As early as in the mid-1960s, von Braun argued that if the trend of cutting back on the space programme were not reversed, we might as well put up a sign on the moon saying Kilroy was here. ‘To make a one-night stand on the Moon and go there no more would be as senseless as building a railroad and then only making one trip from New York to Los Angeles.’ Even America’s space shuttle programme hung by a thread. When Caspar Weinberger argued in a memo written in August 1971 that not to support the shuttle programme would give the impression that ‘our best years are behind us, and that we are turning inward’, Nixon wrote, ‘I agree with Caspar’ on the memo, and that was that, the space shuttle was saved. But whether the project had been worth saving is a moot point. There was nowhere to shuttle to except back and forth between the Earth and the spaceship itself. The shuttle was certainly not the weigh-station to Mars that von Braun had once envisaged.
With the end of the Apollo programme came the end, too, of Apollo’s distinctive management style. ‘The bureaucrats moved in for good,’ Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden wrote. ‘Many of them felt for years that we astronauts had far too much power, prestige, and responsibility. Things were never as informal as they had been before. NASA changed and lost some of its original pioneering and engineering spirit. All of the rules were now laid out in black and white, and every decision passed through multiple layers of middle and upper managers.’
Von Braun often made the point that Apollo wasn’t about the moon landing, it was about everything that had made the landing possible. ‘In reaching the moon,’ he said, ‘we will have proved the feasibility of space flight. All the hardware; the technical and scientific manpower; the launching, tracking and communication . . . the test, management, and logistics support will remain with us as much more of a permanent asset than a handful of lunar dust.’ He said the space programme had become ‘America’s greatest generator of new ideas in science and technology’. A random list might have on it scratch-resistant lenses, cordless power tools, memory-foam mattresses, household water-filters, ear thermometers, shoe insoles, safety grooving on pavements, advances in cryogenics, a better understanding of how radiation affects cell division, and of course Teflon: all things that have made life that little bit better. And yet such list-making remains trivial compared to the simple fact of the space programme as a human achievement. ‘Man does not fit a common mold, either physically or spiritually,’ von Braun wrote in criticism of Soviet collectivism. ‘His soul is unique . . . A man would be a robot without a heart that can feel joy, love, grief, compassion, or devotion.’ He said that no matter how impressive our machines and instruments, ‘by far the most decisive factor in the exploration of space is the human element’. We have not returned to the moon for almost 50 years. Perhaps we have concluded that space is for artificial intelligences – machines – not feeling human beings. But the eye of a machine is not the eye of a human. The returning Apollo astronauts struggled to tell us in words what they had experienced, but the struggle is precisely what makes the attempt human. Machines do not hold conversations. Machines do not write poetry.
‘I do hope,’ von Braun wrote, ‘history will record that we were aware . . . of the enormous implications of the lunar journey, that . . . we are reaching out in the name of peace, and that, while we take pride in this American achievement, we share it in genuine brotherhood with all nations and with all people.’ In our cynical age it is hard to embrace such idealism, and hard, too, to accept the achievement of the space race from a purely political perspective. Konrad Lorenz said that it had absorbed mankind’s aggressive and competitive instincts, that the space race stayed Presidential hands. Carl Sagan argued that by exploring space, ‘the creative, the aggressive, the exploitive urges of human beings can be channelled into long-term possibilities and benefits’. They are surely romantic assessments given that the space race coincided with terrible proxy wars in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and a number of African countries. It might just as well be argued that the space race accelerated the arms race.
‘We must open our vision to the unknown,’ von Braun said in a speech he gave during the early years of the moon race. ‘We must expect the unpredictable; we must value knowledge for its own worth; and we must cease to measure the new in terms of usefulness alone.’ Arguably, we have learned none of these lessons.
In 1977, within two weeks, NASA launched two space probes – Voyager 2 and then Voyager 1 (presumably in that order because Voyager I would eventually overtake Voyager 2). Almost two years later, Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter. Back on Earth we saw detailed images of the Great Red Spot, a swirling storm the size of the Earth in Jupiter’s atmosphere. On Io – one of the largest of Jupiter’s many moons – the first active, non-terrestrial volcano was discovered.
