Now and Then: SPACE in every popular culture media
December 12, 2025
SPACE
One of the ideas of the 1960s was that humans were meant for more than war. All sides of the Cold War devoted time, effort and riches to great numbers of scientific space projects. Some were successful and others not, but a goal of reaching orbit, deeper space or another body in space, remained a motivational factor. Sputnik 1 was an orbital satellite reached low earth orbit in 1957. Humans reached the Moon in 1969, and have continued to aim scientific research towards the stars beyond earth. For a few decades the task of orbiting earth with human crews was our only viewable achievement. However reaching the planet Mars has become our shared human collective goal.
I've often said you can understand humans better by considering their interest through the popular media they consume. Are humans interested in space? Yes but in the past it was often propaganda. In the present it is far more devoted to exploring human existence, philosophy and dreams.
IN COMICS
Space exploration, extreme development and offerings reveal the human interest well. Warren Ellis and Collen Doran's Orbiter both delves into reawakening our wanderer spirit and the need to have goals of space to lift the torch of light to future efforts. My friend Jeremy Clifft bought my copy due to having had a number of recurrent health events and surgery. I thank him here because that book gave me a few new perspectives on the themes considered.
Warren Ellis and Chris Weston did an alternative past that leads to greater human conquest of space. It comes at a cost however. Humans as moral agents and scientific discoveries and victories are not always partners. In fact, during the late 1960s numerous corners of the US had serious issues with the amount of money and effort to succeed. People cried out for an end to the war in Vietnam, to end poverty and the desire to destroy cancer and other diseases rather than reach space.
Peter Milligan and Marcelo Frusin consider something far darker. The chance of humans interacting with dangerous alien life that is less physical as it is mentally dangerous. Contact with it leads to a need for someone to somehow keep a faith, and destroy or control, the wicked life it interacts with.
BE A SPACE WANDERER
RPG games often place a player's character in the imagined space universe of a game designer and publisher. The world's can be found, alien races discovered and interacted with, and human labor might be limited to developing colonies, or exploration, or commerce. Or it can be warlike, unable to change in space what we seemingly can't stop here on earth.
There are numerous games in this human area of interest. Star Trek has some play worth the time, unfortunately with many media based games and settings, one is unable to become more than the great characters and settings known already. (Similar to playing in Middle Earth, the Avengers of Marvel or any other media based game). Traveller is not dark, as I've heard it called, but it would be true to say, human limitations and interests might not occupy thought as much where conquerors might aim for something less elevated. Star Frontiers is geared towards a certain ethos of adventure and positive interests, at a cost of giving characters unlimited goals and desires.
NON FICTION BOOKS
Due to how one views Space they might assume that books about space are limited to giant photos taken in space for humans to view in awe of the grandeur of space. For the science minded there are likely technical and mechanical views of the machines of and technology of space bound craft. Some view space exploration as the last human venue where nationalism and other traits are not on display, and the books we see on shelves celebrate that and suggest it is our future. My favorite books about humans in space are paperback books released in the 1960s celebrating human endeavor! Sadly, that kind of journalism at a price for everyday human citizens of Earth have long since disappeared. Inflation is more than just cost, but how much we are willing to pay. And many serious subjects are not of interest for the common person.
Music always has a soundtrack for human endeavor. Space is a place, a destination, a vast unimaginable oblivion, or our last hope. Are there distant ancestors there, or were we the people who began it all. Is Mars our cousin, or did they begin the space seed program and shared life with our planet? Some have created projects of numerous artists sharing a view. Brian Eno did music as an interpretive act of the reality of space. Rather than just our involvement, he sought to create an ambient sound of space, from the human who interprets it. Gustav Holst was a brilliant composer, and his musical ambitions rarely could be perceived in their finished product fully. In person he might have been cold, but in his considering the planets with music, he was alive with power and glory.
Space as a background for stories, the center point of stories, or the desire to reach but fail to find success awareness can haunt.
2001: A Space Odyssey Introduced the world of film viewers to the reality and future thought, that humans began as mere beasts and found life in the exploration of the world beyond earth. It is a great film and one of the first to fund the work to allow it to be told as brilliantly as needed regarding space and "science fiction". Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in their own medium considered the future, and how vast must our effort be to discover, to endeavor human success in space.
Apollo 13 was a film that told the story of human effort and hope, when a mechanical disaster threatens to kill the crew of the 3rd Moon Landing, in April of 1970. An oxygen tank exploded, and from NASA the repairs were calculated, all the while the crew attempted to survive, and make the capsule a means of survival. Less glorious in film as that of the event, when human intelligence was displayed as an answer to an almost impossible task.
Interstellar is a beautiful movie. It also tells a story that humans might well experience. As Earth is finding most plant life to have died with the few remain soon to be dying due to fungus and disease the setting is disaster, with terminus near. The final space craft and crew are launched with information to find a new home. It has to be super fast, requires human sacrifice because if the desperate missions to possible new planetary homes fail, the astronaut dies. With thematic and cinematographic homage and reminders of other films (2001 for one), Interstellar is a movie that is confusing to some, but perfectly clear to others who know our time on earth is limited. Our species even more limited by our own failed practices, and the random 8 ball of plague.
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