Looking at the story in the context of life’s endeavours, I find that flying close to the sun can actually be a spectacularly good thing. They should be doing precisely the opposite, taking risks, following their heart and being their own person. These are not pieces of advice that anyone seeking to create a sense of self-fulfillment should ever follow. Don’t take risks, keep your head down, fly low and keep out of danger. It also acts as a fantastically cautionary piece of advice for parents to pass on to children, telling them not to walk outside of the boundaries of safety. Because it also serves as a warning that you shouldn’t do anything particularly good or bad, just stick to the middle ground and everything will be OK. As I consider this tale, I start to feel the story is more like middle class propaganda, a conspiracy to try and keep peoples heads down. I always interpreted this story as a warning against overreaching myself, that I should always maintain a realistic set of parameters in any endeavour that I might undertake.īut there’s more to the story than that. It’s a very sad story of a father losing a son after his advice is roundly ignored, and everyone suffers as a consequence. Eventually, the wax melts, the feathers loosen and the boy flails his bare arms in vain, only to plunge to his death in the deep Icarian Sea, thereafter named in his honour. At the sheer excitement of the freedom of the sky, Icarus soars higher and higher in his daring flight, abandoning his father and flying close to the sun, until it’s heat softens the fragrant wax that holds the wings in place. And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion: take the course I show you!’Īnd so they fly out like birds, with wings upon their shoulders, flying as if they were gods travelling into the sky. ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. In a final bid to escape, Daedalus crafts imitation bird’s wings out of feathers fastened with thread and bees wax which he affixes to their arms, allowing them to fly away from the island like birds into the sky.īefore their flight, he gives his son firm instructions as to the course he should take on this flight of escape, warning that Icarus must stay well away from the moisture of the sea at low levels and the heat of the sun and many constellations of stars at high altitude. The story of Icarus is the tale of Daedalus and his son, Icarus, who are exiled on Crete and unable to escape by means of sea or land. I’ve often heard it said, in a slightly smug way, that someone has “flown too close to the sun” if their ventures have sadly failed, as if they should have heeded the story of Icarus and known better. The crux of the story has even passed into our lexicon as a euphemism for over-reaching ambition or greed. It serves as a powerfully graphic warning of the perils of excessive self-confidence, how one should avoid extreme risks because of their potentially grave conscequences. The airtight suit provided a refillable water bladder, a digestive pouch for food, and even a bio-actuated micro grinder capable of processing small quantities of Oxite.Most people learn about the fate of Icarus at a young age. No picture of the First Cohort is complete without the infamous Envirosuit, a miracle of low-cost survival design pioneered by Sinotai. So arose the popular image of the Icarus prospector: landing on the surface empty handed, adopting survival skills from another era, until such fortune arrived. Seeking fortune, they exhausted what little wealth they had simply getting to Icarus, where basic supplies were stratospherically expensive. Īs with all resource rushes, the majority of these hopefuls came from nothing.
The Lagos Unit, meanwhile, was able to outsource the extraordinary risks of operating on the planet to this small and – ultimately – disposable group: The First Cohort. Aging factory ships had failed their original task, these were repurposed as makeshift homes for the first Icarus prospectors, who helped maintain them in return for living space and transport. Their first act was to cannibalize the remains of the original terraforming mission. Scrambling to convene infrastructure, the UDA established the Lagos Unit to manage extraction of the exotic deposits.