An Explorer & The Mice

"Exploration is not a luxury. It defines us as a civilization."

-James Cameron

As this is being written, NASA has just announced that we are going to be building a permanant base on the Moon. In 2020, man will set foot on the Moon for the first time in 48 years and begin the process of building a mall-size base which will be permanently staffed four years later. In effect, we're colonizing our moon. The most important principle behind this, though, is that the lunar base itself is not being touted as the endgame, but rather the means to an even greater end: manned exploration to Mars and then to....Titan? Europa? The possibilities are literally infinite.

I'll hold my tongue on some of the small criticisms and worries I have and just celebrate the greater triumph: at last, man is exploring again.

As guest editor of Wired magazine in 2004, James Cameron wrote an incisive and impassioned argument to resume space exploration. In fact, many of the specific ideas Cameron championed - involvement from the private sector and wedge fund allocation - were echoed in NASA's announcement of this new lunar mission. Cameron's argument is a great combination of useful data and human insight, but there's something that sets it apart from almost all of his other writing.

Typically, James Cameron has an uncanny ability to gauge and then impartially accept whatever it is that the masses are thinking. (In an interview with Randall Frakes about Titanic, he talked about the "invisible audience" he carries around in his head while making a picture.) But in this essay, his frustration at America's collective exploratory paralysis is palpable. To close the piece, he addresses and tersely defeats virtually every argument against space exploration. And then, with what seems to be an angry abruptness, he says simply, "What are we waiting for? Let's go."

At that point, readers might know what the crew on his movies feels like.

It's worth noting for all the environmentalists out there who might get jealous for Earth, Cameron even offered up a "green" rationale for exploration. In a seperate interview:

"We are playing fast and loose with our planet, and if it turns out to be the only place within a hundred light years in any direction that's got life, we might want to take things a little easier, be a little bit more respectful."

(So now they have enough of an excuse to look to the stars and still worship Earth.)

After Titanic, Cameron seems to have divided his professional life into three arenas:

1) Developing digital 3-D cinema in general and his "reality camera system" in particular.

2) Working on several feature movies in various capacities, including Solaris, Battle Angel Alita, Avatar, and Sanctum.

3) And most of all, he's exploring the ocean floor in every conceivable way: developing new tools, making documentaries about his journey, studying what clues deep sea life gives us about astrobiology. Cameron was scuba diving as a teenager, so he's definitely the same person now as he was then (as he's said before).

Cameron has used his seat on NASA's Board of Advisors to help arrange for scientists to accompany him on his trips, as shown in Aliens of the Deep.

But wait! According to a Slate.com hit piece written upon the release of Aliens of the Deep, Cameron is merely "feigning" interest in sea exploration. The way writer Bryan Curtis sees it, Cameron is actually just a "B-movie" maker who's suffering from "filmmaker's block" and his career is headed for a "watery grave".

The entire Slate piece - written almost two years ago - encapsulates lots of the petty disparagments that the phonies at message boards cavalierly throw out at this astoundingly accomplished man. What's especially aggravating about these insults is that they're manifestly bogus. The Slate piece nonchalantly references Cameron's innermost feelings and motives, things they couldn't possibly know. They claim he has writer's block, then they say that he's scared by his post Titanic respectability (as if he weren't respected before; aside from all being box office hits, a quick glance at RottenTomatoes.com shows that all five of his pre-Titanic pictures got positive notices, most of them overwhelmingly positive). Most outrageous of all in the Slate piece, they somehow claim to know that he's "feigning" his interest in oceanic exploration. These people who've probably never even met him casually act as if they've just administered an intensive psychoanalysis treatment.

If Cameron's oceanic exploration is a hoax, than it makes the Piltdown Man hoax look about as obvious as the Duke lacrosse rape hoax.

It's funny, when I first started writing this, I was a little more angry about these message board critics, I even had a perfect phrase crafted: "Phonies pathetically trying to look sophisticated."

But then, this morning, I saw NASA's announcement that we're going back to the Moon and, for a minute, I got that momentary sense of wonder that you sometimes get when you're watching a great movie, reading a great story, or playing a great video game. And I realized that it's impossible to use reason against people who are inherently dishonest. If they cared about truth, they wouldn't be lying in the first place.

So I guess the larger issue here is that James Cameron, professional explorer, inventor, artist, and filmmaker, aggressively championed a renaissance of space travel, and now he - and the entire civilized world - can celebrate the fact that, hey....we are going.