VIEWPOINT
The message of the spheres
GEORGE GALE
The electric thread, or skein rather, which never lost hold of Apollo 13, which still held when the oxygen tank exploded, which kept hold all the long and crippled way back, which went dead for three minutes then came alive again when the ship was through the heat barrier and hanging from its para- chutes: this thread, this skein, this rope, this vital cord was, I suppose, what mattered, and what matters, and what will matter most about space travel. Without this electric thread, constantly repeating and receiving information and instructions, there would be neither possibility nor point to space travel. It is this thread which makes such travel different from all previous exploration and discovery. It is not just that throughout the whole trip, a few minutes ,excluded, the controllers at Houston talked with the astro- nauts, and were also for the most part happy to enable the rest of the world to eavesdrop, but that throughout this time far more information than could ever be ex- changed in conversation, however stylish or cryptic, was toing and froing along this electric thread, this new umbilical cord.
It is this thread, rather than the astro- nauts-as-people, it is this thread with a nodule on the end, nodule of ship and astro- nauts-as-nerve-endings, which strikes me as the novelty, the natural development. the evolutionary aspect of the species. I keep being reminded of tentacles that wave inside the sea, responding to unseen undulations, stretching out further and further; or of stringy weeds stretching out and along, still clinging to their birth-rock until, perhaps, such time occurs as they find a new foot- hold, another rock, another form of sub- sistence and security. There is undoubtedly a sense in which men have infected and in- vaded space, but I do not think the infection has much to do with earthly diseases we may carry to the moon or further, nor do I think it is we ordinary men who do the invading. The invasion and the infection would be much the same were there no men aboard these flights, and were they entirely controlled, instead of only mainly con- trolled, remotely, by men at the earthly end of the electric thread, or probe.
From an evolutionary point of view, it is
much as if we had suddenly sprouted eyes and ears and fingers at the ends of nervous cords now hundreds of thousands of miles long and soon to have lengths measured in millions of miles and more, in light-years, unimaginably. We do not know, we do not dream, and worst, we cannot imagine what we want with our eyes and our ears thus freakishly, thanks to electricity, and mon- strously cast out into space. Why should we thus stretch ourselves, for a piece of useless moon-rock? As well ask. I suppose, why newt first crawled out of water onto land, or why ape came down from the trees and learned to make fire and tools and talk.
There is a difference, however, for none supposes that the newt or ape asked itself what it thought it was doing, or was capable so to inquire. It may be that nobody re- sponsible for the American space programme ever asked himself such a question, but this is most unlikely. The trouble, however, is that the answers to such questions, suppos- ing them to have been asked by responsible men, are sure to be bound up with com- petition with the Soviet Union; and if, then, it were further asked, what do the Russians and the Americans together think they are doing, the competition apart, the answer, at best, must be to do with improving men's knowledge and satisfying their curiosity and, more likely and at worst, with developing communications.
A passing reference or two, some time or other in the process of ordering and making and controlling these space trips, may be made to their inevitability, to the inexorability of progress, even most speci- fically to the evolution of the species. But such reference is unlikely to be other than complacent, a kind of additional justifica- tion: progress equals that which is inevitable equals that which is natural, equals that which is good. It does not seem to have occurred much that these space flights could be disastrous steps for men to take; or, alternatively, that they will lead nowhere. Such criticism as they have aroused has had to do with their profligacy, the argument being that money wasted on such flippant nonsense as moontrips would be better spent on black education, or slum clearance,
and so forth. Inclined to favour this argu- ment myself, I also see that, in practice, any money thus 'saved' by not having space trips would not have gone on schools or blacks anyway.
The last criticism, that if we are to send men up to the moon, then at least let such men be poets and not jargonauts, again has a certain appeal; except that you'd never get a self-respecting poet to sell his tongue to NASA and NASA would never send up any- one who did not talk their language, or not until they have big machines with spare seats, and, anyhow, what on earth would any poet have to tell us about the empty moon? We know what it looks like. Poetry is not the description of landscape. There'll be time for poets on the moon only when men and women have been living and dying up there.
Of course there were many moments when, thanks to the prospect of an entirely new kind of disaster, the Apollo 13 trip became extremely exciting. Had all gone well, however, it would have been a bore. The World Cup became extremely exciting, too. And just as it would have been very difficult to have scripted so eminently satisfying an end to the World Cup, except for the Germans, so, too, would it have been a most difficult thing to write a better scenario for a trip to the moon than that written, by mistake, by Apollo 13. The excitement of the extra time of the World Cup Final four years ago, and the excitement of waiting for Apollo 13 to resume communications having come through the heat barrier, were similar in kind: for a few minutes they carried mil- lions of men and women away, away from wherever they were, for a brief escape. De- licious, fugitive moments, these: the poetry's in the tension, not in the commentaries. But otherwise, what are these extravagances? We know that football does not matter. But what about these space-trips?
To take the longest view, they are part of evolution; and whether in the centuries to come. sometime during the aeon, these electric threads we have sent out will come to mesh the skies, and make cloudy empty space, or whether they will late and soon wither away, after a few centuries of experiment, an unsuccessful and therefore aberrant departure from the future norm of our species, which of such alternatives trans- pires I care not: for long before such matters are known, we and all our kind will have been long since dead. The shortest view is that these trips, these messages, are part of the dispute for supremacy between America and Russia; and this view I cer- tainly accept. But for the short run, then, are they for good or ill? To what use will they be put? How, in other words, can any money be got back?
There may be some slight value in the chemical information obtained. But we know the chief answer already, because there are satellites up there in the sky proving it already, and helping us to see things like the World Cup and Apollo 13. The chief use is in communications, better communications, more communications. Therefore, these trips, this space effort, must be judged as prejudicial to the well-being of men in general: for I take it as axiomatic that the more that is communicated the faster will it have to be communicated, and vice versa, and that therefore the less time will there be for reflection upon what is communicated, to the detriment of the majority who are communicated to and at. although possibly to the profit of the privileged minority of communicators.
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