New Boundaries for Humanity

TDT | Manama
Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

We’re heading into the Big Eid al-Fitr break, and everybody is feverishly researching enticing holiday and staycation trips that will keep the travel and hospitality industry in good form. There was a time in the ‘sixties and seventies when air travel was an expensive affair and not to be taken lightly. Today’s travellers, though, belong to the post-budget airlines generation, and their world is a smaller place.

Now, I come from a family with a maritime travel heritage embedded in it. My father travelled across the seas to many distant lands, and I have accompanied him as a boy. It whetted my appetite for my future maritime career as well. Being out at sea was far more isolating in the early days because the technology to keep in touch with loved ones and abreast of news was sketchy. Over the years, all that changed, and today, I see men and women at sea who are no longer a lone island but as much in the thick of happenings as if they were on land, thanks to the internet and satellite phones.

I was thinking of all this when following the fate of the two astronauts, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who went into outer space for a routine one-week trip and ended up spending nine months, while NASA scrambled to send a rescue mission for their return. Travel is a mind-expanding thing. It forces us all to get out of our safe harbour and test the unknown, exchange ideas, and shape civilizations. What the two astronauts went through is a benchmark – a sci-fi reality that will forever be the guiding post for future astronauts and space men and women. Why, it will always be referred to as a game-changer in space exploration. The first step, perhaps, to sending humans to other planets to set up colonies, just like the Arab traders and explorers of ancient times and the Columbuses and Da Gamas of medieval Europe.

We are celebrating not just the return of the astronauts, but the courage, hope, and clarity with which they drew new boundaries for humankind.

(Captain Mahmood Al Mahmood is the Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Tribune and the President of the Arab-African Unity Organisation for Relief, Human Rights and Counterterrorism)