HR8799c: a Plan for World Peace

Giant planet may explain evolution of solar system, increase chances of discovering life screams a headline from The Space Reporter this morning. Five to ten times the mass of Jupiter, the monster planet HR8799c is 130 light years from earth. Naturally curious, we want to know about these things, but there are practical implications as well.

In C. S. Lewis’ theological fantasy The Great Divorce an unnamed first person narrator finds himself wandering a bleak and grim “grey town” of unchanging half-light that reminds me of an evening years ago when I was in Los Angeles alone. After supper in a Japanese restaurant near the Pacific Ocean, I faced time with nothing to do and a Budget rental car to do it in. Staying off the freeways as I started back toward my hotel in Beverly Hills, I found myself in an industrial district, and had the brainless thought of driving east until I came to the edge of Los Angeles just to see how big the city is. Because there is no such end or edge, I never made it. It was after-hours, and I drove deserted streets and blocks and miles and miles of warehouses, closed and locked and abandoned for the night, a light here and there, not a live being in sight, stretching endlessly. The experience and sense of desolate isolation returns every time I open The Great Divorce.

Lewis‘ narrator eventually realizes that he has died and gone to hell, and learns that the stars shining weakly in the distant sky are actually places where bitter souls have moved to be alone and away from others, and they keep moving farther and farther away to be more and more alone and distant.

Some, perhaps most, of us earthlings are more social than that, we don’t want to be that alone. We identify and cluster with people like us, not wanting for very long to be around people who are not like us, people who are different. Our clustering centers on our differences from those who are not like us: religion, politics, social, race, class. Interests, certainties. Our warring, killing, hatred has this foundation: differences. Idealist naivete aside, the age will never come when Palestinian and Israeli coexist peaceably; they don’t even want that, each simply wants the other gone. And it isn’t just such major religious, social and political differences, it’s within. Our own liturgy prays for the unity of Christ’s church, prayers we say because we ought to; but we don’t actually mean them, we certainly aren’t going to join the fundamentalists or the Coptics or the holyrollers or the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the premillennialists or the LCMS or even likely go to Rome. They can come our way if they wish, which we don’t especially hope or want, seeing they’re not like us, don’t think or believe or pray or worship like us. Or talk or dress like us.We say our prayer for unity and go our way, may God help them see the light of truth. “True religion, and virtue” was the expression in our old prayer book. Universal, the foundation of human hatred. Stir religion, politics, economic and social differences and humanity is at war.

We don’t need to find life elsewhere in the universe, we only need to find places where life can exist. We are not going anywhere, but mixing Lewis‘ fantasy of dim, fading and receding stars with rocket science, space stations, cosmology, human genius, inventiveness, imagination, StarTrek, and nature, it’s time to start searching for -- or creating -- places in the distance where those who are different from us can move to.

Or be sent.