How the Space Fantasy Became Banal
This story contains mild spoilers through Season 2 of For All Mankind.
During the Geneva Summit of 1985, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to negotiate their way out of the Cold War, the American president paused the proceedings, the lore goes, to pose a question. “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space?” Reagan reportedly asked. “Would you help us?”
“I said, ‘No doubt about it,’” Gorbachev later recalled. “He said, ‘We too.’” And the summit went on from there.
Reagan’s query was perhaps a joke meant to minimize tensions between him and the agent of the place he had once dubbed “an evil empire”; his question also, however, belied a long-standing dream. Reagan was an ardent reader of science fiction. One of the enduring themes of that genre involves the hope that humanity, existentially confronted, might put aside its differences and find a way, finally, to collaborate for the common good. Space, in that vision, is both primal and transcendent: an opportunity for humanity to recalibrate its failings. A place to search for, and perhaps even locate, our better angels.
The allure of , the drama that just finished its fantastic second season on Apple TV+, is that it takes the fond old hopes of collaborative humanity and, withand the novel , that question operatic illusions about space. The final frontier, they suggest, will be no different from the other frontiers. Space will be a place of violence, of struggle, of selfishness and occasional grace—a place, that is to say, that bears both the image and the brunt of flawed humanity.
