My friend Lisa J. Haugen recently posted a reply to my philosophy blog post As We Venture Out Into Space, Will We Carry Our (Human) Faults With Us? on her own blog, Muser’s Log; Stardate Indefinite.

Here are the links to my original post and Lisa’s reply post:

As We Venture Out Into Space, Will We Carry Our (Human) Faults With Us? by Zachary Fruhling
Ground Zero by Lisa J. Haugen

Lisa makes an interesting claim in her response that, “[the] greatest technology humans will ever know is that of their own bodies, their own spirit, their own essential being.” While this echoes my own claim that space exploration and space travel will not necessarily usher in a new era for humanity without a radical transformation of, and progress within, human nature itself, Lisa puts an interesting spin on this insight with the claim that the real exploration is of our own humanity—our own bodies, our own spirit, and, (as Martin Heidegger might also have put it) our own Being.

Curiously enough, but perhaps not surprising given that Lisa and I are both fans of Star Trek in general and of Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular, Lisa’s sentiments about our own internal human exploration are reminiscent of the following statement by the character Q (an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, and questionably omnibenevolent being who lives outside the normal spacetime continuum) to Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “All Good Things”:

Q: That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

Captain Picard: “Q, What is it that you’re trying to tell me?Q: “You’ll find out.”(Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 7, “All Good Things”) — **Captain Picard:** “Q, What is it that you’re trying to tell me?
Q: “You’ll find out.”
(*Star Trek: The Next Generation*, Season 7, “All Good Things”)

As Heidegger pointed out in his greatest work, Being and Time, the study of existence, of Being itself, has fallen out of fashion in philosophy and in our reflections about ourselves and about our place in the cosmos. Many of us simply take our own existence and the existence of the external world as a given, treating the entire cosmos merely as a backdrop for our own relatively insignificant lives, however much we might puff ourselves up and treat ourselves as the center of the universe or as the pinnacle of creation, as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”:

But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. (Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense)

However much Nietzsche might be right that we tend to view our own place in the cosmos disproportionally, both as individuals and collectively as a species, we humans do seem to have special faculties of introspection and self-awareness that are unique among all the species on Earth, as least classically. This view of humans as unique in our self-awareness and in our intelligence is changing, however, as scientific and philosophical recognition is growing of animal consciousness and animal intelligence in many other species, such as the many forms of avian intelligence discussed by Jennifer Ackerman in her book The Genius of Birds:

A flood of new research has overturned the old views, and people are finally starting to accept that birds are far more intelligent than we ever imagined—in some ways closer to our primate relatives than to their reptilian ones. (Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds, Penguin Publishing Group)

Birds are much more intelligent than they have traditionally been given credit for scientifically and philosophically, as shown by Jennifer Ackerman in The Genius of Birds. — Birds are much more intelligent than they have traditionally been given credit for scientifically and philosophically, as shown by Jennifer Ackerman in *The Genius of Birds*.

And yet, despite this increasingly expanded view on the nature of consciousness, and on which other life forms we should count as conscious or intelligent, we have only begun to scratch the surface about the nature of our own human intelligence, our human Being (capitalized in the manner of Heidegger), much less to test the possibilities for and the limits of our own future human evolution and progress. We are still in our infancy as a species, like the Space Baby seen in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey based on the book of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke:

The “Space Baby” from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We are still in our infancy as a species, with unknown possibilities of existence still before us to discover and explore. — The “Space Baby” from *2001: A Space Odyssey*. We are still in our infancy as a species, with unknown possibilities of existence still before us to discover and explore.

Philosophers and theologians tend to think of human beings as having a fully developed consciousness. After all, we humans are the rational animals, according to Aristotle at least. And we humans are the species made in God’s image, at least according to the creation story in the book of Genesis in Judaism and Christianity. But what does it means to view our own consciousness, our own Being, our very selves and our entire species, as still being in our collective infancy, as Nietzsche suggests in the following passage?

Consciousness is the latest development of the organic, and hence also its most unfinished and unrobust feature. … One thinks it constitutes the kernel of man, what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, most original in him! One takes consciousness to be a given determinate magnitude! One denies its growth and intermittences! Sees it as ‘the unity of the organism’! This ridiculous overestimation and misapprehension of consciousness has the very useful consequence that an all-too-rapid development of consciousness was prevented. Since they thought they already possessed it, human beings did not take much trouble to acquire it — and things are no different today! (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, No. 11)

As a species, as individuals, as thinkers and writers and philosophers, we collectively need to realize that we still have a long way to go. We don’t yet know what it fully means to be human, what other forms humanity might take than our archaeological and historical records have shown, what possibilities for our consciousness, our Beings, our social structures, and our ways of life are yet to be revealed to us by those willing to take up not just the cosmic journey but the internal journey of discovery—of self-discovery and the ongoing introspective discovery of our own human species.

This kind of human self-discovery takes as much courage, arguable more so, as has been shown by the boldest adventurers in the history of exploration, from Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci to Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, to Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong and beyond. Which thinkers and writers, artists and craftsmen, philosophers and poets yet to come will have the kind of Nietzschean courage to see not just what humanity and our human consciousness has been or is like today, but how they could be, all the possibilities for new ways of being yet to come in the unfolding, emerging (and emergent!) cosmos.

So as I reflect on human nature, space exploration, and human progress, I side with Q and with my friend Lisa Haugen, and perhaps with Nietzsche and Heidegger as well, in saying that the real adventure is not in mapping stars and studying nebulae, but in exploring the unknown possibilities of existence yet to come. Yes, we can continue to explore space and to expand our territory to the moons and planets of our own solar system, and to the stars and galaxies beyond. But will we have the courage also to explore ourselves and our nascent human potential in the process?