The launch of the Voyagers had been timed to take advantage of a future favourable alignment of the outer planets. Jupiter’s powerful gravitational field was used to sling Voyager 2 further out and headed on a course towards Saturn. A little more than two years later the probe sent back close-ups of the planets’ rings. By then, NASA had decided to include Uranus and then Neptune in the Grand Tour. Voyager 2 reached Uranus in January 1986. Three years or so later it flew past Neptune, sending back images of its largest moon, Triton, an ice world that had only been visible as a speck on the Earth’s most powerful telescopes.
Voyager I had set off on a more direct route out of the solar system. By 1990 it was almost 4 billion miles away from Earth (Voyager 2 was a mere 3 billion miles away). Voyager I had just enough energy left to take a final photograph.
Carl Sagan readily admitted that a photograph of the Earth would have no scientific value, but it would have human value. In our imaginations we can place ourselves aboard Voyager 1: we are leaving the solar system, turning our heads for one last look at the Earth before it fades from view forever. What would the Earth look like seen from 4 billion miles away? Would it be discernible at all? Sagan petitioned NASA to turn the craft towards the Earth one last time before it continued its journey into interstellar space. What we saw back on Earth was an image of the Earth less than the size of a single pixel. Remarkably, the pixel looks unlike the other millions of pixels that make up the image: it is a pale-blue colour, the last remnant of our specialness. The image – travelling at the speed of light – took five and a half minutes to make the journey back to Earth.
‘Look again at that dot,’ Sagan wrote in a famous essay, ‘That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’
We might see the Pale Blue Dot as Earthrise’s counterpart. Earthrise is an image of our home hoving back into view. ‘It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,’ said Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman. ‘It sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.’ Earthrise is an image of greeting, of return. The Pale Blue Dot is an image of farewell, hinting at our future as space travellers. Further out, and even the blue pixel fades away.
‘I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,’ Stephen Hawking once wrote: ‘It’s time to free ourselves from Mother Earth.’ He follows in a now long tradition. Jules Verne, in his novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865), wrote of ‘certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstrip’. But they will not prevail, he said. One day humans will ‘travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars’, and with the same ease, he predicted, as nineteenth-century travellers were then moving between Liverpool and New York. ‘Man has no value save for that part of himself which passes into the universe,’ wrote Teilhard de Chardin. ‘Earth is our cradle, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,’ Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote in a letter in 1911, the most quoted of all utopian declarations in support of space travel. In an interview with the journalist Oriani Fallaci, the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury said, in language that sounds almost Biblical, ‘Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth!’ Fallaci said that Bradbury spoke ‘in a low voice, his eyes half shut . . . like a priest who recites the Pater Noster’. Fellow science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark made a similar remark posed as a question: ‘Can you believe that man is to spend all his days cooped and crawling on the surface of this tiny Earth – this moist pebble with its clinging film of air? Or do you, on the other hand, believe that his destiny is indeed among the stars, and that one day our descendants will bridge the seas of space?’ In A Man on the Moon (1994), Andrew Chaikin argues that the possibility of a comet strike is reason enough for us to become ‘a multi-planet species’. In the early 1990s, detailed images taken from the Hubble telescope showed a comet slamming into Jupiter. The Earth is a smaller target but a target nevertheless.
Whether or not the reasons are utopian or practical, the question remains: where are we to find another home? Today Voyager I is around 12 billion miles away; Voyager 2 about 10 billion. As far out as Voyager I is, it would take another 3,000 years – travelling at its current speed of 36,000 miles per hour and assuming it was pointing in the right direction (which it isn’t) – before the craft reached our nearest neighbouring star, three light years distant. We can certainly speed up our spacecraft, but we are ultimately limited by the speed of light. The laws of physics as we currently understand them restrict us to regions nearby our own solar system. The rest is fiction.
