I think everyone is fascinated by space on some level.
That expanse of inky black all around us filled with unfathomable amounts of nothing. It seems impossible.
We're particularly fascinated, I think, by the fact we've been there. Humans have broken the boundary of our planet and taken our first steps in that boundless void.
According to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, as of March 2025, 642 humans have left our atmosphere and looked upon the Earth from space.
Millions of years of our kind's existence passed before Yuri Gagarin's historic launch in 1961. No one had been in space before, and now 641 others have followed him. (Including, funnily enough, Captain Kirk himself.)
The human body alone can't handle the forces required to break through the atmosphere, our lungs can't take the vacuum on the other side. We are creatures firmly of this planet, built for this planet.
Space represents to us a physical human limit. We're not meant to go there.
But we're drawn to things we're not meant to do. We've always been drawn to things we're not meant to do.
Tens of millions of people tuned in to watch Yuri Gagarin's launch live. An estimated 650 million tuned in to watch the Apollo 11 crew walk on the moon in 1969.
Even now with spaceflight less in the public consciousness, launches attract millions of viewers online.
We're not meant to be there, so we want humanity to be there.
When things go right, we feel a powerful sense of ownership. A joint, species-wide pride. Like we all shout at once into that deep void, "We are here! We exist! And look what we can do!"
I still feel that swell of pride when I watch footage of the moon landings, and they happened a quarter-century before I was born.
For humans, limits are more like challenges. Curiosity, pride, arrogance – call it what you will – but something calls us to defy them.
To try.
And we understand that when we try to push our limits, things can go wrong.
It's difficult to be exact, but the total number of unmanned launch failures easily lies in the hundreds.
And we've had 5 major shuttlecraft disasters that resulted in the deaths of the astronauts on board. They are every bit as painful to watch footage of now as I'm sure they were at the time. Devastating.
We have paid terrible costs to break our physical limits. We pay those costs for spaceflight now just as generations before us did to cross mountains, traverse oceans, or fly through the clouds for the first time.
We pay them sadly. We pay them with regret. But we accept them.
No one wants a launch to fail, much less an astronaut to be hurt. But we all understand on some level when it happens.
We get it. Of course things go wrong.
If things didn't go wrong sometimes, it wouldn't be much of a limit. It wouldn't mean much for us to break it.
Risk of spectacular failure is the price of spectacular things.
We understand this innately when we're talking about our physical limits. We have a harder time accepting it for our mental limits.
For some reason, we see our mental limits as signs of weakness. We blame ourselves when we hit them. Like the problem lies not with these miraculous sacks of gray matter in our skulls, but instead with us as individuals.
Our human mental limits are every bit as real as our physical ones, and breaking them every bit as profound.
I've seen few things that push our mental limits as much as Chess. Our brains are not designed for it. There's simply too much information, thinking, emotional regulation, attention control, and self discipline all at once. We hit the limit fast.
We forget things, we blunder pieces, we tilt. We make the move we've already decided is bad. We play without thinking.
We're trying to cram 32 pieces and 64 squares into a mere seven slots of working memory. Slots that were not designed for something so complex.
When we play Chess, we feel that sense of being on a precipice. It demands all of our brainpower, all of our attention. When we play, we come face to face with our mental limit.
And like the human beings we are, we do not yield to it.
Not everyone can go to space. As much as I would love to, my eyes will never see our beautiful blue planet from the outside. Most of us will never cross that physical limit.
But anyone can play Chess. Anyone can push their mental limits over the board.
I think that's why Chess has been around as long as it has, why it will stay with us for centuries more. Through it, every one of us can push against the limits of our species.
The scale may be different, history books won't be written about our attempts, but the core is the same.
And it means just as much to us when we succeed.
We are astronauts. We don't push physical limits, but every day we challenge our mental ones.
Regardless of your age, or skill, or the years you've spent playing, you launch yourself against your mental limits day after day.
You don't do this because you think you'll nail it every time. If things didn't go wrong sometimes, success would be meaningless.
It is specifically because of your mistakes that your successes, the times you truly do conquer your limits, feel so euphoric.
Every now and then, when things go just right, you play something so beautiful that you rise above it all. For a moment, you feel perfection.
It's one of the most incredible feelings in the world: "Look at what my brain just did!"
I'll bet you could ask every single one of those 642 people who have been to space and they'd agree. The view from up there, what it means for a human to see it, is worth all the struggle and the pain to get there. Even if they only experience it for a moment.
When you sit down to play, remind yourself that you are an astronaut too. You're journeying into the unknown, into the very limits of what our species can do.
On the way you will see beautiful things and you will feel the pride that only comes from overcoming those limits.
But things will also go wrong sometimes. Of course they'll go wrong sometimes.
It's the price of trying.
Stand tall. Pay it proudly.
"Shuttle, this is Ground Control. Checkmate in two."
Here's to the journey,
Aiden
