… that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play that Mr N. A. of Houston, TX., set foot on the Moon, only to be disappointed not to have found Lyndon Johnson’s missing reading glasses, and that the Moon wasn’t made of cheese.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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It was forty years ago today ...
- Date:
- Monday, 20 Jul y 2009 - 11:51 UTC
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the young Gee (aged 7) was agog for news. He watched it all on the telly. He remembers seeing it in vivid colour, but that’s memory for you (the Gees didn’t get a colour TV intil 1973, and anyway, the transmission was probably in black-and-white). And when the young Gee wasn’t watching it, he was assembling his Airfix™ Saturn-V rocket and Lunar Module (which cost five shillings and elevenpence from Woolworths). One of the most popular books in the library at Park Hill Primary, Croydon, was called You Will Go To The Moon. Oh yes, it was all very exciting.
Forty years on, the Apollo missions are ancient history. They recall an archaic, even heroic era, in which human beings did wonderful things, made all the more wonderful given the primitive state of the technology available. Like the Pyramids, or Stonehenge, constructed with little more than native ingenuity and human muscle: and so they sent Mr Armstrong and his friends to the Moon inside metal boxes hardly more complicated than industrial washing machines, and with similar computational power.
Those days are over. OVER. O. V. E. R. As we no longer build pyramids and henges, we no longer aim to send people to the Moon. It was politics – politics as extinct as the pharaohs – that sent people to the Moon in the first place, not the thrill of discovery (and certainly not science). One could argue that the Space Race might be hauled into life by some political imperative, but I’d guess that, these days, political expediency might dictate solutions closer to home, and less expensive. As people are discovering in this era of the
Flying Pork BarrelInternational Space Station, the costs are too huge, the returns are too small. Exploration – and science, too – is better served by unmanned missions, or even by the construction of better telescopes on the ground.In the past forty years, ground-based astronomy and unmanned satellites and probes have charted all the major planets and their moons; given us insights of staggering depth into the size, nature, origin and eventual fate of the Universe; revealed the existence of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars; reported on the changes we’ve wrought on our own planet; and have allowed you and I to talk to one another with ease, for all that we might live tens of thousands of miles apart. In all that time, the number of people who have visited the Moon only just makes a minyan, and the project was cancelled even before the Gees got their first colour TV. Just sayin’.
So why do people remain all misty-eyed about the High Frontier? I blame science fiction. (As the Editor of the Futures SF stream in Nature, I think I’m entitled to say that). To be more specific, I mean popular SF such as Star Trek or Dr Who (like the Space Race, both products of the 1960s) that made impossibilities possible. Things like faster-than-light travel, instant matter-transportation and Uhura’s hemline.
It is easy, when carried away with a story, to suspend disbelief, but when the credits roll, and one returns to real life, one should look at things somewhat more rationally and realize that time travel, warp drives and so on really are impossible, at least with any technology we are likely to acquire or even conceive, and that this is not going to change, even were one to adopt the attitude that one can achieve impossible things if only one tries hard enough.
The Late Arthur C. Clarke was one of the most scientific of all science fiction writers – and also the most disparaging of such stuff. To be sure, it was Clarke who came up with the nostrum that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, but he also wrote (in the notes to his novel The Songs Of Distant Earth) that faster-than-light travel is less scientific extrapolation than a narrative device to allow ‘The Great Producer In The Sky’ to get from one place to another in time for ‘next week’s exciting episode’.
J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis might seem to be as distant, in fictional terms, from Arthur C. Clarke as it was possible to get (they did all meet in Oxford, once, and the records speak of mutual incomprehension). Yet in this respect they were all very similar – their view that to use scientific-sounding gobbledegook in stories was somehow dishonest, a disservice to the reader. In The Notion Club Papers a thinly fictionalized account of the kinds of discussions that Tolkien, Lewis and their friends engaged in, Tolkien’s opinion is that if you want to go to some distant location in space or time, it is more honest to dream yourself there, or to wave a magic wand, than to concoct some pseudoscientific contraption to do the job for you. In The Songs Of Distant Earth – one of his most successful novels in terms of characterization – Clarke makes a dramatic virtue of subluminal travel, eschewing warp drives altogether.
Tolkien and Lewis were, of course, suspicious of technology, and so might have been expected to have adopted such attitudes. Clarke, on the other hand, clearly loved technology. His novels are dominated by it. But what’s easily forgotten is that he was at root a storyteller. The function of SF is not, in my opinion, to present an extrapolation of technology for its own sake, but to reflect our own, current, human concerns by throwing them against exotic backgrounds, the better to see them by.
I am not saying that dreams of manned space travel are bad, or even unproductive. Only that when all is said and done, they remain just that – dreams – and so are probably unsound as immediate guides for the formulation of policy.
Last updated: Monday, 20 Jul 2009 - 11:51 UTC
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Comments
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Bugger that. Mars shot: who’s coming with me?
