J. E. Landau

In April of this year, Artemis II set a new record for the distance from the Earth by a crewed spacecraft. This was covered, not only by space and scientific publications, but by mainstream print, TV, and news outlets, and when Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen were in space, they were pushing out the radius of an imaginary sphere, marking the boundary that no one has yet crossed.

This was not a big first. In 2024, China returned samples from the far side of the moon. In 2019, a global team of researchers photographed a black hole directly. In 2015, ESA detected the first gravitational waves. All of these milestones are significant for our understanding of the universe and all of them received mainstream news attention.

Nevertheless, none of them are big firsts.

In 2018, the Chinese geneticist He Jiankui announced that two genetically modified children had been born as a result of his research. Doctor He was fired and imprisoned, the Chinese government passed a moratorium on human genetic modification, and the news went silent. In 2021, it was reported that the two children were healthy, and in 2022, He was released from prison. Beyond this, we have heard very little, and there seems to be almost no evidence that we are living in a brave new world as a part of this.

That’s not to say that big firsts have to change the all world. In July 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and returned, bringing Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins back to the Earth and onto the front pages of global newspapers. This was a big first. Probably nearly everyone has heard of Apollo 11, and when people think of the space age, that was its apex. And it certainly reverberated through pop culture, spawning sci-fi as we know it. But it didn’t stop the Vietnam War, and the last landing on the moon took place in 1972. We haven’t been back since. The space-age future they imagined ended up failing to materialize.

So the impact of a first, and the press coverage it gets are not the key elements of a big first. What makes something big?

First of all, I think it has to be historic. Apollo is in the history books, even ones that aren’t about space. Any general history of the 1960s would be incomplete without it. Artemis II won’t be, because it will be overshadowed by whatever mission does actually land on the moon. Similarly, Yuri Gargarin’s flight into space and Sputnik are essential to the understanding of the 50s. Why? They tie into other narratives, first of all.

Sputnik was a technological leap forward, partly because it promised broader technological changes. If the Soviets can fly a satellite over your house, that implies an ability to land a nuclear missile in your city. Indeed, while Sputnik was the end of the beginning of the space race and the transition from the era of using captured V2s into real space exploration, it also signalled the beginning of the end of the era of air-atomic warfare, where nuclear bombs went with nuclear bombers, and it would give way to the missile-dominated age of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Similarly, Apollo symbolized an end to the space race, with the Soviets not contesting the point, and also heralded changing perspectives in American-Soviet relationships. For example, the Khruschev era, which was in force during Gargarin’s flight, was focused heavily on competition in economic and diplomatic spheres, while Brezhnev’s regime (in force and consolidating power by the time of the 1969 moon landing) focused more on military competition. You couldn’t imagine Brezhnev having the same kitchen debates that Khruschev had with Nixon, for example.

Apollo also has connections to the struggle for peace and civil rights. The Apollo 11 mission launched after the Civil Rights Act and Tet Offensive of 1968, while America was reeling, and many commentators at the time noted that it felt hypocritical, that America could be embroiled in a major foreign war, losing, and still be spending large amounts of money on space exploration.

I believe that another factor for “big firsts” is that they do need to be legitimately impressive. Artemis II is not impressive, because although it has technically gone farther from the Earth, the mission has better scientific and control equipment, and it carries more astronauts, it doesn’t feel like a difference in kind from the events before it.

This criterion disqualifies events like Steve Jobs’s announcement of the iPhone, which was not a first of anything, even though it inaugurated the enormously important smartphone revolution that continues to shape nearly every aspect of our lives today. Smartphones had been built before the iPhone, and so I think that this criterion disqualifies it from being a big first—even if it was a big moment, anyway.

It’s pretty easy to see that landing someone on the moon, or sending the first person into space, is a big achievement. Both of them had nothing like them. I expect that the first landing on Mars will also be a very big deal, but I sincerely doubt that anyone will care nearly as much about the first landing on Phobos or Deimos, because they won’t be different enough. Similarly, I expect that (for example) the first landing on Mercury won’t receive a huge amount of press, although if people end up living there I’m sure it will be important to them: a third factor, I think, is that the events need to be incorporated into the myth of a people.

In the United States, anyone will tell you that Wilbur and Orville Wright were the inventors of the airplane, but this is not a unanimous position. In Brazil, it is more popular to argue that Alberto Santos-Dumont had the first heavier-than-air flight, and there are other claimants besides that, and both of these firsts are big: in America, the big first for flight is the Wright Brothers, and for Brazilians, it is Santos-Dumont.

Similarly, America has grown up a whole mythology around the space age, seeing it as a time of American excellence—even though the flights directly preceded the (far less fondly-remembered) Carter presidency and took place during the Vietnam War.

Mythmaking is not a process that any one person or group has a monopoly on. It’s something done by the state, by institutions, companies, religious leaders, and members of the general public. These myths are then changed, especially as the reputations of the figures involved in them change. This was part of the reason why Yuri Gargarin was so carefully protected by the Soviet state. An unambiguous “big first” like his first flight is an immensely valuable resource, and the people involved in it can create a negative myth. Imagine if Gargarin was killed flying on another space mission: everyone would see it as the end of the golden age of Soviet space exploration, and it might even crumble his myth.

The Space Shuttle was, technically, the first reusable rocket for carrying people, even though a lot of it wasn’t so reusable, and when it was first created there was a lot of excitement about its potential for ushering in a new age where ordinary people could live and work in space.

Unfortunately, that excitement was turned into a PR disaster when the Challenger disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts, including a schoolteacher—intended to be another big first, and creating a new big first myth—the first American disaster in space. The Apollo 1 fire was forgotten in the public consciousness, and the Space Shuttle became a death trap, all from that first.

So when I look into the future, and try to imagine the next big first, I think that there are a few plausible candidates. With all the media attention that we’ve been getting, the announcement of an unambiguous AGI would no doubt be a big first, since it would play heavily into the narratives of our economy and culture.

In space, I think that a moonbase is probably next. The Artemis missions will be important milestones, but it won’t feel like a “first” until people are living on the moon full-time. Mars missions will also be a “big first”, but from my perspective, it seems unlikely that we’ll see any of those before the 2040s, while a base on the moon could come around in the 2030s, if we’re lucky.

In biotech, I think that the announcements around Dr. He’s modified children might actually make it impossible for there to be a “first” genetically modified baby of significance, but human cloning could really shake things up, if anyone ever found a use for it, or something similar. After all, Dolly the Sheep probably could have been a big first, and it still might become one, if the fights over biotechnology become more serious and pressing in the future. After all, it contributed to a lot of the restrictions on cloning and genetic technology that exist today.

In other fields, I believe that these things are more difficult to predict. We could see big firsts in the climate space, for example, in geoengineering, or if a natural disaster gets tied to climate change (as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future) but I think that kind of narrative formation will take longer than we expect. After all, early projects in solar radiation management (on the ground level) and direct air carbon capture are already underway, and in a future history of climate change, those could be significant milestones leading to a future. But today, they are just interesting pieces of trivia.

In fact, I think that the creation of a “big first” has more to do with finding a future for an event to lead to than the significance of the event itself. That’s the difference between a first kiss and finding a life partner, between a first drink and the beginning of a life of alcoholism, between a cold and the illness that kills you.