Once and Future Astronauts

The word “astronaut” has acquired in our times a very specific ring, inseparable of rockets, robots, and fancy expensive suits—all very technological in the limited sense of the metallic and hydrocarbon-powered technology which moves our world. It is rather a pretentious word, when you think that our so-called astronauts have not even made it to the nearest star (astron, in Greek), our Sun, but have barely reached our tiny moon while making other big plans.

In this our contemporary make-believe sense, we mean by astronaut “someone who navigates among the stars,” but there is in fact a more humble and realistic sense of the word, and it is the one used in the compound “astronavigation”. In this case it means “someone who navigates using the stars as reference,” “someone who navigates under the guidance of the stars.”

Some elements of maritime astronautics must have been always there since the end of the mythical Golden Age, when men first started cutting the waves with their keels—after all, the starry sky was and still is an almost palpable reality of uncontaminated night. But fifteenth-century Arab pilots in the Indian Ocean were inheritors and refiners of a centuries-old tradition of astronautics, a particularly sophisticated and complex usage of the night skyscape, combining accurate and dogged observation with astute and insightful combinations to transform the heavenly vault, even in cases of poor visibility, into a very reliable and efficient reference framework. Those were the good old pre-modern astronauts!

And yet, come to think of it, if we remember that the very idea of number and calculation is rooted in the observation of the sky (Plato, Epinomis, 978b), then we are all, by being human and living in society, a sort of astronauts. All our sciences and techniques at every step have been and are determined unfathomably by our relation to those flickering lights above, and what we can decide to a certain extent is only the degree of our awareness. Let’s try and put it axiomatically in Latin: non est homo nisi astronauta, there is no human who is not an astronaut. [Juan Acevedo]