Anniversary of the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite. To be in orbit on such a jubilee is something special. Only twenty-five years have passed since the day that shook the world with the Soviet radio announcement of an event humanity had been working toward for so long, and it took only 25 years to arrive at the student satellite Iskra, which we had the honor of launching into space from aboard the station.

I got to thinking about weightlessness and how it changes our concept of living space. On Earth, we associate it with the area we inhabit, but in space we live in volume. You might think birds or fish have complete freedom of movement — they live and orient themselves in volume — but they’re still bound by gravity to the surface, where there’s an up and a down. Take a person who has ended up in a well: the floor area is minimal, while the volume due to depth can be as large as you like, but in this case it does the person little good — what matters to them is the area of habitation as their living space.

But if you lay that well on its side, the living space immediately increases due to the possibility of movement, potentially to infinity, even though it’s bounded by walls. It’s the same in space: the bottom of our well is Earth, and the walls are the entire Universe, pushed apart by knowledge. Having broken free of Earth, having felt weightlessness, a person is freed from constraints on freedom of movement, is no longer bound by the certainty of their position in space, and can therefore shape their habitat according to entirely different laws and requirements. In so doing, humans have gained the ability to utilize volume — both of any spatial structure and beyond it. In essence, they have begun to live in outer space, though for now only near Earth, and therefore retain the familiar notion: where Earth is, that’s down, and everything away from it is up, regardless of what position the person or the station occupies in space. By mastering an entirely new habitat, humans change their understanding of the world, rethink their role and capabilities within it. As a consequence, culture, art, science, architecture — essentially our entire life — changes, which ultimately leads to changes in social relations between peoples and states. Someday, perhaps, even the concept of state borders, associated with the division of territories on Earth, will wither away, though I’m certain new concepts will emerge in their place, related to zones of influence or habitation.

Space is hard to divide up, but someday that too will become real. Having felt the possibilities of three-dimensional living space, even if for now limited to orbital flight, humans will be compelled to venture into space, because space itself, opening unlimited horizons, will impose its own conditions, to which they will have to adapt and overcome, just as they adapted on Earth, having settled it. Today we are in space like the first travelers whom humanity, driven by the desire to expand its sphere of influence, sent beyond the threshold of its home, to understand what lies beyond the horizon of our understanding of the world.

Humanity will one day sever its ties with its cradle and live in a new world. New zones of life will emerge. Some will choose the Moon, others Mars, and some will go even farther — meaning new inhabited worlds will arise, and with them new contradictions, since all of human life has been, is, and will be a struggle for survival. And how they leave, what bonds remain, will determine their future. When people leave Earth, will they remain its friends or become its enemies? Won’t they become indifferent to its fate? Just as children, growing up and leaving the family home, forgetting it, not infrequently become indifferent even to its destruction. Won’t they forget their homeland, which for them will by then be all of Earth? Just as desperate people once left their countries, went to America to create a New World, and having settled it, transformed into a new nation, losing the blood ties to the land of their ancestors, the sense of depth of their roots. Having fled from everyone in pursuit of freedom, they arrived at the point where they themselves began to suppress the freedom of others.

While humanity has not yet scattered across the Universe, while there is still a chance to achieve unity of views, uniting around a common life program for tomorrow’s earthlings, as citizens of one planet, we must push aside destructive contradictions, rise above them for the sake of understanding the distant perspective, for which all disagreements — social, political, national — various accumulated layers today become secondary, though they must be respected.

By venturing into space, humanity outpaces its own consciousness, and therefore those who do not live by Earth’s interests must not be the ones to go into space.

Today there are no enemies out there — the enemy is within us, and we must not allow it to take up residence in space. Nature, having created reason but once, entrusted its fate to its own hands. We underestimate the speed at which progress advances, fail to grasp its consequences in time. But we are obliged to understand the global nature of the future’s challenges, so that tomorrow we do not become victims of our own irreparable mistakes, since consciousness acquires not only the force of braking but becomes a source of our own peril.