Awe And Wonder

Isn’t technology a many-sided riddle?

What got me thinking this most recently is when I was watching Elon Musk’s February presentation video showing a simulation of SpaceX’s massive, sleek Starship rocket and booster rising majestically on its way to Mars.

Starship to Mars Simulation

 

Starship launch: a still from the SpaceX video

What a contrast to my everyday life – dodging car-battering pot-holes that the slow thaw has uncovered, shovelling heavy slush, getting damp socks, staring at this screen for eight hours a day.

This presently evolving breakthrough in rapidly reusable space launchers is a unique moment, but just one in a long series of uniquenesses. Household electrical power, mass-produced automobiles and affordable air travel were just three in a string of technical revolutions. Then we slowly woke up to the toll fossil fuels are taking on our planet. I wonder what pitfalls lay ahead as the space sector gears up for massive change.

SpaceX is rapidly bringing down the cost of launching payloads. Musk predicts (optimistically?) that Starship costs will be a few million dollars for 100 tons, or perhaps $100/kg. What new initiatives will this allow?

How does SpaceX and their cleverly-engineered Raptor rocket engine fit into history? From the times of the Enlightenment, when rational thought was trumpeted as the final and only judge of everything worthwhile, and human beings were obviously on an ever-ascending trajectory, science and its many products were welcomed with increasing optimism. But then the World Wars and many other twentieth-century ‘aberrations’ delved some deep questions into the humanist project.

And here we are, decades of faltering and contradictions later. Post-modernism is the attempt to progress beyond the concept of inevitable human progress, to synthesize an approach to the universe that says ‘we cannot know everything; in fact, reality is ultimately unknowable’. Instead there’s the subjective, intuitive side to explore. Are more and more people ditching science as a reliable guide to the physical universe around us? Is there a third way, not defined by pro- or anti-science, but by recognising that science is valid within its realm of observations and conclusions about the material world around us, while other tools are just as valid in their own domains?

Our politicians’ public dependence on the advice of medical experts during the pandemic suggests that in a crisis we still reach out for an authority with an objective answer. We still want a solid rock to stand on.

 And that may shed some light on why I felt such attraction to the vibes of Musk’s rocket video, and why I then looked at my reaction in suspicion. Every minute of that presentation projects a feeling of awe and splendour that is pretty common among the space-loving online community. Perhaps it’s been growing on us ever since the era of Apollo launches, Stanley Kubrick’s production of Arthur Clarke’s Space Odyssey and the decades of entertaining science fiction that followed,

The Saturn V vehicle (SA-501) for the 
Apollo 4 mission in the Vehicle Assembly 
Building at the Kennedy Space Center, 
1967. Image credit: NASA

but more recently as SpaceX is undoubtedly erasing more and more of the ‘fiction’, its followers grow wide-eyed and enthusiastic. Everyone needs some hope in life, and a little excitement, and it’s a potent shiny cocktail of techno-Enlightenment-future-rock ‘n’ roll-humanist-space exploration that’s splashed on our screens when SpaceX’s CEO takes the stage. He really does seem to mean well. He would dearly love to save humanity from the dangers of species extinction, founding a self-sustaining civilisation on another planet. And as an engineer he is convinced that there is an engineering solution to our problems. At the same time he's aware that a large engineering project can have its own aura, can turn heads when it’s presented right.

As Starship rises with grave majesty from its tower, and as the thunder fills the sky, and the smooth, subdued soundtrack informs our unconscious that this is awesome and numinous, and the synth-angelic voices begin to sing their chorus of ‘ahhhh’, it’s obvious that this vision of progress and the gleaming city on Mars is filling a gaping void in many people’s souls.

It's a very similar function, I believe, to the place that was taken in medieval times by such colossal architectural feats as cathedrals: spires, domes spun high in the sky, causing us to bend up our necks and make little circles of our mouths, make our eyes open wide, and our hearts sing a glad song. Whether the ordinary people back then were drawn to see their Creator in a new and more worshipful light, or whether they felt admiration for the builders and the funders of the edifice, or simply were filled with wordless awe, I can’t say. But I think tourists to these places still feel an echo of that, a sense that we’re part of something greater, that we little people can build structures that outlast the centuries and express in their forms a thought that we don’t quite understand.

