You see, I remember what it was like when I was a child. Before we came to Delhi, my mother cleaned houses in Patna. She always pushed me to go to school, and she would ask me to repeat my lessons to her in the evenings, so she could learn to read too. I remember her repeating the letters after me, and sometimes she would be so tired, she would fall asleep before I had finished. Once when I came home crying because the teacher had pushed me to the back of the class for being a Dalit—she told me why she had named me Chirag. I remember her eyes burning in her face, saying, in the darkness of my life, you are the light. What use is suffering if it doesn’t make you stronger? Much later I came across the poetry of Om Prakash Valmiki, who could have been speaking in my mother’s voice. Here’s how I translated his words for Annie.
That wound
Of the hammer-blow
On the rock
Births sparks
That night in Delhi, we started thinking about how we would explore space, and why. We were in a climate funk—the West Antarctic ice shelf had collapsed faster than predicted. Sea walls had been breached in Miami and Mumbai and Boston; fish were swimming in the streets of Kolkata. We’d thought to escape from grim reality by going to a movie, but they showed one from the tweens that pissed us off, called Interstellar. Lying on the cooling rock, you said, suddenly: “Trash, burn and leave. Yeah, I’m going to be a space colonizer now. That’s my motto. Having fucked up the only world we have, I’m going into space to fuck up a few more.” You laughed, bitterly, and started singing “Trash, burn and leave” to the tune of some pop number I don’t even remember. “Shut up,” said Kranti and Annie together. “Or at least sing in tune,” I said. We laughed, drank a little more, and wept a little too. That was the start of one of those passionate discussions you have in college that goes on all night: How would we—those on the other side of colonization—do it differently? We couldn’t have known then that the answer to the question would take our whole lives.
We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling. As our own atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels fall and species go extinct like candles winking out, year after year, we want to bring attention to the wonder that is life, here and elsewhere. It is an extension of our empathy, our biophilia. Build your approach, your business model, your way of thinking around that paradigm, and you’ve already built in respect for every human regardless of race or class or caste, connection between all life, and an enhancement of the collective human spirit. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of my people—Rohith Vemula—was driven to sacrifice his life for a vision of a better world. I had suffered from depression for some of my college years, and in the days following that first late-night conversation, I reread what he had written before he died, how he’d wanted to go to the stars. It felt as though he was speaking to me across time and history, urging me to live and dream, reminding me who I was, “a glorious thing made of stardust.” I can live for this, I told myself that night.
Now I wish I could tell him: Brother, you did it! You took us to the stars.
Kranti:
I’ve been spending more and more time exploring Shikasta b. Chirag tells me that it is not wise to spend so much time immersed. But I can’t help it. When I am in the immersphere, I feel all relaxed, all tension goes away. I explore the Twilight Zone in Avi’s little body, sampling data. It is becoming a place to me. Every night we look at the images, locate features on a grid, and name things.
Here’s the description Annie posted on our Citizen Science website:
Shikasta b’s sky is clear and filled with stars. Looking sunward, the star Shikasta 464 is a dull red sphere, bathing the planet with its inadequate light. Most of its radiation is in the infrared. Avi is standing at the eastern edge of the terminator, atop a cliff some 10 kilometers high. The view of the dayside is spectacular. Here the ground falls away in sheer vertical walls down to a redly glowing plain, where large pools of magma hundreds of kilometers across are connected by lava rivers. Near the cooler terminator region the surface lava in the pools crusts over, and enormous bubbles of noxious gases break through it at irregular intervals, popping like firecrackers that would be louder if the planet had much of an atmosphere. Fine droplets of molten rock rain down from these explosions. Behind Avi the top of the levee is a cracked and fissured plain, dark and shadowed, with a few odd rock formations. On the nightside the images beamed from our orbiting satellite show a frozen terrain cut through by fissures and canyons
