Why we look up – and keep exploring

If you haven’t already, subscribe and join our community in receiving weekly tech insights, updates, and interviews with industry experts straight to your inbox.

Be inspired and expand your perspective with weekly insights and interviews from the global LEAP community. 

This week we’re quoting…

Izzi (a character in 2006 movie, The Fountain) 

What Izzi said: 

“Together we will live forever.” 

Hold on, don’t we usually quote tech leaders here? 

Yes, we usually do; but not always. 

On the blog this week we’ve been talking about space tech and space exploration. About the deep human desire to explore beyond our own planet and find out what might be possible elsewhere in the solar system, and beyond. 

We’ve also been thinking about The Fountain; a movie we’ve definitely written about in this newsletter before, because it’s one of those cult classics that’s full of insights into our collective consciousness, if you’re willing to look. 

Released in 2006 and directed by Darren Aronofsky, it weaves three timelines into one meditation on love, mortality, and the search for eternity. 

In the 16th century, a Spanish conquistador seeks the Tree of Life for his queen. In the present day, a scientist races to cure his wife’s terminal illness. And in a far future, a lone traveller drifts through space toward a dying star, carrying the memory of the woman he lost. 

These three people, living in different centuries and galaxies, each confront the same truth: that love (not immortality) is humanity’s most enduring force. 

That’s deep.

It is deep. And it’s also possible that we’ve never really written about love here in the newsletter before; we know it’s not what you’d expect from a mailer about tech. 

But when we’re deep in conversations about exploring further in space (using new propulsion tech that turns light into energy, for example) we can’t help but sink into our philosophical selves, and wonder what’s really driving us to find out what exists out there. 

The drive behind the tech 

Maybe it isn’t just curiosity that propels us. Maybe it’s a kind of devotion – to the idea that we can always make something better or understand something more.

Because that same instinct that sends a traveller to the stars also drives an engineer to perfect a propulsion system; a developer to train a new model; a founder to build the company that no one else dares to imagine.

We see it in the stories and experiments emerging from the space tech sector – 

• Methane-fuelled rockets that can be reused dozens of times
• AI data centres that might orbit the, powered only by sunlight
• Quantum-ready semiconductors manufactured in zero gravity 

Each of these innovations begins with the same human impulse Izzi spoke to in The Fountain: together, we will live forever.

Not in a literal sense. But in the continuity of what we create. 

Tech is based in science and engineering and research and iteration. But it’s also our modern mythology: our way of stretching human potential across time and space.

With everything we make, we’re adding another line to that story. So here’s to those who look up – and to those who make looking up possible.

Explore more…

Read this week’s LEAP articles on space tech and the future of exploration.

Meet the innovators shaping tomorrow’s orbit economy at LEAP 2026.

Have an idea for a topic you'd like us to cover? We're eager to hear it. Drop us a message and share your thoughts.

Catch you next week,
The LEAP Team