A still from ‘Gravity’. (Photo from Youtube)
When a colleague told me two weeks ago that I should watch “Gravity”, I might have snobbishly asked whether it’s about astronomy or “geeky space stuff”.
He responded by rolling his eyes and making an exasperated exclamation of a sort. In my defense, I said, “Well, I would proudly announce that I am an astronomy lover, but, I’m really not into geeky space stuff.”
True. I’ve always been enchanted with stars, have always been fascinated with ethereal shapes of galaxies, and the coloring of the mystical nebulas.
Their otherworldly beauty has always captivated me since I truly took notice of the stars for the first time, which was when I was 14. That time my elder sister asked me to accompany her sit at the backyard of our house at night. Together we watched the stars while singing songs that have the word “star” or “stars” in them.
While doing so, I was suddenly overwhelmed with this inexplicable yearning to somehow reach out for one of those stars, to hold it tight and somehow burn with it. Yes, that was a rather ridiculous urge. But that was how I felt.
And that was how I fell in love with stars, how I began my fascination with the world beyond the Earth. The outer space. The universe.
Quoting Bruno Mars, to me “swimming in (that other) world is something spiritual…”
So yes, I consider that to be very different with those space freaks’ (oh well, you may argue this) fascination with geeky space movies such as Star Wars or all of those science fiction alien films.
Although I always think the infinite size of the universe offers enormous potentials for other lives outside the Earth, it is not the notion of those possible other lives that have fueled my interest in astronomy.
Once again, it is the beauty of the stars. Any astronomy aficionado would I guess understand this. No wonder they wrote that sentence on the tomb of that astronomer: “We love the stars too much to fear for the darkness of the night”. To which I completely agree.
Anyway, so I finally watched ‘Gravity’, and I can say that I LOVE the movie!! It’s not about those geeky alien stuff, and despite the too Hollywoody space accidents after space accidents (just too much, really. I don’t think NASA and their Russian, Chinese and Japan counterparts, etc, would let two international space stations destroyed so easily, whatever may cause it), I can say that it is one of the best movies I’ve watched so far!
Granted the movie could have taken a more philosophical direction rather than stop at being a mere action film, but man, how I LOVE all the outer space settings! Although again I have to add: Alfonso Cuaron should have zoomed in on those swirling galaxies or mystical nebulas rather than continually zeroed in on the blue giant ball of the Earth and the Sun, and made the rest of the universe a mere background for the entire part of the story. Really quite disappointing in that aspect for astronomy lovers like me.
I might also have been too emotionally affected with the story, thus my silent weeping several times while watching the movie in the cinema almost two weeks ago.
Well, I have a reason for this. It’s because –believe it or not– I wrote a terribly similar story 10 years ago!
Granted my story was about a Russian mission, not a NASA one, and two main characters in my story were Russians, not Americans.
But it was a similar female and male astronaut pair. The female was similarly a scientist. Katrina Tereshkova in my “Mars 10” (yup, it was a Mars-bound manned mission, also set in the future) was an astrobiologist, while Dr. Ryan Stone in “Gravity” was a medical doctor (I did wonder what a medical doctor was doing in the outer space, the same questioned apparently asked by US astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he criticized the movie. Although I‘m not sure either if he would approve my astrobiologist choice).
The male characters are similarly the pilots.
And their dispositions… God, I was freaked out with the uncanny resemblance: Dr. Stone is as aloof and gloomy as my Katrina, while my Nikolai was as playful (though not as flirty) as Matt Kowalski.
And they were similarly outside their space shuttles, fixing stuff, when things gone wrong. While “Gravity” smartly blamed all the incidents to high-speed space debris and the Kessler Syndrome, I might have absurdly blamed the first accident in “Mars 10” on a solar flare (yeah, I wrote that story when I was 20 and I’m still not sure now whether a solar flare can really be a good cause for a space mission gone wrong).
Dr. Stone’s musing of the silence of the space, her non-existent life on Earth are also very similar to Katrina’s.
But the similarities really stopped after the first accident because where Gravity continued as a full action movie, my “Mars 10” took off for a philosophical journey.
And in my story, it was Katrina who got disconnected and lost in space, not Nikolai as in the case with Kowalski in “Gravity”.
