I was refreshing Twitter/X for maybe the fifth time that hour when I noticed what was happening. Thousands of us were doing the exact same thing. Following Artemis updates live. Holding our breath every time a milestone landed. It felt like the whole internet had pulled up the same chair.
That's the thing about space missions now, I think. They don't happen behind closed doors. They happen with live telemetry and thousands of strangers on the internet who feel like friends for a few hours because you're all watching the same countdown. Each update — orbit insertion confirmed, re-entry sequence started — landed like a shared heartbeat.
I think about scale a lot. Or maybe it's more accurate to say it forces itself on you when you're watching humans orbit the Moon on a livestream. The Earth is tiny from up there. We are too. And somehow the same tiny species builds the thing that gets you up there to see it. I don't really know what to do with that. I'm not sure anyone does.
Artemis didn't give me any answers. It gave me a feeling I didn't know I was missing. Something between relief and wonder. I also wanted to go build something. Rejuvenation, maybe, if I had to name it. Moon joy.
Here's what I didn't expect. That same feeling started showing up in other, much smaller places. My inbox in the morning, when I open the daily briefs from the agents I've been running. Sitting down to work on the novel I'm trying to write with AI in the mix — not letting it write the thing, more like a sparring partner that pushes back on an idea I thought was good until I either defend it or realize it wasn't. A small PowerPoint generator I've been building that's starting to actually understand what I'm trying to say.
It's not the same as watching a rocket launch. Obviously. But there's a rhyme between them that I can't quite shake.
I've been testing a new agent this week. Nothing important, just poking at it to see where its edges are. And I caught myself feeling something I wasn't looking for. Not productivity or efficiency. Closer to curiosity. The kind you feel when you're exploring and you don't know what you'll find. That energy feels related to what I felt during Artemis, somehow. The sense that there might be more possible than what's in front of you right now.
Most of the AI discourse I see doesn't match any of this. It's either all "this changes everything" or all "this ends in ruin", and from what I can tell neither really describes what using these tools feels like when you're actually in them. It's messier than that. Some days I close the laptop feeling hopeful, other days I close it worried about where the whole thing is heading, sometimes in the same afternoon.
I don't think collective awe just makes you feel small. It does something else too. It makes me more willing to try the thing I've been stalling on. I know that might sound like a stretch — drawing a line between a Moon mission and a small project on my laptop — but I'm not sure it actually is.
Where does any of this go? I genuinely don't know. Maybe the agents become boring infrastructure, the way search engines did. Maybe they change more than I can picture. What I keep noticing is that the horizon I had six months ago is already behind me, and I didn't move that much. It moved.
I'm not trying to tidy this up. The honest version is that watching Artemis gave me a feeling that kept showing up in my work afterwards, and I want to keep following it for a while.
That's about as far as I've gotten.