Asian Interstellar Flight

China and its neighbors should be encouraged to develop the Asian star flight adventure theater.

This could take pressure off North Korea, and ease the problem of the United States appearing to be a source of oppression. In contrast, Russia has no such problem because it has its own science fiction.  Russia's theater culture has strong traditions, including some from France, in which space flight is tolerable popular entertainment. China, by contrast, derives its formal theater from Confucian family values that tolerate little nonsense.

From the importance of the Moon in Chinese philosophy and literature, some kind of consciousness emerged around 500 A.D. in China about the Moon in its future. There were also paintings of the Moon and at least one reference to a Chinese person who attached many rockets to his sedan chair and was never seen again. One of the constellations, called "The Slipper" has to do with a Princess who went to the Moon.

That kind of stuff, as well as the ancient Egyptian paintings of men in winged boats sailing across waters toward a disk in the sky, is ancient. It indicates that for much of the world the highly successful and globally televised Apollo manned space flight project was the fulfillment of many ancient cultural ideas that had been devolved into instinct through many generations of time.

In the West, space flight to the stars was highly illustrated in theater and factual information publicized widely. Among other things there is an idea that flight to the stars will eventually become vital if mankind is to survive.

While the author is of the opinion that Earth will be quite habitable for another hundred million years at least, the traditional world did not have such confidence. In part this was due to the fact that the Earth was depicted in the Christian tradition as having been created only six thousand years ago, an insignificant time clearly meant to convey the idea that the civilization involved was temporal.

Meanwhile, idea such as the absolute necessity of discovering ways to travel to the stars, to determine the existence of extraterrestrial life, and to discover new worlds to inhabit has become at least entrenched and will continue to preoccupy human destiny for a long time. It will require either success, or failure for unending generations, to make those determinations.

Some cultures today, particularly those advancing rapidly in technology and the sciences, use the idea of a fundamental need to find new planets where human beings can life as a source of support for their research. To them, the idea that Earth's future is limited means that research in extraterrestrial space flight is vital, and the concept tends to lead to good job security and high incomes.

In other words, there is at least monetary value in keeping the world slightly alarmed in favor of research in space flight.

If China is itself concerned in that way, it could be that anything which inhibits Asian progress and enthusiasm for extraterrestrial flight could be interpreted as an enemy. The United States and European countries have dominated fictional literature and theater in the scenarios about extraterrestrial flight and colonization of planets at other star systems. England's H. G. Welles, Voltaire's description of space beings from Sirius, and the United States theater of Star Trek and Stargate essentially dominate world theater in fictional depiction of space flight to the stars.

China, naturally inhibited, may have been reluctant to venture into spectacular space fiction theater except by joining American theater groups, such as the participation of Mr. Sulu in Star Trek. If this is so, the theater-loving cultures of China, Japan and Korea could be feeling oppressed and prevented from developing their own amusing space theater in order to turn to the prosaic, almost mind-numbing militaristic-seeming development of economic progress.

China should be, ah, led serendipitously into the development of its own science fiction theater and introduced to the fantastic profits that can accrue from really big hit movies about space flight. Of course it should be delicately led to that success, so that most of its value can be attributed to Asian minds.

It is possible this could take pressure off North Korea, and thus ease the problem of the United States appearing to be an oppressive monster of some kind.