Lindbergh predicted that the future of travel lay in dreaming and imagination. After his famous flight across the Atlantic, he had wondered what would come after conventional aircraft and had come to the conclusion that the future lay with rockets. And then when there were rockets he had wondered what would come after rockets. ‘What lies for man beyond solar system travel?’ he asked. ‘What vehicle can be conceived beyond the rocket?’ Lindbergh’s answer was informed by his experience in the cockpit of The Spirit of St Louis during those hours of utter exhaustion when unearthly visitors had joined him there. Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing had transformed the age of physical travel, but gradually, throughout his life, Lindbergh came to understand that the secret those visitors vouchsafed in words he could never remember was that of travel itself. When the visitors arrived, everything ‘unessential to [his] existence’ fled, and for a time his consciousness grew independent of his ordinary senses. He saw, without using his eyes, that he was ‘spirit masquerading in matter’s form’. He felt himself departing from his body as he imagined a spirit might depart its body, to be reformed as ‘awareness far distant from the human form’ he had left behind. He was ‘awareness spreading out through space, unhampered by time or substance’. Weightless, he felt he could travel freely across the universe. His understanding was not so different perhaps from Russian cosmism of the 1920s. He wrote that the experience in the cockpit made him ‘cherish the illusion of being substance’, yet in the knowledge that he was also the spatial emptiness inside the atom and the space between stars. He called it matterless awareness. Ed Mitchell had come to a similar conclusion. Mitchell saw that there was a connection between spirit and matter and that that connection was consciousness. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘divinity is the intelligence existing in the universe.’ After meetings with Native Americans and others living in non-material societies, he understood that ‘visions perceived in trance and dreams are exactly what they appear to be: assistance obtained through either benevolence or supplication, from a spirit world to aid and guide humans’.
Of course Lindbergh’s experience – the only time in his life, he said, that he conversed with ghosts – can be explained away in a material way as an eidetic or hypnogogic vision, a hallucination. But whatever the label, for Lindbergh the experience was as real as anything else was real for him. He said that the longer he lived the more limited he believed rationality to be: ‘I have found that the irrational gives man insights he cannot otherwise attain.’
‘Is it remotely possible,’ Lindbergh wondered in his last years, ‘that we are approaching a stage in evolution when we can discover how to separate ourselves entirely from earthly life, to abandon our physical frameworks in order to extend both inwardly and outwardly through limitless dimensions of awareness?’ It was typical of Lindbergh that he should have found a way to hold fast both to his belief in Social Darwinism and to move onto ground few other materialists would dared to have trodden. He thought the future of travel might have no need for vehicles or matter: ‘As Goddard’s dreams resulted in the spacecraft . . . advancing man may discover that thought and reality transpose like energy and matter.’ Because humans could now determine to a large degree their ‘physical, mental, spiritual, and environmental evolution, limitless courses’ were open to them.
I think the great adventures of the future lie – in voyages inconceivable by our twentieth-century rationality – beyond the solar system, through distant galaxies, possibly through peripheries untouched by time and space.
I believe early entrance to this era can be attained by the application of our scientific knowledge, not to life’s mechanical vehicles, but to the essence of life itself: to the infinite and infinitely evolving qualities that have resulted in the awareness, shape, and character of man. I believe this application is necessary to the very survival of mankind. That is why I have turned my attention from technological progress to life, from the civilized to the wild. We will then find life to be only a stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our developing consciousness is beginning to become aware. Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the interior of the atom ? To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory, and I suspect that the two will prove to be different faces of each other. I believe that it is through the sensing and thinking about such concepts that the great adventures of the future will be found.
Humans will reach the furthest regions of the universe, Lindbergh suggests – across spaces infinitely vast, and infinitesimal – as spirit not flesh, and fuelled by imagination. At the end of his life Lindbergh was as ‘way out’ as any devotee of the counter-culture:
When I see a rocket rising from its pad, I think of how the most fantastic dreams come true, of how dreams have formed into matter and matter into dreams. Then I sense Goddard standing at my side, his human physical substance now ethereal, his dreams substantive. When I watched the fantastic launching of Apollo 8, carrying its three astronauts on man’s first voyage to the moon, I thought about how the launching of a dream can be more fantastic still, for the material products of dreams are limited in a way dreams themselves are not. What sunbound astronaut’s experience can equal that of Robert Goddard, whose body stayed on earth, while he voyaged through galaxies ?
Now that Goddard is dead, what difference does it make that his earthly individuality never left the ground in rocket flight? He thought of the stars; he became part of the stars. What physical fantasy of man can compare with my living memory of him – to my time-escaping vision? There is no better proof of immortality than this; dream is life and life is dream transposing.
Science extends our physical reach, but imagination comes first. We have long imagined what it might be like to fly, just as we long imagined what the Earth might look like seen from a great distance. We imagine what it might be like to live on other planets, and even in other universes. In our modern cosmology, we can travel beyond time and space into infinitely inflating quantum landscapes. But how do our dreams measure up to experience? In the light of facts and proofs old dreams quickly fade and disappear, to be replaced by new ones. Imagination only takes us so far, and we have often been wrong in our imaginings. Science and technology bring the power of our creative imagination into focus, so that the beam might be directed further out.