Interior of a Gothic cathedral, Toledo, Spain
Image credit: commons.wikipedia.org

Are there now modern or post-modern people who are essentially worshipping this vision of progress among the stars, longing to travel in glinting spacecraft and to live under glistening Mars domes? Of course that’s not the only denomination in this broad creed: there are the space solar power people, the asteroid mining fraternity, and the interstellar starship builders, to name just a few. And far be it from me to claim that I have never been drawn towards their altars, but there’s always a fundamental clash of ideas that repels me. I’d love to go there too, but I refuse to pack all my hopes onto that rocket.

 There are many dissenting voices to this space-technophile vision. Some protest that increased numbers of space launches will be terrible for the environment just when we should be fighting climate change. Others talk about a waste of resources and that only billionaires will profit from this while the poor will grow poorer. And there’s much truth in those voices that needs to be heard. This article by Tim Jackson spells out much of what I’ve been vaguely thinking, ending like this:

“Let’s dream of some “final frontier” by all means. But let’s focus our minds too on some quintessentially earthly priorities. Affordable healthcare. Decent homes for the poorest in society. A solid education for our kids. Reversing the decades-long precarity in the livelihoods of the frontline workers – the ones who saved our lives. Regenerating the devastating loss of the natural world. Replacing a frenetic consumerism with an economy of care and relationship and meaning.

Never have these things made so much sense to so many. Never has there been a better time to turn them into a reality. Not just for the handful of billionaires dreaming of unbridled wealth on the red planet, but for the eight billion mere mortals living out their far less brazen dreams on the blue one.”

 

My take on SpaceX and the draw of their glittering vision of the future is that technophiles are placing their money on the wrong horse altogether. I am glad to admit that their horse can race, and perhaps even win a few ribbons in the races, but every horse will eventually have its day, stumble, fall. Every leader with ambition in whom we place our trust is a flawed human being. The few inspiring, messianic leaders in modern times who did not end their careers in mass murder, corruption, disappointment or disgrace were probably those who were assassinated before they could get that far. It’s not hard to poke holes in Elon Musk’s character; what’s harder at this point is to predict how SpaceX’s dream will hit a pot-hole: how it will eventually shatter or become soiled, bought or perverted.

What we’d all love is a leader without flaws, one who would lead us towards integrity, a healed world finding balance and moving away from the myth of unfettered growth, where abstracts like truth and justice become embodied in the established order. Someone who leads by example, who isn’t afraid to come down to our level and mix with ordinary folks, even suffer alongside them, lay his life down for them something like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appears to be doing. Elon Musk is working hard towards becoming the saviour of the human race – who’s going to let him know that the position’s already occupied?

History whispers, sometimes in rhyme, nagging at us. As the psalmist has it:

 Don’t put your confidence in powerful people;
    there is no help for you there.
When they breathe their last, they return to the earth,
    and all their plans die with them.

(Psalm 146)

We live in the shadow of Babel’s ruined tower. But we turn our backs on its telling wreckage and talk up our tech, making out that it’s the only show in town, the only way to save ourselves, the only dimension. How much we come to depend on our own inventions! How badly I would fare at wilderness survival. I believe that there is danger of driving right into all the ethical potholes of expanding into space by being caught up in the awe and wonder and hubris. There have been many papers written from an ethical & legal perspective, but who reads them, and how many robust international and interplanetary agreements will result from them? Spacefaring nations are slowly getting to work on the details of treaties on everything from the demilitarisation of space to planetary protection, of which the latter is concerned with the microbes which can so easily be carried from one planet to another with potential for contamination of an ecosphere.

NASA's Mars2020 Rover in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL, July 2019
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Wherever we go we humans seem to carry not only gifts of greatness but also the seeds of our own corruption, so I hope those voices of sanity contribute strongly to the formation of the new world out there. Based on how history reads so far, a more accurate prediction of how space civilisation might look one hundred years from now would be the backdrop of grime and despair in Alien and Avatar, not the orderliness and pressed uniforms of Star Trek. This means that we have every reason to strive for binding treaties covering the treatment of employees in space, the trade in goods and information, the stewardship of off-Earth places and resources, and much more besides.

If there’s one thing I don’t wish on our descendants, it’s the despairing chore of  metaphorically shovelling up the mountains of slush and toxin that we have left them.