My Battery is Low and It's Getting Dark

ISSUE #42

My friend Ariel, who commissioned our stargazing playlist back in July, sent me this story about how engineers at NASA would play a different song every morning to try to wake up Opportunity, the Mars rover, after it lost contact in June, to boost team morale and maybe hoping to cast a resurrection spell. Two days ago, they played it their last song: Billie Holiday's "I'll Be Seeing You." Its last words before losing contact were "My battery is low and it's getting dark."

Now, instead of wake-up songs, this playlist is my way of saying goodnight. Some are songs I use to sleep after a long and arduous day, and some I use to imagine the trials the little rover must have gone through up there in the cold, with only the hope of seeing the sun to power it. There's a lot to relate to in its story, especially today, in the middle of dreary February, when all I have to keep me going is the power of Vitamin D, and I have to use my energy sparingly. One day, there will be a storm I cannot stand to weather; I'd like to beam these songs into the universe in solidarity, in the hopes that they find others who deserve rest, be they bionic or breathing.

I'm the last person you'd expect to be eulogizing a robot, but the rover's story has made me reflect and see that I should only fear robotics when it's used to carrying out our own most violent impulses, when they're created as weapons or surveillance, but Opportunity was neither of these things. It was art and science combined: photography and engineering, architecture and electronics, choreography and computing. It's a bridge between two worlds that are often unfairly pitted against each other, and if we insist on playing god, it's at least comforting to find it so easy to extend our humanity to this little rover, to grieve and cry in its passing. Maybe the AI of the future will extend us the same compassion.

We were all fashioned out of nothing without being asked, and we're launched into the universe all by ourselves. We're expected to perform our daily tasks no matter how tired, hungry, or worn. It's a trite and college-dorm-room thing to say that we're all running on batteries of our own, but that doesn't make it less true, with the only difference being that we can travel that path of feeling and thought inward, passing organs in our mind's eye to reach our own beating core that will some day run low. When that day comes, and we are at peace, there is little to say that dying is much different than sleep, and maybe sweeter. Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself:"

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

If I can address Oppy directly: it's unfair that you had to die, when you were so good and brave. You lasted 14 years, 295 days beyond expectation, even after the death of your twin; you traveled farther than a marathon through reaches unknown, places we can only dream of, places that make us feel smaller than pebbles, and you faced it unafraid. You died on stormy seas, like sailors of old, one of the most human endings of all, the kind we tell in our most rousing eulogies. I hope we get up there some day, to give you a proper funeral.