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I. Space, from the Ground

In the post-Enlightenment human imagination, outer space has often been described as desolate, cold and empty. The heavens used to be mystical, populous and accessible only to gods and spirits, but starting with George Tucker’s 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon, in which he called space a “bitter cold void,” the setting has also become an apt metaphor for exploring humanity’s isolation and agnostophobia.

Our first direct glimpse of space came in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin parachuted back to Earth and spoke of a “completely black sky,” pinpricked by “bright and distinct” stars. Only seven years later, 2001: A Space Odyssey translated unease into haunting images set against that “dense black,” most memorable in the silent death of astronaut Frank Poole seen above. Kubrick and Clarke’s story portrays an infantile human race grasping for control in an indifferent void, only to be undone by its own overzealous technology. Then, scarcely a year after 2001’s release, humans set foot on the Moon.

And yet, even after witnessing the cold darkness firsthand, humanity still refuses to treat space as nothingness. If we truly saw space as empty, our imagination might look more like that of Krikkit. In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Krikkit people live beneath an “utterly and completely black” sky, similar to Gagarin’s. But it is starless, which means they never even realize space exists. Adams suggests that a sky perceived as a void wouldn’t inspire myths or exploration at all. We wouldn’t tell stories about its celestial inhabitants, dream of reaching it, or build the technology to do so. Yet here on Earth, ancient mythologies that personify the planets coexist with modern ambivalence toward space travel, and produce a jumble of attitudes ranging from the reverential and optimistic to the cynical and terrified.

Science fiction movies are close proxies for the average human’s perception of outer space today. Some build on Kubrick and Clarke’s harsh realism, like Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian and Arrival. Some are absurdist, à la Hitchhiker's Guide, Spaceballs, and the Men in Black movies. And some are driven by narrative, like the iconic franchises of Star Wars, Star Trek and Dune. Other strands of the genre include the space horror of Alien and the ecological spectacle of Avatar. The one thing all of them do, however, is continue our long tradition of wielding space as a metaphor.

We reshape an unknown realm and squeeze it into our earthbound frameworks. For most of human history, gravity’s shackles kept us from seeing space as it truly is. Like the prisoners in the Platonic Allegory of the Cave, we are bound to our fire-lit cavern, and “would consider the truth to be nothing but the shadows of the carved objects.” Socrates also reminds us that even when a prisoner is freed and catches their first glimpses of the outside world, it is “painful,” as the “glare from the light made him unable to see the objects that cast the shadows he once beheld.” Likewise, the technological tools we use to “see” the universe—from astrolabes to telescopes, satellites to rovers—partially obfuscate our view, refracting its essence through data points and artistic visualizations. What we call “outer space” is still, for most of us, an inner landscape. It is a dark wall upon whose vague constellations we cast our anxieties and aspirations.

So what is the real substance of space? As I’ve suggested, its environment lies so far beyond ordinary human comprehension that we can only approach it indirectly. Philosophy has spent a few millennia inventing clever work-arounds for exactly this kind of eldritch problem. Take God, for example.

II. The Heavens

Cataphatic theology uses affirmative descriptions to describe God—God is good; God is omnipresent. Conversely, apophatic theology negates—God is not mortal; God is unknowable. Artists and writers do the same with space: either endowing it with qualities (cold, vast, explorable) or defining it by what it lacks (lifeless, colorless, matterless). We also have analogical reasoning, in which God is compared to familiar objects and situations. In both theology and art (like sci-fi), the combination of the three are used to generate paradoxes. Their intended unresolvedness, or aporia, illustrates how our mortal tools limit our perspective.

Well, maybe not all of our perspectives.

Astronauts like Gagarin are part of the select few that have had the exceedingly rare privilege of experiencing the unreachable firsthand. So what do these demigods, the best of the best, the chosen ones, have to say about it?

Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad replied: “Super! Really enjoyed it!”

Oh. Not exactly what I was going for, but we’ll put a pin in it. Conrad’s testimony is more revealing than it looks.

Here’s a more overt illustration of my argument:

Nicole Stott spent 104 days in space, during which time, being away from Earth was overwhelmingly impressive for her. She claimed to have no words to express what being in space was like. Not only the view was indescribable, but also the feeling of being up there. The best way she could explain it was by comparing the Earth to the brightest light bulb imaginable, swirling with all the colors we know and shining blinding light. This made her feel as if she could almost reach into the world. Similarly to Hadfield, Stott realized that her home was not simple where she was from in the state of Florida; instead, the whole planet was her home.