It was during her floating in the middle of no other living being, in the middle of stars, galaxies and other space objects that used to fascinate her so much, in the middle of a supposedly absolute silence that Katrina realized how she didn’t like loneliness that much. That for the first time in her life she felt completely, and helplessly alone (which was very true in that story), that she now wished she could meet people that she used to avoid and take for granted while on Earth because of her dislikeness with people in general (talking about past psychological trauma).
And also, the chance to be completely alone with her thoughts –once she got over the shock and great tremor — without outside interferences, allowed her to re-contemplate her stance on the origin of the universe.
She was decidedly an atheist. God to her was simply a fragment of common people (non-scientists)’ imagination. But really seeing all those space objects for the first time (as they were so near now), surrounded by their overwhelming otherworldly beauty, while being aware of the laws that kept those objects where they were while traveling orderly in each of their own orbits, she began questioning her old belief.
In the end she decided that there must be an intelligent being behind the systematic, life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe. And that the being must also have had a penchant for arts because of those artistic compositions of the colors (especially those of nebulas), which gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “heavenly beauty”. Obviously the being had far superior intelligence than those of all mankind combined into one.
‘God’ or not is just a matter of naming. But there is obviously an intelligent being (one or more is another subject to debate, or is simply a thing that we have to accept we‘ll never know; at least not in this life) who created all of those.
The beautiful rosette nebula. (Photo courtesy of nasa.gov)
Oh well, in the end “Mars 10” is just one of those typically “cheesy” stories of one’s spiritual journey commonly criticized by agnostics or atheists who happen to stumble upon such literary pieces.
The difference with most of other spiritual journey stories probably lies only in the strong science theme — in this case astronomy, and in the amount of literature research that I had to do to make the story not too scientifically incorrect, given that I wasn’t even an astronomy student to begin with (I studied Pharmacy). Luckily, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), where I did my undergraduate study, happens to be the only institution in Indonesia offering an astronomy program, so I could easily access all those astronomy and space exploration textbooks in the central library (yeah, I hardly touched Pharmacy textbooks if not for homework or exams).
And “Mars 10” was based on my own spiritual journey.
I was born Muslim, and like many other Indonesians born to Muslim families, I religiously performed the Islamic rituals, including the five daily prayers and the Ramadhan fasting, but merely out of tradition for the most part.
As I developed my fascination with science, though, and got acquainted with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution at high school, I began to fundamentally question my religious belief.
I decided God did not exist not long after I entered university, because I just couldn’t fathom why people often fight on behalf of religions and why Muslims especially are often the epitome of poor, backward societies split in bloody civil wars and why Indonesia, a Muslim majority country, is such a corrupt nation. I thought, if God truly existed, why would He allow all those things to happen? Why would He let His believers suffer and become subject of mockeries everywhere? If He truly existed, and Islam truly came from Him, I thought that this should not be the case.
So for some time, I became an atheist. I still wore my hijab then (had been wearing it since I was 18), but that was partly because I already got accustomed to it and mostly because I thought, “Oh well, if I made a wrong conclusion, and God appears to actually exist, Islam appears to be true, and Heaven and Hell are truly there; at least I would have collected enough religious merits for the afterlife.” Yup, I also still did my five-time-a-day mandatory prayers on that thought; albeit it felt getting more pointless every time.
It was in astronomy I truly found God for the first time. As aforementioned, I read many astronomy books, and I also attended some discussion forums on the topic. I would always remember how that one astronomy lecturer explained so fluently how the Big Bang Theory, currently considered the strongest theory that might explain the origin of the universe, only confirmed the presence of a Creator.
You might want to take a look at my post “Do Science and Religions Have to be Always Contradicted?” if you wish to know more of my view on this subject.
So, when I found Him, everything that I’ve seen, read, heard and experienced afterward never again cast any doubt on my belief that God exists. I might not always understand His actions or lack thereof, and have still often been saddened with the way many of my fellow religious people, especially Muslims, behave. But I could never go back to that era when I consciously didn’t believe in God. Just because you cannot explain things, it doesn’t mean that they’re not there, especially when all facts that prove they’re there are glaring at you.
And in the Quran (especially if you believe it to have come from God), He actually tells mankind to seek for evidence of His presence in the universe. So, really, there should be no blind belief. Allow me to quote two of the ayat for you, namely Surah Al ‘Imran 190-191:
“Behold, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding, namely those who celebrate the praises of Allah standing, sitting or lying down on their sides, and contemplate (the wonders of) creation in the heavens and the earth…”
There & (Never) Back Again 