is certainly a better criterion for being a great nation than whatever Donald Trump or anyone else has in mind.
Unfortunately, Voyager isn’t a very good compass to dictate concrete policies in most areas that need policy-dictating. Perhaps, though, it should simply keep us aware of how cosmically ephemeral we are, let alone our governments’ policies.
I usually hate it when science is hijacked and used to draw questionable conclusions about the social sciences or the humanities (social Darwinism comes to mind as an extreme negative example of this phenomenon.) Forgive my apparent hypocrisy on this matter by noting that I’m not attempting to advocate a policy agenda, but simply arguing that an awareness of a particular astronomical reality should factor into our collective emotional orientation. Which, it could be argued, is the root of whatever malaise, if any, that may be pervading the US at this point in time.
1 – Weirdly, Neil Armstrong also died on August 25th, 2012.
2 – This is an unimaginably huge number. For comparison, there are about 10^50 particles in the universe.