In an American era marked by discord and divisiveness, the recent solar eclipse brought about a welcome sense of wonder, awe, and even unity as “eclipse fever” swept the country. The band of totality spanned from coast to coast, directly through the American heartland—crossing broad ranges of communities, states, and political regions. One news report described the event as a uniting “ribbon of totality.”
Science fiction movies often present cataclysmic events or alien invasions as the unexpected catalysts for humanity coming-together. But such unity needn’t arise solely out of fear or danger—as the eclipse so clearly demonstrated. One viewer of the event told a reporter that at the moment of totality, she (and those around her) literally dropped to their knees in awe of its majesty.
Humankind has long looked skyward to process our world—imagining animals and heroes among the constellations, or gods of war and gods of love nestled in the heavens. And this celestial fascination continues into the modern era—the desire to better understand our place in the cosmos, and to potentially even discover evidence of life beyond our planet. Dr. Carl Sagan moved bureaucratic mountains to convince NASA to turn the Voyager space probe’s camera back at earth as it passed out of our solar system in 1990—a parting celestial selfie that captured both the smallness and the unique grandeur of our “pale blue dot” in space. Sagan poetically described the image as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” where “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
We have rarely been in greater need of such unifying visions. In more primitive times, narrow tribal exclusivity and competition was an essential survival strategy for our species. But in a globally interconnected world, it has now become our curse. As Martin Luther King once noted—“Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development, we must make it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”
With our higher-brained functions, we are capable of forming and re-forming ever shifting virtual alliances. And because such tribal loyalties are protean and malleable, we can knowingly reshape them—with stories and human narratives. Recent brain imaging studies out of USC indicate that we are actually hard-wired to resonate with such stories, and particularly those with a moral quandary component. Such tales have spanned human history—from the adventures of hunter heroes told around ancient campfires, to big-screen exploits taking place in the depths of space.
The 2015 movie, The Martian, offers an exciting fictional saga of extraterrestrial survival, where an American astronaut (played by Matt Damon) is inadvertently left for dead on Mars, and has to devise a means of staying alive until he can be rescued. But beyond a tale of survival-against-all-odds, the movie also explores an ever-expanding sense of tribe inspired by the astronaut’s plight—first among his fellow crewmates, then all of NASA, then the governments of other countries, and finally, the entire human race. As the rescue mission reaches its exciting conclusion, anxious crowds gather in New York’s Times Square, London’s Trafalgar Square, Beijing, and more, to collectively watch the outcome.
The events pictured in The Martian tap into our hard-wired centers of story, empathy, and cosmic wonder. At one point in the film, a heated managerial debate erupts over whether such a high-risk mission to save a single person can possibly be justified. One government official opposing the rescue insists that the space program (and its very survival) “is bigger than any one person.” But a proponent of the rescue declares—“No…it’s not!” And soon, all of earth agrees. Chinese space officials ultimately sacrifice their planned launch to instead provide supplies to the American mission—offering-up their space center and its resources.
Our era seems consumed by partisan rancor and discord—with narratives about walls, and exclusion, and narrow tribal groups pitted against one another, in tooth and claw competition. But there are other possible narratives, and other possible stories. As Kurt Vonnegut once noted—“We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful what we pretend to be.” The recent eclipse’s ribbon of totality demonstrates that it sometimes takes little more than the awe and wonder of a celestial event to bring us together as a people.
And in a similar vein, the conclusion of The Martian says it all for both the movie's unifying message, and for the possibilities of our species. The final scene closes with the rising strains of the 1970’s tune, “Love Train.”
...Get on board.
Steven and Michael Meloan are authors of "The Shroud," a science-adventure novel exploring the spiritual impulse, tribalism and its manifestations in human behavior, and the intersection between science and spirituality: