I once asked a son of Neil Armstrong what it was like, growing up, to watch “Star Trek” with the first human being to set foot on the moon. “’Star Trek’ drove my father crazy,” Mark Armstrong replied. “The Starship Enterprise would whoosh by and my father would shake his head. He’d say, ‘You wouldn’t get that noise in space. Sound is caused by molecules moving, and molecules in space are too few and far apart to generate sound.’” Which makes Neil Armstrong all the more heroic. One has to admire his disciplined adherence to the facts of space no matter how desolate, how dull.
So many others who should know better have yielded to delusional space fever. So many others have wasted their energies, and ours, on wild flights of fancy. Choose your earthly anxiety. Overpopulation? Just offload millions of people into space colonies, preached Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand and physicist Gerard O’Neill. Existential angst? No worries. Outer space enfolds all of human consciousness, according to the Noetics organization founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Still lonely? Join visits to Roswell, N.M., who believe aliens have reached out and probed us.
Such gaseous eruptions of culture, rather than hard scientific data, are what British journalist Marina Benjamin sets out to explore in Rocket Dreams. The crash of the space shuttle Columbia after the book went to press has made the trip all the more compelling. Benjamin, who confesses to having “space mania,” is a deeply informed tour guide. Having visited the faded glory of Cape Canaveral, she offers a short course on Space Age-inspired philosophy, from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of Earth as a self-regulating system to former NASA chief James Webb’s vision of a nation as the perfect melding of man and machine. In Roswell, she hung with UFO nuts and traced the lure of conspiracy theories. Via her computer, she joined a virtual community pretending to colonize Mars. In North Hollywood she found three “leathery” Apollo astronauts signing autographs for cash with forgotten TV celebrities. And yet, when space hypesters seem most in need of ironic puncturing, Benjamin remains oddly indulgent.
In 1971, for example, Krafft Ehricke of Rockwell International boasted that space colonies would evolve from Earth’s “mudhole” into superior societies intolerant of “all that is small, narrow, contemptible and repulsive.” Benjamin meekly muses: “Visionary utopianism or proto-fascism? It’s hard to say. . . . “ Not that hard. Ehricke did start out designing Hitler’s rocket weapons. Indeed, all but missing from Rocket Dreams are the military dreams driving most space technology. Fear of Sputnik funded development of not just nuclear missiles but also satellite platforms for directing conventional warfare. Battles are won by seizing the high ground. Space is the highest ground, and whoever controls it may rain destruction upon enemies.
But Benjamin’s quest is to reaffirm her wondrous childhood faith in the Apollo effort. She begins with her sense of betrayal that we never got to Mars and the stars. She wants to chase “the utopian, escapist and conquistadorial hopes that originally enlivened the effort to put humans in space and meant so much to a generation of Space Age dreamers like me.” She finds kindred spirits at the SETI project who scan galaxies for radio signals from advanced civilizations. We learn that an early SETI advocate, Bernard Oliver, “took it for granted that civilizations that managed to develop beyond that phase of ‘technological infancy’ when societies are inclined to flirt with self-destruction would not only be long-lived, but would possess . . . wisdom, patience, benevolence, selflessness and . . . the secret of immortality.” Such civilizations have already made their secrets available to us. To unlock them, we need only learn to read the “Encyclopedia Galactica” encoded in cosmic vibrations. “Access to this ‘galactic heritage,’ “ declared Oliver and his NASA-funded team, “may well prove to be the salvation of any race whose technological prowess qualifies it.”
Even here the author does not fully activate her radar. Instead she credits Oliver with unknowingly heralding the Internet. Cyberspace, she writes, enables “the kind of mind-meld that is just not possible in a world handicapped by terrestrial geography.” And cyberspace has proved far better than outer space for hosting the “tenacious” belief that “we might start over somewhere new.” It is jarring to encounter such techno-rapture after the dot-com debacle, Sept. 11 and the proliferation of weapons nuclear, chemical and biological. But Benjamin refuses to shoot down the dream. That is not her mission. She clings to the anything-is-possible optimism of her youth by rediscovering it on the Net. Rocket Dreams, therefore, is about the twin escape hatches we are tempted to reach for whenever the ride gets rough. One is faith in the essential goodness of technological advance. The other is belief that our species is capable of some great leap to utopia. Despite little evidence that either is valid, a lot of us would rather look to the sky for salvation than accept human limits. How much more thrilling is the whoosh of Starship Enterprise compared to the chore of making our own little worlds a bit more kind, a bit more healthy, a bit less alien.
- Arab News Features 14 August 2003
