Starman Contemplates the Stars
I’m accustomed to writing articles that few people read, comment on, or care about. As such, I was intrigued, in watching Starman, a documentary about space engineer and science-fiction writer Gentry Lee, to learn that, in the 1970s, he and astronomer Carl Sagan, colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, were frustrated at media incomprehension and public indifference about interplanetary exploration, such as the Viking probes that went to Mars; and the Voyager probes targeted at the outer planets and beyond, which also carried a gold-plated phonographic disc for possible perusal by aliens someday.
Why didn’t people grasp the significance of these breakthrough steps into the universe? Why didn’t they recognize the importance of the search for life beyond Earth? Sagan and Lee responded creatively, working together to develop the 1980 science series Cosmos fronted by Sagan and separately authoring sci-fi novels (Sagan’s Contact, Lee’s Rama series with Arthur C. Clarke) about imagined alien encounters. Cosmos had a particular impact on me, and I’ve been citing Sagan and writing about extraterrestrials ever since.
A long-ago experience with Lee was off-putting, though. In 1999–2000, when I was working at Space.com, Lee became a columnist for the website, with an arrangement that his work couldn’t be edited; this was brokered by Sally Ride, who’d become the company’s president, and reflected disdain by NASA scientists for a webzine that encompassed UFO credulity in its efforts to gain traffic. I don’t recall whatever contacts I had with Lee, only that I thought he was arrogant; one colleague, similarly irritated, expressed indifference to how Lee’s column would even be visible in a planned redesign of the site.
Seeing that Starman was available on Amazon Prime, I was about to pass on it, based on this ancient friction, then decided that was petty. I’m glad I watched it, as it’s an astute insider look at science and space exploration. The film opens with Lee, 82 at the time of filming, walking through California streets exulting that he’s had the “best job in the world,” and been well-suited for it, as a NASA chief engineer; it shifts to mid-20th-century Ebbets Field, with Lee recalling he could calculate batting averages at age five. This matched my acerbic memory of the guy, but soon such self-congratulation is outweighed by Lee’s interesting narrative of the cutting-edge of knowledge and its societal implications.
“We can’t say today what technological advances will occur that will someday allow a human imprint—not physical necessarily but at least mental or spiritual—on another solar system,” Lee says in the film. “However, our desire for exploration must always be balanced by the need to make certain that what is happening in the already-explored world is not unstable. If our future world will be unstable, there will be no exploration of interstellar space.” Lee segues into a discussion of climate change, noting that studying Venus and Mars marked a breakthrough in scientific understanding that climates can be unstable, a lesson then applied to assessing the consequences of greenhouse emissions on Earth.
Regarding possible extraterrestrial intelligence, Lee points out there may be a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, seemingly giving vast opportunities for life to arise and evolve. He wonders, though, whether intelligent species may be rare, and if technological civilizations are inherently unstable, only lasting a short time amid the cosmic eons. A further question is what common ground we’d have to communicate with species that evolved on other planets. There seem to be severe limits to communication with species on Earth, such as dolphins, Lee notes, and octopuses are a case of intelligence radically different from our own, divided from humanity by some 600 million years of evolution.
After watching the documentary, I re-watched some of John Carpenter’s Starman (1984), one of my favorite movies, which presents an optimistic view of communication and even a close relationship between a human and an extraterrestrial. This opens with the Voyager II probe traveling into space with its golden record, and seemingly going into a wormhole, from which a small alien vessel then emerges. This gets shot down by US fighter jets, and the occupant emerges as a ball of light that then enters the Wisconsin home of Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), a widow mournfully drinking to films of her late husband Scott.
Extracting DNA from a hair clipping, the alien recreates Scott’s body to become the Starman (Jeff Bridges), enlisting the terrified and confused Jenny to take him to the rendezvous point for a rescue mission from his home world. Showing her a map, he asks if she knows where the pinpointed place is. “Arizona maybe,” Jenny says. That is where he needs to go, the Starman says, his English evolving but imperfect. “Arizonamaybe.”