parameters19

No one has "been" to Neptune. The physical distance
there prohibits it. Yet the physical distance to
Neptune has not prohibited it. We have been there
nonetheless. And the idea that we have been there has
been an exercise of the imagination, not only in
imagining the technology to construct and launch
Voyager, but also in imagining ourselves as spacecraft
that are at the site, at the planet. There. We have
extended our idea of our own being.
If the distance to Neptune has restricted us from
going there in our own bodies, it has on the other hand
compelled us to imagine another way of being there.
The restriction of that enormous distance (4
light-hours) has caused us to make a leap of
imagination that is not only satisfying to human
curiosity but extraordinarily exciting to the human
spirit.
At the word "spirit" we are instantly beyond the realm
of observable objects and events. The "human spirit"
is not a valid object for scientific inquiry. In that it
might be related to consciousness, and in that
consciousness might be related to the chemistry of the
human brain, then the spirit might one day be a
legitimate topic for scientific discussion. But there is
no clear evidence at all for anything like the existence
of a human spirit. For science, the human spirit does
not exist. And if the human spirit does not exist, then
the possibilities of the human spirit do not exist.
Yet the possibility of traveling to Neptune was awake
in human beings when Voyager was launched, and
later some element of consciousness seized the
enormous distance from Earth to Neptune and
imagined that human beings have been to Neptune.
This imagination is somehow in the nature of
dreaming, unreal by the parameters of science, but real
- a real event, a real occurrence - by the parameters of
human experience. What element of consciousness can
seize on the distance between stars and imagine that
huge leap?
Imagining a leap to the stars is a far more enormous
task than imagining the leap to Neptune because the
distances to stars are far more enormous than the
distance to Neptune. They are too enormous to travel
in any physical sense, as we traveled to Neptune in a
physical sense. But Voyager-travel was only partly
physical. It was also partly imaginative. In a real, even
scientific sense, we have been to Neptune, and this
means the terms of the human imagination are
themselves very real. At some inner juncture of
consciousness where physical reality meets the
imagination, a kind of dream event occurs, and reality
is transformed from material to knowledge, that is to
say, "reality." Perhaps the human spirit is this
juncture: a space where the two parallel lines of
physical reality and the imagination meet.
If so, then the physical distances between stars and
galaxies are fixed limits only if imagined as limiting.
For the imagination, these tremendous distances are
not restrictions, but possibilities. The possibilities are
titanic, at this moment, they are beyond our
comprehension, swimming in a chaos of empty
nothingness between stars and galaxies perhaps further
even than that. To travel these desert spaces, we are

Such a notion is as bewildering to the scientific mind -
or to any human mind, probably - as the distances to
other galaxies. What can "transcendence" mean?
Broomstick riding? Astral travel? Telepathy? These
terms are riddled with allusions to the restrictions of
distance." Astral travel" posits an ethereal body which
flies around physical localities. "Telepathy" posits
communication across a physical distance. In The
Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan unwittingly expresses the
poverty of this idea: "While the suggestion is
sometimes made that the preferred channel of
interstellar discourse will be telepathic, this seems to
me at best a playful notion. At any rate, there is not
the faintest evidence in support of it; and I have yet to
see even moderately convincing evidence for
telepathic transmission on this planet." Sagan cannot
admit telepathy into the field of inquiry because it is
so difficult to observe objectively: it does not seem to
be exactly there, as science requires it to be. But
further than a scientific objection, telepathy imagined
as a "transmission" of thought implies the coverage of
a measurable distance, which is exactly the problem,
rather than the solution. To think of telepathy is
exactly the restriction, rather than the leap.
Physical inventions probably will not leap the
distance to galaxy M31. Probably the imagination will
transcend that distance. It is hard to think, at this
point, that the distances between stars and between
galaxies are not deliberate invitations to the expansion
of the human spirit. The enormity of the universe feels
like a parameter of the soul. Something huge occupies
every human mind and desires to grow outward to the
furthest possible limit - to the furthest possible
aggregation of stars, the furthest possible shell of
galaxies - to inhabit it, and to know it as completely as
possible.
The tendrils of the human imagination have in this
century rearranged the realm of the galaxies and
projected themselves into the sky and into
radiotelescopes in searches for extraterrestrial
intelligence. The same tendrils have ascended to Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and occupied
them. Probably they will scale past Neptune, and
inhabit Planet Alpha Centauri, Barnard's star, Beta
Pictoris, Vega, Sirius, galaxy M31. And probably when
we arrive there, the planets of M31's solar systems will
not look anything like the way we imagined them to
look because the whole shape and existence of there
will have changed for us.
The restrictions of distance are the possibilities of
being: I am speaking not of afternoon fantasies of alien