Wednesday Wisdom

 Jacques Cousteu introduced and highlighted the relationship of mankind to nature and more importantly to the ocean. In 1950, Cousteau acquired a modified, surplus British minesweeper. By naming his ship Calypso, Cousteau leaned into the idea that the ocean was a beautiful, dangerous nymph that had captured him, holding him hostage away from a "normal" life on land. While Odysseus from Homer’s The Odessey spent seven years trying to escape from Calypso’s hold and return to dry land, Cousteau spent nearly five decades happily trapped in her embrace, using the ship to lure millions of television viewers into the same maritime spell. When Cousteau launched his second major documentary television series in the late 1970s, he didn't call it a study or a chronicle, he titled it The Cousteau Odyssey. This wasn’t just a catchy title, it was a deliberate philosophical framework for exploring the ocean. Cousteau wore his iconic red wool cap, reminiscent of ancient Mediterranean fishermen and sailors, casting himself as the weathered, wise captain navigating unknown perils, and narrated with a poetic, gravelly voice that felt less like a scientist and more like an ancient storyteller. In a brilliant bit of narrative symmetry, several early episodes of The Cousteau Odyssey were filmed in the Mediterranean. Cousteau literally retraced the geographic routes attributed to Odysseus, searching for lost civilizations, Minoan ruins, and the historical truths behind Homer’s myths.

The Apollo space program of the 60s and 70s was named after Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, light, music, and knowledge. Apollo was one of the most important gods in ancient Greek mythology and he was the son of Zeus and Leto. One of Apollo’s most famous sacred places was the Oracle of Delphi, where priestesses delivered prophecies believed to come from him. The Oracle of Delphi was considered Apollo’s sacred sanctuary. At Delphi, people believed Apollo spoke to mortals, prophesized the future and instilled knowledge through a priestess called the Pythia.

Abe Silversteinm was NASA’s Director of Space Flight Development. One evening in early 1960, Silverstein was browsing a book of mythology at home. He struck upon the image of the Greek god Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun. He felt the sheer and grand scale of that image perfectly matched the unprecedented ambition of a crewed lunar voyage. Part of the justification of naming it after Apollo was that “light” and discovery go hand in hand, and it symbolized bringing knowledge and exploration to new frontiers. Apollo reflected the technological ambition of sending man into space and of landing humans on the Moon. The program was also of cultural prestige, having a strong, heroic god as the namesake as the United States contended with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and “space race”. The program achieved its goal with the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, putting the first humans on the Moon in 1969.

Apollo’s twin sister is the goddess Artemis who was also born to Zeus and Leto on the island of Delos. Her birth came under difficult circumstances because Zeus’s wife Hera tried to prevent Leto from giving birth anywhere on land. Her most famous sanctuary was the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The current NASA program is named after Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo and the goddess of the Moon, hunting, and wilderness and proving continuity to NSAS space program. From Apollo to Artemis, the Sun and the Moon are linked to NASA and the United States ambition to discover outer space. The names are also logical in that they allow the space program the eternity and continuity of time when naming the missions. Artemis also asked Zeus, who was the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, to live in nature rather than with the gods. She chose to live in the wild rather than among gods or cities and he roamed forests with a band of nymph companions, which is certainly a reflection of the astronaut’s mission in space.

In 2019, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and his team knew they had a massive problem; they had a collection of expensive, disconnected technical parts including the SLS rocket, the Orion capsule, the Gateway station but no cohesive story to sell to a skeptical Congress and public. Longtime NASA staff explicitly warned Bridenstine not to name the program, pointing out that giving a project a high-profile name makes it an easier target for politicians to kill which happened to the Constellation program.

Bridenstine ignored the warnings, realizing that a powerful brand was exactly what would save it. He successfully brought back the dormant NASA space program.

Now we have Artemis that successfully circumnavigated the Earth and was able to sling shot the astronauts around the dark side of the Moon achieving the deepest distance mankind has gone into outer space. The initial Artemis program is a steppingstone to once again putting humans on the moon and perhaps eventually exploring Mars. Only imagination, will and engineering provide a hurdle and delay these lofty goals.

Male and female, the Sun and the Moon and two celestial twins that represent the enormous ambition of the men and woman whose effort make the impossible achievable. When looking for a name, Brian Macdonald, a NASA staffer, suggested Artemis. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the Moon and the twin sister of Apollo. The "Twin" Strategy: The name was a political masterstroke. It directly respected and anchored itself to the nostalgic legacy of the 1960s Apollo missions, while instantly signaling that this wasn't just a repeat, it was a new, inclusive era. Bridenstine was so thrilled by the name that he bypassed the usual weeks of bureaucratic White House and National Space Council signoffs. He dropped the name "Artemis" during a press conference in May 2019, using her identity as Apollo's twin sister to proudly announce that NASA would be sending the first woman to the Moon. To protect the program from being canceled during the upcoming 2020 election cycle, NASA’s communications team launched a massive PR blitz. They quickly partnered with major retailers like Target and Lego to get "Artemis" branding into the mainstream, successfully building a bipartisan political shield around the program. Apollo was selected by a single engineer looking for a symbol of raw, sun god power to inspire a nation during the height of the Cold War. Artemis was chosen by a modern agency looking to create a diverse, inclusive narrative that would unite a divided Congress and make a multi-billion-dollar space program politically bulletproof.

While philosophy wrestles with metaphysical questions about existence and meaning, Jacques Cousteau and NASA pursued those same questions through exploration, one through the oceans of Earth, the other through the vastness of space, each seeking to understand humanity’s place in nature and in the universe.

And now you know...

Thanks, Dad, for the gift of curiosity!

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.