Editor’s note: To commemorate the coming new year, neweurasia is looking heavenward to gaze into Central Asia’s past, present, and future.  neweurasia’s Schwartz explores outer space’s ultimate meaning for the region’s destiny…

The “Astrostan” series is far from over.  Central Asia and outer space is a topic — to some wacky, to others (me) fascinating — that we’ll be returning to again, sometimes in a way, ironically, more “down to earth”, e.g., talking about the space industry and space ideology, and sometimes in the more speculative ways of some of the posts you’ve seen this week, like using Mars as a model for understanding the region’s history.  See you soon, space cadets.  ;-)

The residents of Baikonur have a saying: “The cosmos are inside you.”  I think it’s incredibly apt for this week’s exploration of Central Asia’s relation to outer space.  This is a region with so many very earthly struggles that, as Averroes has repeatedly pointed out in his posts, we need to think carefully about Central Asia’s inner space as the real meaning of its reach heavenward.

This week’s posts are tied into last week’s by the common thread of vacuum — the physical void of outer space and the ideological void of Communism’s fall.  As I said on Monday’s post, much of the Soviets’ destructive legacy has been psychological.  I think first and foremost among these, outstripping even fear and ideologization of everyday life, was the loss of unity in the region.

For all its problems, the Soviet Union brought a sense of connection between the ‘Stans that has been painfully missing ever since its fall.  The reach toward space by several of the republics, then, is a kind of reach back to that unity.  After all, outer space is the penultimate terra incognito in that it is not terra: the vast darkness is something all human beings share.

With that in mind, I’d like to close this week and indeed 2009 with some quotes that speak to the great unknown out there and the equally great unity within all of us.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. — Immanuel Kant

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!  — Yuri Gagarin

Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities. — Muhammad Iqbal

Although You are one, You spread throughout the sky and the planets and all space between. O great one, seeing this wondrous and terrible form, all the planetary systems are perturbed. — Baghavad Gita, chapter 11, verse 20

Thy heavens, the work of the Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou has ordained… Thou dost make him [man] to rule over the works of Thy hands, Thou has put all things under his feet.  — Psalms #8, verses 3 and 6

Do you not see that God is He, Whom obeys whoever is in the heavens and whoever is in the earth, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and the mountains and the trees, and the animals and many of the people…? — Qur’an, chapter 22, verse 18

And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned. — Qur’an, chapter 30, verse 22

O Son of Man! Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of heaven, yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to Our command and humbleness before Our Face. — The Hidden Words, Arabic #40