Flying across the galaxy is nothing more than just wandering in another place

Sylvester 2022-06-02 16:13:28

This is a film about fragile intimacy. In the beginning, the vast interstellar space, the spacecraft cruising alone, the more enthusiastic the jazz music, the more it reminds the loneliness and wandering behind this journey. We are never unfamiliar with this kind of lonely wandering, we are always wanderers.
[From the beginning, we are the wanderers]
We know the location of every tree within 1600 kilometers, and we are there when the fruit is ripe. Livestock migrates every year, and we all follow, just for fresh meat. We depend on each other, settle and migrate. It's ridiculous to go it alone.
To survive and multiply, we have established races and marriages. We unite to protect children from lions and wolves and teach them the skills and tools they need. No matter what era, technology is the key to our survival.
[Beyond survival, the soul is still wandering]
Technology always gives us hope and possibility and constantly liberates us from labor. Slowly, the survival cooperation retreated to the awakening of self-consciousness. It is not so much that technology has shaken up social relations as it has loosened our mutual dependence.
The Industrial Revolution disintegrated the family collaboration of men and women weaving, and the information age obliterated the one-way education of word of mouth. Telecommunications, networks, and self-media allow us to reach farther places. But why the more "expanded" the self, the more lonely the soul feels?
[It’s just that, just wandering in another place]
The leap of technology and the explosion of information have made the meaning of individual existence more and more out of the constraints of collaboration, making the traditional boundaries between men, women, and children less and less clear. The pursuit of self-sensitivity pushes freedom into an infinitely wide space.
This kind of continual outward and distant exploration naturally has its positive meaning, but we must be careful with the ambition of getting out of the way and the illusion that everything can be replaced. Once some intimacy breaks, it is difficult to repair. Probably, only the interplanetary spacecraft still knows:
Flying across the galaxy is nothing more than wandering in another place.

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Extended Reading

Men, Women & Children quotes

  • [Last lines]

    Narrator: [recites extract from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space] That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. Every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. How frequent their misunderstandings, how fervent their hatreds. Our imagined self-importance, the delusions that we have some privileged position in the Universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the earth is where we make our stand.There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits, than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

  • Chris Truby: I've got, like, a pretty hard test tomorrow. So, I'm gonna go study.

    [goes upstairs]

    Don Truby: Yeah... studying.

    Helen Truby: What are you talking about?

    [Don gestures]

    Helen Truby: You know, you're gross. He's 15.

    Don Truby: That's all I did when I was 15.

    Helen Truby: Yeah, that I believe.