‘Rocket To The Renaissance’, written by Arthur C Clarke in about 1960 and expanded upon in his epilogue to ‘First On The Moon’, a book by Apollo astronauts, sets out many of his thoughts regarding the positive impact of human space travel on the human race. Since it was written in the mid-twentieth century by a White Englishman, though apparently a queer one, it unsurprisingly has its colonial biasses, though not fatally so. He focusses initially on White expansion across the globe, although he does also mention the views of non-White thinkers such as 胡適. That said, his point stands, and is paralleled by Arnold Toynbee, who once said:
Affiliated civilisations . . . produce their most striking early manifestations in places outside the area occupied by the “parent” civilisation, and even more when separated by sea.
I honestly can’t read this without thinking of the genocides committed by European powers, but there is a way of defusing this to some extent. There was a time when humans only lived in Afrika and slowly radiated out from that continent into the rest of the world, a process only completed in the twentieth century CE when we reached the South Pole, and not including the bottom of the ocean, which is of course most of the planet’s surface. Something I haven’t been able to track down is that there is supposed to be a genetic marker for the people who have spread furthest from East Afrika, which I presume means it’s found in Patagonia, Polynesia and Australia, although I suspect it actually refers to Aryans because there is indeed such a concentration in the so-called “Celtic Fringe”. Even this expansion may be problematic. It’s not clear what happened when Afrikan Homo sapiens left that continent and encountered other species of humans. Our genes are mixed with theirs, but they’re extinct and we don’t know how either of those things happened. It seems depressingly probable that we are all the descendants of children conceived by rape, within our own species, and this may have been the norm as we would understand it today, between or within our species. It seems more likely, though, that we simply outcompeted our relatives on the whole, and maybe the small portion of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans reflects their relatively smaller populations.
Leaving all this aside, the imperial winners of this million-year long onslaught on the planet benefitted culturally and technologically from it. 胡適 said:
Contact with foreign civilisations brings new standards of value.
And:
It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.
Since I don’t want this to descend into some kind of patronising Orientalism, I’ll come back to Arnold Toynbee and his law of Challenge and Response. When difficult conditions are encountered, a minority of creative people respond by coming up with far-reaching solutions which transform their society. For instance, the Sumerians responded to the swamps in their area by irrigation and ended up kind of inventing civilisation as such, and the Church, having promulgated a belief system which caused the collapse of civilisation, went on to organise Christendom and invent Europe. We can of course still see the consequences of Sumer today all around us, but as I’ve mentioned before the very human geography of these isles reflects its location through the “diagonal” arrangement of cultural and economic differences we see locally due to the radial spread of change from the Fertile Crescent.
Even human expansion from East Afrika is problematic. There are clear signs that whatever it was we did led to enormous forest fires and the extinction of charismatic megafauna such as the nine metre long lizards who used to predate in Australia and the giant tortoises and birds of oceanic islands, not to mention the possibility that we helped wipe out the mammoths and woolly rhinos. Animals today tend to be nocturnal, smaller and to run away from humans because of what we’ve done in the prehistoric past. Nonetheless, there is an environment which is not problematic in this way. Actually, I should turn this round. The environments which are problematic from the viewpoint of being easily damaged and containing other sentient beings are largely confined to the thin film of air on this tiny blue speck we call Earth.
In his ‘Spaceships Of The Mind’, Nigel Calder pointed out that if we want to develop heavy industry, there’s always an environmental cost on this planet. On the other hand, if we were to do it in space, that problem goes away completely. Nothing we can do in space is ever going to make even the slightest scratch on the Cosmos in the forseeable future. Of course, it’s worth injecting a note of caution here because that attitude led to damage to our own planet, and locally even in space, that may not be true. Nonetheless, I do believe that one response to the energy crisis is orbiting solar power stations which beam their power back to remote receiving facilities on Earth which can then relay electricity globally, obviating the need for any fossil fuels or terrestrial nuclear power stations, or for that matter wind turbines or Earthbound solar arrays.
Space exploration has already yielded very positive results. These include the discovery of the possibility of nuclear winter, the Gaia Hypothesis, the Overview Effect and technological fallout. I’ll just briefly go into three of these.
- Nuclear winter. When Mariner 9 reached Mars in 1971, there were problems imaging the surface due to a global dust storm. This was studied and it was noted that the fine particles in the atmosphere were blocking solar radiation and cooling the surface. The Soviet Mars 2 probe arrived at about the same time, sent a lander into the dust and it was destroyed. Carl Sagan then sent a telegram to the Soviet team asking them to consider the global implications of this event. This led to a 1982 paper which modelled the effect of nuclear firestorms and the consequential carbon particles in our own atmosphere which appeared to show that there would be a drastic cooling effect on this planet if that happened: the nuclear winter. Even now, with more sophisticated models, scientists recommend that global nuclear arsenals should be kept below the level where this is a significant risk during a nuclear exchange, and it’s also possible that it was a factor in ending the Cold War.
