Fiction: The Space Age.

There was a time, long ago, when the people of the country called the United States of America were obsessed with looking at the sky. It was a time of fierce optimism, when human beings actually believed that they were responsible for the well-being of the planet on which they lived. That they had been given some sort of divine command to discover as much about their universe as they possibly could. It was a time when the most noble of human occupations was that of the Scientist, a person who had dedicated their life to the hopeless task of knowing as much as a person could know and to understanding that which was beyond understanding.

(We know now how impractical science is. All it has truly bestowed upon the human race is the terrible awareness of the fact that intelligence is futile in the wake of instinct. )

In those days, however, they looked to the sky, believing, in their naive way, that it would eventually afford them answers to all of the mysteries of life.

It was during this time that America began to send humans into the indomitable frontiers of outer space. There were some who thought that the stars could be tamed and that the heavens could be contained. Others said that it was mankind’s duty to explore the sky, just as it had been man’s duty to extend the United States from sea to sea. Still others had faith that the planets would contain life forms of higher intelligence, life forms that could teach them how to cope with their most pressing concerns-- war, disease, hunger, death.

They channeled these hopes and dreams in two directions. The first direction was towards a man named Kennedy, a man who rose to power on his youthful idealism and his beautiful method of speaking. The second direction was into the creation of objects known as rocket ships. Space shuttles. It was this grand invention that was going to carry mankind on its adventures into the wild and wonderful future, as well as outer space itself. The space shuttles were the pinnacle of human achievement in the years before the second millennium; the grandest of all of the grand things that they had ever built. And the Scientists were the new pioneers.

It didn’t last. Kennedy was shot and killed by a madman, and Americans watched in horror as their precious shuttles were destroyed, crashed, and burned with the greatest of their helpless heroes inside of them.

The First Space Age ended when the people finally came to realize that exploration was pointless. Human beings could not solve the problems of their own planet. Why bother to infect the rest of the universe with their diseases, regardless of what might be out there?
   
It was the start of the Great Age of Self-Awareness, where the only meaningful adventures were the ones that occurred within the human consciousness. And people stopped looking into the sky, so much so that they never noticed when its colors began to change and the stars stopped appearing at night.