PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
R ecently, a headline in a scientific publication announced ‘Dark matter might enable exoplanets to glow’, which is more or less equivalent to saying ‘Thing we know nothing about might be able to do cool stuff in a way we don’t understand’. Still, the reaching beyond our current limits of ignorance is itself exciting. There are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet chided Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (He wasn’t, by the way, accusing Horatio of being especially closed-minded: here, ‘your philosophy’ essentially just means ‘science’.)
The romance of space travel has been around at least since Lucian’s second-century Greek satires on travellers’ tall tales: in his True Story, the narrator and his friends are blown to the Moon by a whirlwind, where they encounter strange new life-forms such as giant fleas and half-women, halfgrapevines. Space exploration is, of course, a staple of videogames too. It might have started in part simply because you can efficiently evoke the vast black emptiness of space by simply drawing nothing on the screen save a few white star-pixels, but the long road from Elite to Elite Dangerous and beyond has enabled us all to become spacefaring philosophers, pondering the deep meaning and structure of the cosmos.