- The Gaia Hypothesis. This is the belief that Earth is a homoeostatic system governed by its life. It’s still a hypothesis because many scientists still reject it or see it as only weakly supported, and it also coëxists with the Medea Hypothesis, that multicellular life will inevitably destroy itself. The roots of the hypothesis lie in Spaceship Earth and the observation that the other planets in the inner solar system, which didn’t appear to have life on them, were much less like Earth than might be expected. Up until the 1960s, life was more or less regarded as a dead cert on Mars because of the changes in appearance caused by the dust storms, which at the time were interpreted as seasonal changes in vegetation, and of course it had become popular to suppose there were canals there. On Venus, many people expected to find a swampy tropical world or a planet-wide water ocean teeming with life. When this didn’t happen, some scientists started to wonder if life had actually influenced this planet to keep it habitable rather than there already having been a hospitable environment for life which maintained itself. Viewing our whole Earth as alive is a way to engender compassion for all life, and is of course an example of hylozoism.
- The Overview Effect. This is substantially related to the inspiration for the Gaia Hypothesis. When astronauts have seen Earth hanging in space, they have tended to gather a powerful impression of the fragility of life and the unity of the planet which has constituted a life-changing experience. The Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences in response to his personal reaction, which was part of the human potential movement, and there are plans to make views of Earth from space available via virtual reality.
These are just three examples of how space exploration changes human consciousness for the better, and two out of three of them only happened because there were people in space, beyond low Earth orbit. Considering that even today only a tiny proportion of our species has ever been in space, and an even tinier proportion have left cis lunar space, this is an enormous influence relative to their number. It’s evident that the more astronauts and perhaps people living permanently off Earth there are, the more positive the effect on the human race would be.
But instead, we’ve gone the other way.
The biggest recent notable change in technology from a cultural perspective is of course information technology, mainly the internet and easy access to it via relatively cheap devices. This has led to the creation of cyberspace (I was there at the birth) and a generally inward-looking culture. I would contend that up until 1972, the human race had a spatial growing point, and that this had feedback into the rest of our cultures. And yes, it absolutely was the preserve of the rich and powerful countries, and yes, Whitey was on the “Moon”:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enoughA rat done bit my sister Nell.
Gil Scot-Heron
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
The question here is of course of which America got the moon landing, and possibly which humankind. However, is there a reason to suppose that if enough people were to go into space it wouldn’t alter their consciousness enough for them to become, for instance, anti-racist and to recognise that we really are all in it together? To a Brit reading this, the reference to doctor’s bills brings the NHS to mind, and that kind of large-scale government-sponsored undertaking is pretty similar to NASA in many ways.
Apollo was also, of course, a propaganda coup, demonstrating what the so-called Free World could do that the “Communist” countries couldn’t. However, it wasn’t done via private enterprise or competition. It is at most an illustration of what a mixed economy can achieve, not capitalism. On the other hand, it could also be seen as an example of competition between the two power blocks dominating the world at the time, but is that capitalism?
As it stands, space probes even today have relatively low specifications, possibly due to long development times. In 1996, Pathfinder landed on Mars powered by an 8085 CPU running at 0.1 MHz. The Voyager probes run on a COSMAC 1802. There was eventually a problem with the Space Shuttle program because the craft used 8086 processors which became hard to find and had to be scavenged from antique PCs. The space program is startlingly primitive in this respect. As far as I know, there has only ever been one microcomputer based on the 1802 processor, the COMX 35, which came out in 1983. The Intel 8085 came out in March 1976, was a slightly upgraded version of the 8080, and was almost immediately eclipsed by the legendary Zilog Z80 which was released a month later. It had a longer life in control applications, which is presumably how it ended up in a Mars rover. The Shuttle program ended in 2011, which was thirty-three years after the 8086, a pretty conservative design in any case compared to the 68000 and Z8000, was mass-produced. Given all that primitive IT technology, the achievements of space probes are astonishing, and serve to illustrate the inefficiency of popular software used on modern devices on this planet. We have our priorities wrong.
I needn’t say much about the effect of social media on society. We all know it’s there, and it’s basically an ingrowing toenail, albeit one which has ingrown so far it’s started to pierce our brains. But we could’ve had a rocket to the renaissance, and instead we got Facebook and Trump. History has gone horribly wrong.
A Box Of Chocolates 