Yesterday, in the gap that is currently almost constantly filled by a flightless parrot sitting quietly in a hollow under a tree raising a chick, I was searching for another rock to stand on due to a technical live cam error and I saw a rocket lifting off the ground.
Thousands of tonnes of engineered certainty, fire, noise, and a level of commitment that suggests someone, somewhere, was very confident that this would work.
At first glance, these things have nothing in common.
One is quite spectacular, there’s flames and noise and it looks like Michael Bay had something to do with it.
The other is… not.
And yet, if you look past the obvious differences - scale, technology, budget, and the general absence of explosions in one of them…the resemblance starts to appear.
Not in what is being done.
In how... and maybe, why.
The space programme is often presented as a series of moments.
A launch. A landing. A photograph. A quote.
But none of those things happen on their own.
They are the visible tip of something much less cinematic: thousands of people checking, re-calibrating, re-running, managing contingencies, tracking variables and occasionally discovering that something they were very sure about is not, in fact, correct.
It is not a straight line of progress.
It is a loop.
Try.
Fail.
Understand.
Adjust.
Try again.
The kākāpō recovery programme looks different on the surface, but the pattern is familiar.
There are no countdowns. No global broadcasts. No slow-motion replays.
Instead: chick checks in the dark. Monitoring signals. Moving eggs. Waiting on rimu. Adjusting feeding. Watching. Recording. Trying again next breeding season.
Less fire. More spreadsheets.
But the same loop.
We do not have to do any of this.
No one is required to send humans around the moon again.
No one is required to spend decades trying to recover a flightless parrot in a remote New Zealand forest.
And yet, we do.
When John F. Kennedy stood in front of a crowd in 1962 and said the United States chooses to go to the Moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard, he wasn’t really just talking about rockets.
He was talking about a particular kind of human instinct. The one that looks at something difficult, uncertain, and wildly impractical, and decides it is worth doing anyway.
The kākāpō programme carries a quieter version of the same idea.
Don Merton once framed it more bluntly: if we can’t save something as distinctive, as remarkable, (dare I add, as charismatic!) as a kākāpō, what chance do we have of saving anything else?
Neither of these are practical arguments.
They are not about efficiency. They are not even, strictly speaking, about outcomes.
They are about something harder to quantify.
What we choose to care about.
What we decide is worth the effort.
What we are prepared to keep trying, even when success is not guaranteed.
It is tempting to see this as a story about technology, or conservation, or progress.
It isn’t. Not really.
The similarity between sending humans around the moon again and persisting in the effort to increase the population of a parrot, that is literally a biological refugee, is not the outcome.
It is the pattern. A very old one.
The scientific method has evolved into a discipline that is often described as a system for discovering truth.
In practice, it looks suspiciously like a refusal to be discouraged by being wrong.
Form a hypothesis. Test it. Discover it does not hold. Adjust. Repeat.
This is not a new invention.
It is a disciplined version of something much older.
Try something.
It doesn’t work.
Try again, slightly differently.
Humans have been doing this for a very long time.
Long before we named it.
Long before we wrote it down and attached funding proposals to it.
Curiosity, persistence, pattern recognition.
The ability to build on what we know.
These are not modern traits but they are the traits of humanity. The traits that separate us from the rest of the living things.
What is modern is what we build with them.
Stretch those traits across people, across time, across generations… and you get something larger than any individual effort.
A recovery programme.
A space programme.
We are not especially good at getting things right the first time.
Or the second.
Or the third.
The history of both space exploration and conservation makes that clear.
Things fail. Sometimes catastrophically. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes repeatedly.
And yet, we continue.
So what? (aka Shine, what is your point?!)
It is easy, at the moment, to feel as though essential things are being lost.
That we are less capable, less connected, less able to do the kinds of things that once seemed possible.
But if you look at the structures we sustain - over decades, across generations, in the face of uncertainty - a different picture emerges.
The underlying traits are still there.
Curiosity.
Care.
Persistence.
Fallibility.
The ability to learn.
The willingness to try again.
Artemis II leaves the ground, carrying with it the accumulated learning of everything that came before.
The same thing is true when a DOC ranger checks a chick in the dark, noting weight, respiration, small signs of progress or concern.
Neither guarantees an outcome. Both are part of the same pattern.
Humans, attempting something difficult, uncertain and not strictly necessary … and doing it anyway.
Science is a way of thinking. A way of probing the dark when we’re not sure if we know what is there.
(It’s also our best defence against ignorance, manipulation, and self-deception – thanks Carl Sagan and your Demon-Haunted World!)
Science is not driven by certainty… it is sustained by the decision to continue without it!
That sounds like hope…
Post Script: The term biological refugee was directly from this clip of Dr Ron Moorhouse, kākāpō guru.
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