Here, Stott uses the aforementioned philosophical tools to describe her view of the Earth. She affirms that being in space is “overwhelmingly impressive,” negates it with “no words” and “indescribable,” and analogizes when feeling “as if she could almost reach into the world.” By doing this, the experience of being in space is likened to mystical rapture, emphasized by her lyrical perspective on the Earth as the “brightest light bulb imaginable.”

Honestly, if you tweaked the phrasing and added some line breaks, this quotation could very well be a Rumi poem.

Rumi was a Persian Sufi mystic and scholar whose poetry focused on divine love and the spiritual ecstasy of a union with God. One verse is so uncannily like Stott’s recollection that, if not for its 13th-century origin, I’d think Rumi were addressing an astronaut.

It’s tempting, perhaps irresponsibly so, to hear Rumi anticipating a modern astronaut’s rapture. In his verse, the addressee is “he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color,” situated above the earth, in the “road to the sky” to “heaven.” In Sufi mysticism, these are metaphors for the spiritual journey to enlightenment, and Rumi probably intended for us infer this and read between the lines. But literal imagery always leaves a trace on our understanding, and is not to be discarded, especially given how often our culture likens space to the heavens.

Stott uses the same verbiage to describe her experience of space, looking down at a world “swirling with all the colors,” so tiny compared to the grandeur of her perspective “up there” that she “could almost reach into” it. Both describe the “blinding” brilliance of Earth, as “the brightest light bulb imaginable” (Stott) “filled with purity and light” (Rumi). The main emotion expressed is the ecstatic “joy” one feels so above the ground. Remember, as Conrad said, it was an experience they “really enjoyed.”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say Stott caught a glimpse of God, these similarities suggest a shared human strategy for grappling with the ineffable. If we take the parallels between extraterrestrial experiences seriously, then a crucial line in Rumi’s verse offers further insight into astronauts’ impressions of the heavens’ physical texture. Rumi writes:

For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.

Stott had said that the Earth was “swirling with all the colors we know,” the only palette intimately familiar to us. His revelation follows that in the “beyond,” there lie “other colors.” For Rumi, that beyond is a transcendent state of the “heart and soul.” For Stott, however, her corporeal body is the one in the beyond, and she admits she has “no words” for it, implying that being in space reveals “other colors” of an otherwise-familiar Earth.

III. An Impasse

All of the writers, astronauts, mystics and theologians that have taken a stab at describing the ineffability of the space beyond earth appear to approach an asymptote precisely as they near its je ne sais quoi. Is it just a skill issue? Is there a sequence of words in a language we haven’t invented yet, that could perfectly capture the essence of being in space?

No. The answer is firmly no. And I can prove that, using logic.

Back to the Ancient Greeks. A syllogism is “a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.” The structure is typically made of three statements—a major premise, a minor premise, and the conclusion. Here is a set of syllogisms constructed from verifiable facts and Stott’s account.

• I.

  • P1: Humans can see the full range of colours in the visible spectrum (the specific range of electromagnetic wavelengths that are detectable by the human eye.) This premise is tautological.

  • P2: Electromagnetic waves cannot create more visible colours than this existing range, no matter where we are.This premise is factually true.

  • C: Humans can see the full range of colours in the visible spectrum, no matter where we are. This conclusion has to be true.

• II.

  • P1: Humans can see the full range of colours in the visible spectrum, no matter where we are.This premise has to be true.

  • P2: A human language can describe all the colours we can see. (!)

  • C: Humans developed language that can describe the full range of colours in the visible spectrum, no matter where we are. (!)

• III.

  • P1: Humans developed language that can describe the full range of colours in the visible spectrum, no matter where we are. (!)

  • P2: Stott calls looking down at Earth from space “indescribable.”This premise is factually true.

  • C: Being in space reveals more visible colours in the full range of colours in the visible spectrum. This conclusion is factually incorrect.

It appears that we have arrived at a paradox, which means that we have created an “aporetic cluster” in the final set of statements. Defined as an “inconsistent group of plausible contentions,” “the only sensible reaction is the abandonment of one or another of them” (Rescher, 284).

From the annotations above, it is clear that source of our puzzlement (aporia) lies in the premises of cluster II. Here are its premises:

1. Humans can see the full range of colours in the visible spectrum, no matter where we are.

   1. This premise has to be true. It is factually true that our colour-detecting cone cells are not altered in space.

2. Humans developed language that can describe all the colours we can see.

   1. Thus, this contention must be abandoned.

If we abandon this statement, then we have to contend that its negation is true. Humans developed language that cannot describe all the colours we can see. Or if we were to be more specific, humans developed language that cannot describe every experience of seeing all the colours we can see. This moment underscores a long-standing philosophical problem—our words inevitably fall short of the full spectrum of experience.