The target of human evolution long ago moved from the gene to tools and technology. Skill became more powerful than brute force. Over millennia our tools became more and more sophisticated. It’s what we mean by progress. The tool might once have been an axe, now it might be a violin or an aircraft. A few rare human beings are so well integrated into their tools that it is as if the tools have become extensions of themselves. Lindbergh wore his plane as if it were a suit. Collectively, human beings have traded in direct apprehension of reality via their senses for detecting instruments. We do not have the hearing of a deer, or the sense of smell of a fox, and yet we can detect emanations from deepest space, even back to the beginning of the universe itself. The day will come – the revolution has already begun – when our machines will become so sophisticated that we will all be integrated into them as if they were extensions of ourselves. Today, we see a new generation, for the moment heads down, inseparable from their mobile devices. These are toddler steps. Virtual reality is still in its infancy. We have hardly begun to plug our machines into our human frames, but the day is coming when our bodies and minds will be integrated into our instruments: machine made flesh, flesh machine. Lindbergh might yet prove himself prescient. Even if we discover that we must leave our bodies behind, the machines we send deep into space may yet take with them the spirit that animates flesh. The reach of our minds might reach out into space along with our instruments.
There is something utopian about all our visions of space exploration, and something both dispiriting and fantastical about the motivation for space travel that tells us that we must find another home because we will at some point have to give up on this one, perhaps because we have trashed it, or because our sun will at some point run out of energy.
In the 1920s the rocket scientist Willy Ley said that it was a mathematical certainty that there was life elsewhere in the universe. ‘The universe itself is our larger home. And without doubt we will meet other species along the way, if we haven’t already,’ Ed Mitchell wrote, decades later. ‘To declare the Earth must be the only planet in the universe with life,’ says astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, ‘would be inexcusably big-headed of us’. It is hard to believe otherwise, and yet the question of whether or not there is life elsewhere cannot be decided by statistics; the numbers involved are too various and too unstable to be wrestled into some measure of probability. The more refined our measurements become, the closer we seem to get to finding other ‘Earths’ out there, and yet all those other possible ‘Earths’ – proto-Earths – have so far proved to be too hostile to host life. So, for the time being at least, what we have found is, not evidence of life elsewhere, but further evidence that life here exists within a very narrow band of possibility. The search for proto-Earths helps us understand our own Earth; it gives us something ‘like’ the Earth with which to compare our Earth. We humans understand by comparison. We are the only species, as far as we can tell, that tries to imagine what it is like to be something else. For now the question of whether or not there is life elsewhere cannot be answered. Richard Dawkins believes that there is life elsewhere in the universe, as I imagine most scientists do, but he readily admits that it is a belief, not a fact. He says that if life on Earth proves to be unique in the universe, then we will be forced to accept its existence as a miracle. Science, of course, does not do miracles.
Science is driven in part by the Copernican ideal that human beings are without privilege. Copernicus wondered if the sun, not the Earth, was at the gravitational centre of the solar system. We now know that ‘we’ are not at the gravitational centre of anything, whether we take that ‘we’ to be the Earth, Sun or even Milky Way. After Darwin, the same principle insists that neither is there anything special about being human from an evolutionary perspective. In short, the Copernican principle tells us that there is no universal privilege attached to being human. No wonder scientists seem to be obsessed with aliens. The Copernican principle makes their existence essential. Science is ultimately in search of a universal perspective (as religion is), a perspective that would be undermined if the only scientists in the universe turned out to be human beings. Science needs aliens in order to confirm that its universal laws really are universal: that aliens have reached the same understanding of the nature of reality.
It is possible that life is indeed profligate across the universe but so spread out that we will never make alien contact, constrained as we are by the laws of nature as we currently know them. Those other wildernesses where other life forms live may be forever beyond our reach. For us then, space would be not a place in need of taming, but beyond wildness, barely more than stuff and motion. Maybe there just isn’t much out there of interest compared to the complexity that is here on Earth. Maybe space is as boring as a wall of white tiles.
If we ever have to leave Earth we will need to know how to fabricate wilderness. Out in space we will have to begin again, make from scratch what we can in imitation of what we have left behind. And if we are to succeed in that, then naturally we will have to know what wilderness is. Here, then, might be one of the most important reasons for space travel: not to relocate elsewhere, but to deepen our understanding of why we cannot leave.
