Life Lessons For Space Travel From Jewish History
Tech Tribe Dispatch 190
💡 Think:
The nearest star to earth is Alpha Centauri, at 4.1 light-years away from our pale blue dot. A beam of light traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second would take 4.1 years to reach Alpha Centauri, by our current human standards it would takes hundreds if not thousands of years to traverse the same distance. And that’s only factoring in traveling one way. No humanbeing can yet live that long, no faster than light travel exists, how could a crew be sent to our ‘neighbor’ Alpha Centuari, if not farther, with any success?
As Professor Velvl Greene noted1, after he was posed this quandary during his work for NASA on the Viking program,
“The only real solution is to put men and women together on a spaceship, and then advise them to follow the first commandment: Be fruitful and multiply. They would have children, who would marry other children, on and on and on, for many generations.”
But how then would these people stay on task?
“Think about it,” Greene noted. “For 830 years, all [the crew of the ship] have is the one instruction manual they started out with. But we know how we feel about old instructions—if an appliance handbook were written in Elizabethan English, we’d ignore it. Junk it! It’s too old to be practical. Even maps—we don’t follow old maps, we correct them!
But here’s this spaceship full of people. If they junk the old instruction manual, what will happen? If they start fiddling around, tinkering with the maps and the navigational system, one thing is guaranteed: They’ll get lost. And then how will they land the thing? And get back? Would that happen?”
This conundrum on a so called Generation Ship, is a staple of science fiction.
Here, we turn to a Chasidic parable2:
Once, a king dispatched his son to a remote part of his kingdom where the inhabitants dwelled in large underground caverns for many generations until they had forgotten about the surface world altogether. Light filtered in through small windows, and whatever food they ate was lowered down to them as well. Living in darkness had become natural to them, so much so, that they could not imagine such a thing as light, and they were quite comfortable, happy with the darkness. They had no knowledge whatsoever of the sun or the wonderful fruits and produce of the surface world.
The prince tried to explain all that they lacked: The warmth and brightness of the sun, the fruits of the earth and the beauty of the world and everything therein… but they only laughed and jeered at him. The longer the prince stayed with them the more saddened and anguished he became over the lack of light, which astonished them greatly. They simply could not understand his distress. Earth, as he knew it, was a non-entity to them.
Finally, as he was crying, he took his fiddle and started playing a joyous melody. This totally confused them, but he explained, “I am looking forward to when my father the king will save me and take me out of this deep pit.”
As Professor Greene noted, this idea, embedded within Jewish tradition, was the key to the Generation Ship:
”At the NASA meeting, a professor then made an interesting suggestion. “There are very few precedents for this kind of situation,” he said. “How does a society pass down its mission and beliefs to succeeding generations? I think we need to study the Jewish system. So far as I know, they’re the only group of people who, for thousands of years, have managed to hand down their traditions intact to each new generation. We should study the Jews, and see how they did it.”
As Jews, we do indeed have a continuous debate going on. Every day, wherever there are Jews, they still debate and discuss what exactly Moses heard from G‑d, and how that applies to the problems we face this afternoon.
For several thousand years, our concept of our mission has remained real. It’s not a hypothetical. You can’t study the Talmud without gaining the sense of the continuity. I can look and see what was added. I may know that this did—or that did not—come down from Sinai, but the message we received at Sinai is undiluted. It’s as clear and precise today as it was when the Torah was given. The people who are guiding Jewish destiny know exactly what they’re doing. They’re successfully transmitting it to their child.”
Our guide to the greater world exists through our transcendent connection to our Maker - to something beyond this world — and our ability to transmit it from one generation to the next.
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Professor Velvl Greene (1928-2011), some of his correspondence with the Rebbe has been shared previously in the Dispatch
Rabbi Dovber Shneuri, the second Rebbe of Chabad, in Derech Chaim pg 88. Translation adapted from Dovid Markel.