This means that although the language used for firsthand accounts may appear to bring us closer to a truer vision of our world from outer space, it filters and distorts just like the religious and artistic interpretations made by those on the ground. We’re back to Plato’s allegory of the cave, where our language limits us to shadows and prevents us from seeing complete reality, and fully capturing the substance of space.

I mean, gun to her head, Stott would probably be able to describe what she termed the “indescribable.” Like Gagarin rhapsodized:

The sunlit side of the earth is visible quite well, and one can easily distinguish the shore of continents, islands, great rivers, large areas of water, and folds of the land…I must say the view of the horizon is quite unique and very beautiful. It is possible to see the remarkably colourful change from the light surface of the earth to the completely black sky in which one can see the stars. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth’s sphere. It is of a delicate blue colour. And this transition from the blue to the dark is very gradual and lovely. It is difficult to put it in words.

But even as he recollects in vivid detail, Gagarin makes sure to contend that aspects of his experience are “difficult to put it in words.” Once more, we encounter aporia.

IV. ⬧︎◻︎♋︎♍︎♏︎

I’ve been delaying finishing this article, because ironically enough, I couldn’t find the words to do so. I’ve wracked my brains, furiously parsing notes from old philosophy lectures and opening hyperlink upon hyperlink for explanations. Not because I couldn’t find relevant sources. No, no, not at all. I’m suffering from the problems of plenty—every philosophical tradition from Vedanta & Aristotle to Heidegger & Saussure & Kant explores the limitations of language in more depth than my singular mind ever could. Entire critical traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, structuralism, deconstructionism and phenomenology, have sprung from the basic observation that human experiences are difficult to put into words. Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of theory and its far-flung consequences, I have found myself at a loss.

Which brings us to Derrida.

In contemporary philosophy, aporia is more strongly associated with Jacques Derrida than it is with the Greeks. Derrida defined it as “a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.” Essentially, as researcher Nasrullah Mambrol explains, “the gap or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean creates aporia.”

In a paradigm-shifting lecture, Derrida highlights that structuralist analysis, which considers the position of an individual element in the context of its larger structure, is limited by the centrality inherent to the structure of any structure. While the centre is the organizational core of the structure, giving it shape and meaning, Derrida illuminates the fact that the centre itself cannot be a part of the structure. In more material terms, “there are no rules for the rules of chess. The rules exist outside the game.” Derrida lays out in a simple, mind-melting sentence:

The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.

Further implications:

Western thinking has always desired for a center. The entire Western thought is based on the idea of an Origin, an Ideal Form, an absolute Truth, a God, etc. This center provides with all the meaning. The West has always preferred presence over absence, wholes over holes, and has always attempted to fill in the center with various substitutes. However this desire for a center simply implies that either the center does not exist.

I have fallen prey to classic Western thought patterns. This whole time, I wanted to find a something so badly, that it obstructed me from grasping that at the end of the day, space really is a void.

One of the most basic structures we use is language, the means through which we conduct our thinking and analysis. A word is merely a sequence of letters (or sounds) that we associate with a concept. It comprises a binary made up of the “signifier” and the “signified,” which come together to make a “sign.” This could be a spoken or written word, an image, a metaphor, basically anything that is used as shorthand to refer to something else.

In trying to narrow down the substance of space, we began with space as a metaphor in creative works, then space as it is actually perceived by astronauts, then compared it to its divine analogue. But now, we must deconstruct the sign of “space” itself.

Based on those ideas, Derrida developed the theory of différance. Différance is an intentional misspelling of the French difference, the noun form of the verb “différer,” which means both “to differ” and “to defer.” It is Derrida’s neologism for the process through which meaning is derived in any language: through the difference between words and the deferral of meaning.

The first allusion, “to differ,” is the concept that the meaning of a sign only arises in its difference from other signs. We know what “hot” refers to because it is not cold, just like the apophatic method. Even if we try to define something through cataphasis, we will eventually end up at a logical binary that can only be defined as “x” and “not x” (the same logic as the binary system in modern computing). For example, “star” means:

• A fixed luminous point in the night sky which is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun.

Let’s deconstruct this definition, by highlighting a single word for the sake of brevity: incandescent.

• “Incandescent” means: emitting light as a result of being heated.

• “Heated” means: made warm or hot.

• “Hot” means: having a high degree of heat or a high temperature.

• “Heat” means: the quality of being hot; high temperature.

• “Temperature” means: the degree or intensity of heat.

…Oops, we’ve stalled. There are no cataphatic ways to define “heat,” so we must resort to “opposite of cold,” which, as you can imagine, is defined as “lacking heat.” In this way, even the most complicated sign in the world can be boiled down to the binary of what is and what isn’t.