Cosmic radiation, anyone?
I’ll stay put under my blanket of ozone, thank you very much.
I’ll come with you Richard. I’ll bring SPF 1,000. And some cookies.
Best pack some Bovril, too.
Best for whom? Not me, I hate the stuff.
In fact, I’m not going if you’re bringing Bovril.
I now officially agree with Henry.
Lightweight.
Bloody colonials. No staying power.
Bloody imperialists
Now, if it were Marmite …
I have problems conceiving of why anyone would rather consume the byproducts of the brewing process. Foul muck. I’d rather drink 2xTY.
It’s the B-vitamins, Richard, and the salt, combined with the fact that Marmite never goes off, even if left open in tropical heat – of all known organisms, including bacteria and fungi, only true-born Englishmen can eat it. The Empire was built on it. When I was in the bush in Kenya in ’98 it was the only thing that kept me going.
Mars is made of Marmite, so there’d be no need to stow it on the space craft. Marmite gets its name from when Mars smited the planet now named after him, creating a sticky black residue. Over aeons, the name has contracted from Mars smite to Marmite. Fact.
That’s a good reason to visit Mars, then, if not the Moon.
In that case, all yeast extract-lovers should be bundled to Mars ASAP, with lots of toast.
That’s fine, but only if Vegemite-lovers are excluded.
Why, would there be a fight?
Is very interesting what exhibit. Correa family was only a white and black motorola, the images were blurred.
but only if Vegemite-lovers are excluded
Given a side – by – side taste test, I prefer Vegemite over Marmite, but I’ll admit that my methods are not traditional (I like my yeast extract spread on rice cakes).
And as I can totally relate to the 2xYT comparison, “lover” is not a word I’d use with either Vegemite or Marmite.
Happened this morning:
Me (to my son, who had just woken up): “You know what – 40 years ago today, the first people landed on the MOON!”
My son: “Mean!! I want to go to the moon too!!”
My son Felipe too,the moon looks today by google earth, is very easy.
We have this stuff called “bullion” that you lot call “Bovril” I believe. Makes a good alternative to Marmite. Well, my dog likes ’em both, anyway. Come to think of it, he also likes to chew on horse hoof parings.
@Henry- “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra” were positively Steam-punk in current SF parlance, and “That Hideous Strength” relied on diabolical use of esoteric “science gone bad”. (AND it had Merlin-AKA “The OTHER English wizard that Rowland never ever read about or heard of.”)
And also… “the records speak of mutual incomprehension” Somehow I think just about anyone sitting in for an evening to listen to fourteenth century Skaldic verse would find their comprehension rather strained, even if it wasn’t in Danish…well, any of us Colonists I mean. (I keep forgetting that you guys had some Danish infusion a while back. Probably accounts for the love of salt preserved things that most people would bury to keep the dogs away from. Like a dead seal. Or Marmite.)John, I nearly fell off my chair when I first of the non-fictional NICE. Is someone having a larf, do you think?
I LOVE Marmite.
There.
I’ve said it.
Have to think with your head not the heart. That is what we go by saying there.
@Richard- not to be pedantic, but technically BEER is the byproduct of the brewing process. Marmite is the repurposing of the brewing agents corpses, who were setting up to civilize the vat until they came a cropper of their own effluvia…hmm…
@ Cath re colonists vs. imperialists- See my Dane comment above. According to Darwin, every one of us who doesn’t live in the Rift valley is a colonist, right?
So now that we’ve got this great vat of a planet fully mapped out we can finally create a pan global civilization right?… Say, does anyone else smell beer?
Honestly, Henry, although I had to look up Minyan just now, I was actually surprised the first time I realized how many people had walked on the moon. It’s not exactly Everest, but there were more missions than I’d realized.
I liked the way
Carl Saganthe screenwriters handled interstellar travel in Contact: build a trillion-dollar gubbins based on alien design specifications, then build another one in secret, neither of which actually take you anywhere (more or less). Sorted.build a trillion-dollar gubbins based on alien design specifications, then build another one in secret, neither of which actually take you anywhere (more or less). Sorted
Sounds like one of Mr Brown’s Public-Private-Partnerships for upgrading the railways.
Indeed. Our railways are on strike, so they also fit into the general category of “things that don’t actually take you anywhere” too.
Hey¡ John is a good link civilization and I think it’s terrifying.
I tried Vegemite while here in Australia. I…. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s say I’m happy it was in Adelaide, which I didn’t like anyway.
It was forty years ago when I has 10 yeras old my canary (Order Passeriforme) recognized your image in a mirror but I don’t try the Thatcher effect in my canary. Nonetheless I think the behaviour of my canary, maybe be very curious with one image thatcherized-
Sorry 10 years old.
40 years ago the group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young toward history in Woodstock. Wooden ships was the hymn of the 70’. Today….mmmm!,I don’t know….