Space – The Final Frontier?

The news media in the United Kingdom have got very excited, because a British man has joined the crew of the International Space Station for a few months. The I.S.S. is jointly owned by 26 different nations, and has been crewed by people from at least 17 countries so far. The Station has a wide number of uses – the conduct of experiments, actual space research, the study of human biology, etc – and is probably thought of as the first stop on the way back to the moon, or a jumping-off point for Mars.

Bahá’ís believe that ours is not the only planet to carry life. Bahá’u’lláh stated that, “…every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute”. What is more, there will have been at least one “Prophet, bearing a Message…in each of the worlds whose number God, alone…can reckon”.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, gave a talk in Paris, in 1913, stressing that it was time to start making efforts to reach other planets. Of course, at the time, man had only just succeeded in flying an aircraft over the English Channel! But in the mind of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá space travel was the next step. It is a great pity that the powers of the time did not work together on this, but instead directed their efforts towards war.

While the astronauts are floating along the corridors of the space station, living and working together in friendship, the politicians down on the Earth’s surface, coming from the same countries, are still engrossed in conflict, instead of urgently tackling the planet’s many problems. It must be very obvious to the astronauts on the space station, as they look down, that the earth is one entity. Perhaps if the world’s leaders could be up there too, then they might understand things differently and be prompted to make greater efforts towards uniting the world and preserving the planet’s ecosystem.

Clearly, the ability of the major powers to suspend their rivalry and send Russian, American and British astronauts off together in the same capsule is in itself a positive sign. However, for all the co-operation in space, we are still lacking solutions to problems such as warfare, racism, starvation, disease, gender inequality, political boundaries, universal education, religious rivalry, etc, etc. But once we do begin to see mankind as one human family, and the whole earth as our home, we will be able to make exciting discoveries on the “final frontier”. As Bahá’u’lláh explained, “Know…of a truth that the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infinite in their range.”

Let’s see what’s out there!