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The tagline of the Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar emphatically proclaims: “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here”.
Yet for my generation — those born from the mid 1970s to 1980s — there is no escape from this fate, as inexorable as orbital decay. We are frogs at the bottom of a gravity well. You would think that recent developments should cheer me up. NASA last week announced its master plan to get to Mars by 2030. This only shows that we are a generation lost in space.
We were too late for the first age, which culminated in the Moonshot. And now we are too early for our species’s next great adventure. We were caught in a trough between two waves of human expansion.
We searched for the stars but found only ourselves. Denied the heavens we retreated inwards, into the interstices of informational space. And come 2030 we will be in our 50s, hopefully still spry – but not exactly a catch when we stand before the Colonization Selection Board.
Ray Bradbury once said Mars is heaven. And like Trishanku* our generation is suspended between an unreachable past and an abandoned future.
NASA last Monday released its report “Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration” aiming for planetfall by 2030. This is not a one-off rock collecting mission, but the right stuff, the spearhead of a full fledged colonization effort. We seem to be entering a Golden or rather Rust-Red age of spaceflight.
Alas my generation completely missed the spaceship. The first great age dawned in the 1950s, illuminated by Sputnik and Gagarin.
1971 was the apogee. That was the year that humans travelled farthest from the cradle. The crew of Apollo 13 sailed 400,000 kilometres skimming across the far side of the Moon. The commander of that mission Jim Lovell, is now 87 years old, dim with memories of the future.
Today, in comparison, the International Space Station is at an orbital height of 400 kilometres — the distance you’d traverse if you take the State Transport bus from Chennai to Pudukkotai.
The First Age of Space was the culmination of a slow migration of science-fiction from the pages of pulp magazines into Reality. These were the decades of “space opera”, a subgenre featuring galaxy-spanning wars, swooning melodrama and a universe teeming with alien life, where jut-jawed heroes chanced the vasty deeps of the ocean of night.
Each tribe has its own sacred stories. Fans still talk about when Cleve Cartmill was investigated by the FBI for his story featuring the atom bomb in a 1944 issue of Astounding magazine. The magazine’s editor had already noted that a large number of subscribers had moved address to Los Alamos, and deduced the existence of a major military-scientific project underway there.
Scientists would deduce that by using the Sabatier Reaction, the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere could be the feedstock for rocket fuel, thus opening the outer solar system for further exploration. Similarly, Mars was used as a proving ground for the imagination, a launch platform to reach even deeper into the vault of the sky.
As with Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom, it was an old, decadent world dense with intrigue while Alexei Tolstoy had to venture there to meet the most beautiful woman on all the nine worlds – Aelita, the Queen of Mars.
Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars catapulted us to a time when the hero is the first child to be born in 10 million years while E.E. Docs’s Lensman series began their adventures only 2 billion years from now. Isaac Asimov was barely out of his teens when he oversaw the rise and fall of Trantor, an ecumenopolis** the size of a planet with a population of 450 billion. The only crime in this era was a lack of imagination.
Just as robotic probes prefigure human exploration these were the heralds into the imagination, relaying their messages back to those would hear. This was the “outward urge” as writer John Wyndham put it, felt by all those who “hear the thin gnat-voices cry, star to faint star across the sky”.
The high tide of the First Age was ASTP, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, détente mirrored by a sarabande of orbital trajectories as Apollo and Soyuz docked over Cold War skies. This was the Utopianism which was the hypergolic propellant of the genre. It was no coincidence that the first interracial kiss on television was on Star Trek. It was only in confrontation with a vast cosmos, with a million different alien races that you could say — we are humans, we are from a planet called Earth.
Then the heavens began to close. Space opera had sown the iron seeds of its own destruction. The missile men were to blame. The rockets that promised the planets were a by-product. A bug, not a feature. Gagarin blasted off on a modified R 7 Semyorka, an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile designed to deliver a nuclear warhead to the American homeland.
Hitler’s rocketeer Wernher von Braun’s autobiography “I aim at the Stars” should have been subtitled “but sometimes I hit London” they quipped. One could draw an iterative line from Vengeance Weapon II to Saturn V.
The Space Race was competed by only the impractical designs, the failed horsemen of the apocalypse. The R7, which is the ancestor of the Soyuz family, was a discarded model, repurposed as space exploration vehicle.
It was these same engines of destruction that sped up the development of the net. The Intergalactic Computer Network led to ARPANET which itself was a post-apocalypse SF plot point – how do you preserve the entirety of human knowledge, distributed across multiple libraries and databases, and do so within 20 minutes, that time it takes the ICBMs to arc down over the north pole towards their targets?
The fundamental solution, shred information into packets and send them across to reassemble at the other end underpins our entire data architecture even today; Kirk & Spock use the same underlying philosophy to “beam” out of hostile planets.
And as “Einstein’s monsters” silently waited in the silos and dreamt of a final unmaking, the world changed. As sinews of data transmission cables bound the world together, it was the hour of the god in the machine. The odyssey to the exterior was being supplanted by a journey of the interior.
A news clipping from a Florida-based paper showing the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1984, minutes after its launch . In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published, coining the term “cyberspace”. The very public demise of space shuttle Challenger two years later marked an end to the mythos of the first age. Exploration increasingly became outsourced to robots. As individuals atomised, the space between us grew to be as vast as the space between the stars.
This process reached its logical conclusion in 1999 with the release of The Matrix, where everything happens inside your head. Keanu Reeves plays a slacker coder — exemplifying the hero’s journey from astronaut to hacker. Compare this to 2001: A Space Odyssey , that lyrical saga of exploration released three decades earlier.
It is late at night. I lament our fate over Whatsapp to a childhood friend similarly irradiated by a lifelong dose of SF. This is not the time travel I envisaged: travelling at the rate of one second per second, always into the future. What has happened to us? He cuts me off. Uploading he says. What’s that? The process of capturing your mind content; “whole brain emulation” as they call it and dumping it on a neural network. “WBE might be possible by 2030” he says.
“Forget Mars. You might be loading yourself into a grain of silicon and getting fired off to Alpha Centauri”.
A melding of the interior into the exterior journey, then. “Don’t worry, we’ll get there in the end” he says.
Glossary
*Trishanku: a character from Hindu mythology, commonly referred using the phrase "Trishanku's Heaven" — something that denotes a middleground or limbo between one's goals or desires and one's current state or possessions.
**Ecumenopolis : a planet city, a Utopian concept of a limitless urban space that encompasses the entire surface of a heavenly body