The second meaning of différance is “deferral.” This is the idea that the meaning of a word is always deferred, i.e. it is never complete and fully in the present. Notice how I’ve only listed one definition per word above. If you look up any of those words in the dictionary, you would definitely get multiple definitions, usages, synonyms and forms of the same word. Moreover, you will find that its past usage leaves traces on the present, which is also haunted by its future connotations. All of these bundle up together to give you an unstable sign, whose meaning is not quite fully there, neither in space (contrasted against other words) or in time (contrasted against its own uses in the past and future).

Much as matter can be broken down into molecules, then atoms, then protons and then quarks, the last of which can only ever exist in groups, the fundamental meanings of words can never stand alone. They are only defined in their differences and deferrals, in their negative space.

Ah, space. If you look it up, this simple word has a host of meanings, synonyms, contexts and variations. It is the ultimate recursion: the meaning of space eventually devolves into one devoid of meaning, i.e., empty space. For the sake of this essay, let’s handpick its most relevant definitions (but always keep in mind the traces and haunts of the rest).

“Space” means:

• a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied.

• a blank between printed, typed, or written words, characters, numbers, etc.

• the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move.

• the physical universe beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

• the near-vacuum extending between the planets and stars, containing small amounts of gas and dust.

• a mathematical concept generally regarded as a set of points having some specified structure.

• an interval of time (often used to suggest that the time is short considering what has happened or been achieved in it).

• the portion of a text or document available or needed to write about a subject.

• the freedom to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one.

So when we think of “space,” in the sense of “the physical universe beyond the earth’s atmosphere” or “the near-vacuum extending between the planets and stars, containing small amounts of gas and dust,” we also carry with us aaaaall of these other meanings, and then some. How deft are we, that we fold into outer space tinges of freedom, abstraction, existence, blankness, availability, time, dimension, movement, structure, smallness, and universality?

And if this is our notion of space, then what is its binary pair? Here are some of its antonyms:

• crowding, congestion, jam, fullness, cramp, compactness, overcrowding, clutter.

• contact, connection, continuity, adjacency, closeness, density.

• earth, ground, land, surface, atmosphere, terra firma.

• continuity, immediacy, simultaneity, succession.

• intrusion, closeness, constraint, restriction, pressure, involvement.

Earth, as not-space then, is a place of closeness, continuity, connection, pressure, constraint, immediacy and clutter. And that is what is truly revealing. Space is a construct, literally nothing outside of what we have associated with it, and what we associate with it says more about our feelings on not-space than they do about space. Like Douglas Adams pointed out, if space was just nothingness, we wouldn’t even have a word for it. It would be beyond the beyond, past our cognitive limits. Our ancestors, who looked up at the stars and made up stories, were closer to understanding the essence of space than the clearest Hubble photo. It is an unstable text, endlessly rewritten through science, philosophy, theology and art.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and USSR needed space to feel like freedom, like change, like “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” so that the threat of nuclear winter down on earth didn’t feel so suffocating. Some people need space to feel like a void, blank and existential, so that home feels all the more close, immediate and familiar. Others need it to feel like the gap between words, devoid of the constraints of grammar and mundane life, a blank canvas upon which their imagination can run wild, creating gods and aliens. And yet others think of it as a voyage, unstable and unmoored, consuming time away from loved ones and familiar locales. When they return, they kiss the stable ground, the terra firma, of our Earth.

V. Irresolution

On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1 took a blurry photograph of Earth from six billion kilometres away and called it “Pale Blue Dot,” pictured below, accompanied by a beautiful quotation by Carl Sagan.

While Sagan’s book of the same name, inspired by the image, warned readers to remain humble when faced with the vastness of the cosmos, I would like draw a different conclusion. This photo, to me, is a love letter to humanity. Even in the depths of space, having journeyed far beyond the limits of our ancestors’ imaginations, we turned around and took a photo of ourselves, a “mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.” Just as Rumi predicted hundreds of years ago, the “the earth of water and clay / contains the hearth of the philosophical stone.” The earth is an solid, unshifting anchor, taking up a massive amount of epistemological and visual space in our field of view. The best part is, Sagan, Rumi and I are all correct. The image’s significance is derived from the aporia generated through its various interpretations.

So now, in a grand, unsatisfying conclusion, I have determined that the substance of space is nothing. We have ended right where we began, in the “bitter cold void.” Yes, the substance of space remains unchanged, but you and I have climbed out of the cave to find not blinding light but a shadowless dark, and the faint outline of our own longing. We answered the call of the void, only to be told it was unavailable. And when it called back, it spoke in our own voice.

Yours, with her head above the clouds,

Khushi

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