THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Better abodes on other stars; hic Rhodus
There is also the lure of another sea apart from the horizontal one, namely the vertical one above us. Air space was admittedly inaccessible for long enough, but then it
is transparent, it does not hide its Beyond. It particularly does not hide it at night, countless tiny sparkling coasts then emerge. And an age­old wish aims at sailing these
coasts and landing on them. Up till now this wish has undoubtedly been even more extravagant than that of Columbus was, although it is less mythical. At any rate it
touches on the ancient archetype according to which the stars are the seat of better characters. What draws people up to this Above does not even necessarily
presuppose inhabitants of course, in the secularized form it has assumed. The lure of outer space is satisfied in one respect with the fact that man is able to imagine
himself as a visitor on these distant heavenly bodies and that he will find, if not something more perfect, then at least something extremely peculiar up there. The
imaginary traveller does not even need to be carried away for this, apart from taking his body and his sense organs up there with him intact into such totally changed
circumstances. All the rest, in so far as it does not refer to inhabitants or even to their perfection, but simply to extreme peculiarity, is not even hypothetical, but it is true,
this is where the most outlandish foreign parts really begin. The sky on the moon becomes black, the stars shine fiercely in the daytime, the sun beats down in a dazzling
bombardment, unmitigated by any veil of air. A wall of blackest shadow stands immediately next to the light there, all in a silent wilderness; the vast globe of the earth
rises above the rings of craters, with large cities as points of light. On the smaller asteroids our body would weigh almost nothing at all, and one jump would be enough
to take us into outer space; on large dense heavenly bodies, however, our body would lie chained by gravity, it would be like granite. Then the day on pale Saturn, with
the countless bodies that make up the ring above us, then the view from one of the moons of Jupiter towards the planet, which half or entirely fills the sky. There is all
this and much more that is still inconceivable, virgin territory at an inaccessible, imaginary distance. And the most outrageous things of all occur on the myriads of fixed
stars themselves, on these explosive blossoms and lights of cosmic development. The peculiar is thus one part of the astronomical lure, it continues the obsession with
the ‘curious’ which the Baroque period had for alien zones. In this, the sky is a sheer physical wonderland or terra