Can we break the pattern of our species: move in, ravage, move on? Or is our narcissism – individual and collective – our doom? We might in principle move to other parts of the galaxy, other parts of the universe, and continue the same pattern forever; but what if, when the day comes, as it seems to be coming soon, when the Earth is exhausted and we must move on, we find that we do not have the technological wherewithal to do so; that to move on from the Earth is harder than we imagined? Or what if we discover, as we find out more about ourselves as seen from the outside, that we are more integrated into the Earth than we ever imagined, that human beings cannot be transplanted?
Have we humans got what it takes to see ourselves from without, and so save our Earth-home? The arrival of aliens would surely unite the world. We would fear them and not the others (whoever our others may be) for their difference. But what if aliens never come? What if there are no aliens? Can we learn, instead, to see ourselves as if from an alien’s perspective? Might this be another reason to travel into space, in order to experience what an alien might experience: to see ourselves from the outside?
What would it take for human beings to change permanently? Are human beings even capable of change, either individually or collectively? The young Lindbergh thought that the experience of seeing the Earth from an aircraft would change humans fundamentally: ‘I felt sure airplanes would bring peoples of the world together in peace and understanding.’ But as he grew older he began to change his mind. Mike Collins believed that the view of the Earth from space had the power to change us, to make us realize that ‘the planet we share unites us in a way far more basic and far more important than differences in skin color or religion or economic system’. But it had to be the experience itself; looking at a photograph is not the same thing, he said. Photographs ‘deceive us . . . for they transfer the emphasis from the one Earth to the multiplicity of reproduced images’. He thought it a great pity that the view has so far ‘been the exclusive property of a handful of test pilots, rather than the world leaders who need this perspective, or the poets who might communicate it to them’. Jim Lovell thought that perhaps even the experience itself might not be enough: ‘But the mind easily forgets,’ he wrote, 40 years after Apollo 8 had returned to Earth, ‘and not too long after . . . people get back to the way they lived before – wars and disruption and human cruelty.’ Rusty Schweickart said that after he had told the story a thousand times he grew sick of it, and even to wonder if he’d made the whole thing up.
If the experience of seeing the Earth from a plane or a rocket will not change us, if we cannot keep up with the speed of technological progress, if we cannot grow into our brains in time, if we cannot learn from history or art or science, if the Earth is indeed teetering on the edge of colossal environmental collapse, then the species that biologist Lynn Margulis once described as ‘upright, mammalian weeds’ will surely perish. Human life will have proved itself fragile and transitory. The robust Earth, however, will continue to plunge silently through black space.
Perhaps we need worry about the universe only when we do physics. ‘As a philosophy,’ Ed Mitchell wrote, ‘science is terrible; as a method, it’s superb.’ We should use the method, he said, and forget the philosophy. Or – I would argue – we could improve the philosophy. Science is only bad philosophy when it is scientism; that is, the belief that science has the answers to all questions. If we could accept that the scientific method continually points to what is outside itself – which is always almost everything – we might see that the scientific method is actually even more powerful than certain reductionists would have us believe. Whether we are unique or not, we living complex forms – humans, flies and grasses – might live as if we were unique, as if this blue marble is never to be made again; never again this small damp spot. Perhaps life, whether profligate or not, is in balance with the universe: complexity in trade-off with size. If it is hubristic to rate life so highly, perhaps on the other side it is just as hubristic to rate the universe more highly than the Earth. Do we really want to risk the Earth itself for the sake of an idea: for a particular interpretation of the scientific method? Paradoxically, the human experience of space travel is to reject a scientistic obsession with infinity and eternity – to reject the eternal search for universal laws, as reflected in the exploration of infinite space and the search for eternal existence – for an understanding of the human species at a human scale, intimately connected, even embedded, in its home. The more distant our perspective, seemingly the more intimate. Perhaps a fragile tent of twigs really is more robust from a human perspective than a cluster of galaxies. Perhaps the imagination of a child does outweigh the destructive power of an approaching meteor, even though we die. Until the day comes when we might know otherwise, life is here, not there. And we do not know that the day will ever come to tell us otherwise. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the moon race lies hidden in Kennedy’s original aim of ‘landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. After centuries of wars in which countless human beings have slaughtered each other, here, in this simple statement, a nation committed itself to protecting the life of a single human being. Perhaps we are the miracle we refuse to acknowledge.